KUWAIT CITY (dpa) – In the Kuwaiti town of Ahmedy, home to the Kuwait Oil Corporation, a brilliant garden full of wildflowers and desert grasses blooms on a hillside.
“This park is a unique kind of park, not only for the gulf region, but in the whole world,” explains Hani al-Zalzaleh, a horticulture scientist with the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR).This abundant garden has been planted in oil-contaminated soil that has been cleaned up with the help of naturally occurring microbes.The KISR’s biotechnology department has perfected a technique to clean up the soil without the need for chemicals or detergents. And it turns out that soil blackened by oil spilled and burned after the Iraqi invasion can be transformed into a rich soil for growing plants.This fires-to-flowers story is one of the few bright spots in the environmental legacy of the Gulf War.More than ten years after the fires of Kuwait were extinguished in late 1991, the country still struggles with the legacy of hundreds of standing oil lakes in the desert, millions of cubic metres of contaminated soils, 40 per cent of the country’s aquifers contaminated, and sea sediments drenched in heavy metals and other toxic pollutants.According to Samira Omar, an ecologist with KISR, “It’s going to take years and maybe generations to remove these marks. At this stage, these are deep scars in the environment.”But the environmental pollution is also taking its toll on public health. Lamya Hayat is an outspoken biochemist from Kuwait University. She blames the Gulf War pollution for an increase in cancer rates.“Statistically there is a huge increase,” she said. “From 1990 the slope is very sharp going up, until 1995. And it has stabilized with a minimal rise since then. But the level itself has increased. Until 1990 we had almost 50 cases of cancer per million people, now it is in the range of 450 cases per million.”Lamya believes that the health problems can be traced back to heavy metals, which were abundant in the smoke from the oil fires.Smoke fallout also rained on the ocean. Trapped in the sediment of Kuwait’s shallow bay, they linger, building up in marine organisms and offering up the possibility of environmental disaster.One such disaster happened last August when 2,000 tons of dead fish washed up on Kuwait’s shores. Lamya suspects that the massive fish kill was caused by a phosphate spill in the Gulf.As the phosphates drifted into Kuwait bay, they mixed with the heavy metals – nickel and vanadium – that were already in the sea, making an especially potent poison.But the government’s story differs sharply from Lamya’s. The Kuwait Environment Public Authority blames the fish kill on climatic conditions such as especially high temperatures and low oxygen content in the water.Such reasoning angers Shukri al-Hasham, an environmental activist in Kuwait. He thinks the government is in denial about the environmental problems the country faces.“There have not been any honest or sincere pollution studies since liberation, not from the Ministry of Health or the Environment or the government,” he says.“It’s only basically individuals who are striving to present the facts and figures to the people who are authorized to give treatment.”Initially, landmines prevented the government from even examining the damage in the desert after the Gulf War, and all of the research facilities in the country had been destroyed.But now most of the mines have been cleared, the research facilities have been rebuilt and an environmental authority established.So the Kuwaiti government is now going about making a thorough assessment of just how bad the environmental damage is.The United Nations Compensation Committee (UNCC), which was set up after liberation is, stepping in to help. They are giving the Kuwaiti government 108 million dollars worth of funds taken from the Iraqi oil for food program to fund a 3-5 year study of the Kuwaiti environment.The study may settle the controversy over what is causing cancer and killing fish in Kuwait, and it should help the UNCC determine how much to pay the country in damages.But for many Kuwaitis, like Samira Omar, compensation would be small consolation.“The damage for us is priceless, I cannot put a price on it. Rehabilitation will be billions and billions. But for the damage, it has done permanent damage to nature. It is sad to say that. But it is a great loss.”
