Reef Life by Roberts Callum

Author:Roberts, Callum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: epubor.com

1. Access by sea is very easy in one of the dozens of tourist boats that go there every day.

CHAPTER TEN

The aftermath of war

Arabian Gulf, 1992

SOON AFTER THE FIRST GULF WAR, in late 1992, I get a call from Andrew Price, ‘Captain Haddock’ from our Red Sea sailing adventure. Now marine advisor to the World Conservation Union in Switzerland, he is leading an effort to assess war damages to coral reefs and other habitats in the Arabian Gulf and wants my help. Saddam Hussein annexed Kuwait in August 1990, not expecting more than local opposition. He could surely not have imagined that within six months the fury of a thirty-four-nation international coalition would be hurled upon his forces.

Saddam’s disregard for nature was already notorious; he drained his country’s magnificent southern marshes in order to destroy the Marsh Arabs. And his appetite for revenge did not stop at the coast. When his retreating soldiers sabotaged Kuwait’s coastal refineries, they bled over a million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf. I had watched aghast as satellite images showed vast slicks creep south, pushed by powerful desert winds. One by one they surrounded and swallowed up islands that I knew to support the Gulf’s richest and most beautiful coral reefs.

I fly from the UK to Saudi Arabia via Bahrain, an island off Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast, taking a taxi over the sea to mainland Arabia. The connection, part bridge, part causeway, is a major engineering feat. For twenty-five kilometres it affords broad vistas of Persian blue sea, traced with the pale meanderings of sandbanks and blue-green smudges where seagrass meadows grow. Andrew Price had spent several years assessing the likely damage to marine life that this road would cause, but his reports had little influence. I ask the driver about the queue of traffic coming the other way. What could draw all these people to a tiny island like Bahrain? He scowls. ‘They are very bad people. Go to nightclubs, drink beer.’

The Gulf coast is largely flat and featureless on the drive north the following day, save for the towering columns and chimneys of refineries, desalination plants and power stations that here and there rise from the shore. There is a whiff of hydrocarbons on the wind, especially nearing Jubail, whose industrial outline is a tangle of pipes, tank farms and gas flares. This will be my base for the coming week, where I will be headquartered with the ‘Marine Habitat and Wildlife Sanctuary for the Gulf Region Project’. As its name suggests, it aims to create a marine protected area hereabouts, but the war has been a serious setback. Some of the prime candidate sites have been oiled.

The project team is based in one of the many walled compounds favoured by the expatriate workforce. Like little international islands in an Arabian sea, the compounds separate infidels from believers, allowing a slightly greater laxity of dress and expression than is permitted outside. Although alcohol is strictly banned, yeast and grape juice often find themselves in the same bottles in places like this.

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