Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
putes are settled by peaceful negotiation, however. In 1969, about 3,000 troops from the
Soviet Union and China lost their lives in a fierce conflict lasting several months over their
international boundary along the Ussuri River and specifically over the ownership of Chen-
pao island.
River rights and conflicts
The importance of fresh water as a resource, allied to its uneven geographical distribution
in rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers, has inevitably led to political wrangling over
the rights of different groups to use water. On occasion, disagreement over rights to shared
water resources can lead to militarized confrontation, and the notion that so-called 'water
wars' may become a leading source of conflict in the 21st century has become quite wide-
spread in some academic and journalistic circles, as well as in political rhetoric.
Many rivers flow across (as well as along) the borders between nation states, and approx-
imately 60% of the world's fresh water is drawn from rivers shared by more than one coun-
try. Some of the world's larger river basins are shared by a great number of countries. The
Danube is the greatest of them all in this regard, its basin being shared by no fewer than
nineteen countries in Europe. Five other basins - the Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zam-
bezi - are shared by between nine and eleven countries. These facts suggest the scale of
possible river rights issues, although multiple stake-holders are by no means necessary for
political discontent. The River Ganges, for example, flows through just two countries yet
was the subject of a twenty-year confrontation between India and Bangladesh following
completion of India's Farakka Barrage in 1975. Bangladesh complained that it was being
deprived of water it could use for irrigation and was subject to increasing salinity problems
thanks to diversions of water by the barrage, sited some 18 kilometres upstream from its
border with India.
The dispute over the Ganges, which eventually resulted in the signing of a water-sharing
accord in 1996, is not atypical. A downstream state's objection to pollution, the construc-
tion of a dam, or excessive irrigation by an upstream state, actions which will decrease or
degrade the quality of water available to the downstream state, are all classic grounds for
disagreement over a cross-border river. Many of these disputes are peacefully settled by
international treaty, but many are not. Further, not all international treaties are designed to
address all players in an international river dispute. An example here can be quoted from
the Nile. Egypt and Sudan have an international agreement that governs the volume of Nile
water allowed to pass through the Aswan High Dam, but none of the other eight Nile Basin
