By Bla Liptk
As the melting snow runs down the slopes of the Alps, it is collected into the mighty Danube. As the river reaches the Hungarian plains, it slows down, spreads out into hundreds of rivulets and deposits its detrital material into thousands of little islands. The name of this region in Hungarian is Szigetkoz, which means island-region.
This region has survived since the last ice age and, over the millennia, developed a totally unique fauna and flora. Today this marvellous ecosystem is dying. Death comes, because there is little rainfall here and in the past, the marvellously lush vegetation depended on the ground waters, which now have disappeared.
According to a WWF report published in 1995, the ground water level in the Szigetkoz region has dropped by from 0.6 to 3.04 metres. The drop was caused by Slovakia, which in 1992 unilaterally rerouted its border river with Hungary into a sealed canal on its own territory to build the Gabcikovo (Bos) hydro-electric dam.
Hungary sided with the environmentalists and has withdrawn its support, while the ultra-nationalists in Slovakia viewed the pilfering of the border river as a building block in creating a greater Slovakia and went ahead with the project unilaterally and illegally. They were not bothered by the fact that hydro-electric plants make little sense in lowlands.
Under the Szigetkoz is one of Europe's largest freshwater reservoirs, of Perrier quality. As the old riverbed has recently been turned into a semi-stagnant sewer, the poisoning of this reservoir is only a matter of time.
The drying up of the Szigetkoz rivulets has not only destroyed the wetland habitat of some 200 species, but has also eliminated the oxygen supply of the river itself. As a result, the water quality of the Danube has plummeted and the water supplies of Hungary and the nations downstream have been endangered.
In 1992 the Slovak construction lobby argued that if the dam is built, this will eliminate the need for more nuclear power and will improve shipping on the Danube. Yet, last year, Slovakia announced that the Chernobyl-style Moravce nuclear power plant will be completed anyway.
As to improved shipping, at the time of writing, shipping on the Danube is at a complete standstill, because both sluices of the Gabcikovo dam are broken. I visited this concrete structure in February and found leaks throughout the whole edifice. A tragic accident is waiting to occur here as the 200 million cubic metres of water, dammed up to an elevation of 10 storeys, are held back only by this dilapidated structure.
Hungary is now suing Slovakia in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It is hoped that the court will rule: that rivers are not owned by nation states; that nation states are not free to do as they please with the ecosystems of this planet; and that they are the common treasure of all humankind.
Even more importantly, it is hoped that the court will allow the representatives of the allied international environmental organisations to act as a third party in this lawsuit, representing the interests of humankind, and will consider the compromise plan formulated as a blueprint for resolving this conflict. [The writer is a former Yale professor, the editor of the Environmental Engineers' Handbook and the author of Municipal Waste Disposal for the 1990s. Abridged from PeaceNet.]