Brussels, 14/04/2010 (Agence Europe) - The Euro-Mediterranean ministerial conference on water, in Barcelona on Tuesday 13 April ended in failure. Once again it was the Palestinian issue which brought to the surface deep divisions, to the extent that the fully ready draft joint project could not be adopted. Turkey, too, not wishing to complicate its cross-border relations, added to the problem.
“In Barcelona this Tuesday, lack of agreement on how to name the occupied Palestinian territories has prevented representatives of the 43 countries of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) approving a joint strategy for guaranteeing the water resources of the whole Mediterranean basin,” said the Spanish Presidency of the EU. French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Pierre Lellouche, representing the joint chair of the UfM, spoke specifically of a “failure”, and UfM Secretary General designate Ahmad Massa'deh expressed his “disappointment”. “There was 99% agreement” on the technical issues, he told Spanish press.
European Commission and Arab League representatives along with representatives of civil society and financial bodies took part in the conference, which was chaired jointly by Spanish Environment and Rural and maritime Affairs Minister Elena Espinosa.
The 43 delegations, it was hoped, would adopt the document in which joint water management initiatives were proposed, as the first stage of a specific strategy which had been recommended by the 3rd Euro-Mediterranean ministerial conference on water, in Jordan in December 2008. Tuesday's conference was to set up “a common political, methodological and financing framework to facilitate the implementation of regional policies in the water field”. The joint objective was to reduce the consumption of water between now and the year 2025, to levels 25 percent below those of 2005. In her opening speech, Espinosa said that the Mediterranean was “an imbalanced hydrological basin”, with extremes of drought and cyclical flooding which required UfM member nations to adopt “a common strategy for a scarce resource”.
As was explained in the press conference following the meeting, the insurmountable obstacle was a nuance of terminology, since Israel's representatives would not accept the document referring to “occupied territories” and proposed the term “territories under occupation”, which was not acceptable to the Arab block.
According to information received from a reliable source, Turkey also raised objections to the terms used in the document and would not accept any reference to the 1997 UN Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, arguing that this convention was not in force and could not, therefore, be used as the legal basis for future cooperation. For Turkey, cross-border relations are a very sensitive issue in water management and affect its relations with neighbouring countries. “Turkey backs reasonable and proper use of the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for the three countries through which they pass. Our ultimate aim is to manage the water resources of the Tigris and Euphrates basin in a unified way to ensure needs are met, while not losing sight of water and climatic circumstances,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in an interview last week in the Egyptian press. Turkey would not, he said, back “an agreement that sets quotas”. He went on to say, however, that “cross-border waters can be a genuine opportunity for cooperation rather than a source of conflict”. (F.B./transl.rt)