451 Javier Del Valle Melendo Water as a strategic resource... In 2011, the Commission announced that there was dissent among the countries in the basin over Laos’s announcement to build a hydroelectric dam. This was the Nam Theun dam (420 kilometres long29) which will directly affect the lives of 7,000 people. It will have a generation capacity of 1,070 MW, 1.5 times the country’s current capacity, of which 95% will be exported to Thailand. The Laotian government had initially awarded the project to a Thai company; however, in 2012, the project was temporarily suspended so that changes could be made to reduce the dam’s impact on the environment. By last November the changes had been made and construction had resumed. In the past, this region has suffered dramatic situations and wars. Recent decades, however, have brought stability and the region is experiencing steady economic growth, especially in the coastal districts. Economic exploitation of this great river causes tensions and disagreements because of the environmental and socio-economic impact of hydroelectric projects whose economic benefits have had adverse implications for certain people and the natural environment. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers As far as we know, it was in this area that the first war over water took place around 3,000 years ago, and it was resolved with the first agreement over shared water.65 The two rivers, which define Mesopotamia, rise in Turkey (figure 14), which enjoys a privileged position over the other countries in the Tigris-Euphrates basin (Syria and Iraq). As a result, Ankara is at an advantage when it comes to controlling the two rivers, given that the two upper sections are in Turkish territory. The case is similar to that of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, except that Turkey has much more political and economic power and is much more stable, also compared with its neighbours, Syria and Iraq. There is no treaty to regulate the shared use of these two great rivers, which run through a very unstable but extremely valuable area and supply energy to distant countries, given that they both empty into a single estuary (Shatt al-Arab) in the Persian Gulf. There is, however, a large-scale hydroelectric power plant project underway, known as the South-eastern Anatolia Project (the only Turkish region with a shortage of water), also called the Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (GAP). 65 VAN DER VALK, M. and KEENAN, P. (Edits). The right to water and water rights in a changing world. Colloquium Paper. Delft, The Netherlands, 2011, p 6. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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