the times | Wednesday November 10 2021 2GM 29along the Poland/Belarus frontier but a sizeable force of border guards and troops are determined to keep them at bay
Presidential hopefuls scrap
to claim de Gaulle’s legacy
Page 32Netflix hit by stream
of libel lawsuits
Page 31JD Vance is paying
a price for calling
Donald Trump
an idiot in 2016cy, which is based in Warsaw. However,
it argues that the organisation, which
has 1,300 staff, is “too weak”, compared
with the 15,000 Polish border guards.
Instead, Poland is considering invok-
ing Nato’s Article 4 mechanism to con-
vene a meeting of member states to dis-
cuss a joint security threat.
It has received strong support from
Germany, which has registered 6,000asylum seekers who have arrived by
way of Belarus over the past six weeks.
Horst Seehofer, the German interior
minister, accused Putin and President
Erdogan of “orchestrating migration
for political purposes”. Some migrants
are believed to have been permitted to
fly to Belarus from Turkey.
Many of the migrants say they were
lured to Belarus by the promise of aquick route into the EU but were beaten
and robbed, and then stranded in sub-
zero temperatures on the border.
Concerns have been exacerbated by
an information blackout on the border,
with journalists and aid workers barred
by the Polish authorities from 183 mu-
nicipalities within a mile of the frontier.
The EU must help Poland to defend its
borders, leading article, page 27runs scared from Trump-bashing past
back control of both houses of
Congress next year, hobbling President
Biden as his term winds down.
Mitch McConnell, 79, the Republican
Senate majority leader, said this week
that the 2022 midterm race “will be
about the future, not about the past ... it
is likely to be a very good election for
Republicans.” He was among those
who clashed with Trump for refusing to
endorse his claim that the 2020 elec-
tion was stolen.
Chris Christie, 59, the former New
Jersey governor, said on Sunday that
Republicans were “wasting time talking
about past elections ... it is over”.
Trump was quick to retaliate: “Every-
body remembers that Chris left New
Jersey with a less than 9 per cent ap-
proval rating — a record low,” he said.
With the party base in his thrall as he
toys with another White House run in
2024, Trump, 75, still dominates the
Republican landscape. Glenn Young-kin, 54, the party’s candidate in the race
to be Virginia governor, kept Trump at
a distance throughout his campaign, in
an effort to broaden his appeal to swing
voters, but he did accept the former
president’s endorsement as “an hon-
our” and sought to appeal to the base
with “culture war” talking points.
Youngkin overturned a huge deficit in a
state that Biden carried by ten points
last year to win with ease, setting a tem-
plate that Republican challengers will
aim to copy nationwide.
Vance, 37, has found his election
hopes crumbling as his attacks on the
former president resurfaced in Ohio.“I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance said in
a 2016 interview, admitting also that he
did not vote for him in the election. “I
never liked him.”
He has tried to backtrack, claiming
he regretted his remarks and now
“stands with Trump” but the betrayal
appears to have doomed his campaign.
Trump’s endorsement threatens to
create further controversy for the
party: Sean Parnell, 40, whom he
backed for the Senate race in Pennsyl-
vania, is mired in allegations of domes-
tic abuse, with his estranged wife claim-
ing he beat his children and choked her,
as an ugly divorce plays out in the
courts. Parnell denies the allegations.
6 The congressional committee in-
vestigating the January 6 assault on the
Capitol has issued subpoenas seeking
documents and testimony from ten
more Trump associates, including Kay-
leigh McEnany, his former press secre-
tary, and Stephen Miller, an adviser.The river in front of us had once been so
swollen with floodwaters, it was an im-
penetrable front line in the war against
Islamic State.
Now it had disappeared. The floor of
the Khabur valley in northeastern Syria
was a uniform brown in the autumn
sun. As far as the horizon, not a single
farmer could be seen tilling the fields.
The river, a tributary of the Eu-
phrates, is testament to the water crisis
facing Iraq and Syria. Mesopotamia,
the cradle of civilisation, is being re-
duced to a desert by conflict, overuse of
such water as there is and global warm-
ing, driving farmers off the land.
A recent report by a coalition of aid
agencies said the crisis was likely to
trigger a new wave of migration, follow-
ing on from the mass movement of
more than a million people fleeing war
who arrived in Europe six years ago. It
said seven million people in Iraq and
five million in Syria were “losing ac-
cess” to water.
“The unfolding water crisis will soon
become an unprecedented catastrophe,
pushing more into displacement,” said
Carsten Hansen, regional director for
the Norwegian Refugee Council.
A report last week by Pax, a Dutch
NGO, backed claims by residents of
northeastern Syria that the Turkish-
supported forces that invaded two
years ago were damming the Khabur.
“This is a crime against humanity,
and no one is trying to stop them,” said
Aram Hanna, a spokesman for the
Syrian Democratic Forces, the West’s
Kurdish-led partner in the fight against
Isis. Turkey is also accused of damming
the Euphrates and the Tigris, which
flow into Iraq, reducing water levels.
And conflict in the region over the
years has damaged pumping stations
and irrigation facilities.
The excessive use of groundwater by
Syrian farmers goes back decades to
when Hafez al-Assad, the present pres-Drought in cradle of
civilisation driving
new migrant flood
ident’s father, attempted to boost agri-
cultural production by encouraging
mass irrigation with water pumps pow-
ered by subsidised fuel. The water table
has fallen by up to 100 metres in places.
Farmers are leaving the land as yields
collapse. The lives of those who remain
have entered a vicious circle: they use
diesel pumps to extract groundwater
from ever deeper under the earth, de-
nuding the reservoirs and polluting the
land and air with fumes and residues.
“We failed to grow any wheat this
year,” said Jassem Mohammed, a farm-
er from Deir ez-Zor, in the country’s
southeast. “That is a catastrophe. No
wheat — no bread.”
He said he had been able to irrigate
his farm, two miles from the Euphrates,
only once this year. He was now de-
pendent on pumping groundwater, but
the quality was too poor for his crops.
Conditions have been extreme, with
temperatures hitting 50C for days on
end the past few summers. Rainfall in
northeastern Syria halved from
430mm in 2019 to 217mm in 2020.
Low water levels at the region’s two
main dams, Tabqa and Tishrin, have
affected supplies and are threatening
the hydroelectric power plants on
which eastern Syria depends.
Mercy Corps, another aid group, said
the shortage of clean drinking water
had caused tens of thousands of cases of
acute diarrhoea this summer.
There is little sign of the overarching
political solution that might make poss-
ible policies to restore the region’s envi-
ronment. The SDF has installed local
councils that have begun to rebuild
devastated cities such as Raqqa, but
northeastern Syria has no recognised
government, which makes planning
and investment much harder.
Pax called on national leaders to find
“cross-boundary” solutions. But with
Turkey, the Assad regime, Russia,
America, Iran and a whole variety of
local militias facing off against one
another inside Syria, cross-border
answers seem as far off as ever.Syria
Richard Spencer Tal TamirRed planet sauce: Heinz
develops Martian ketchup
Life for the pioneers who form the first
colony on the red planet will be spartan,
but there is one staple of the dining
room table that they will not have to do
without: ketchup. Scientists have man-
aged to grow tomatoes in conditions
approximating those on Mars.
The tomato sauce experiment was
carried out over two years by Andrew
Palmer, the Florida Tech Aldrin Space
Institute associate professor of biologi-
cal sciences, and his sponsor, Heinz.
“One of the biggest challenges is how
to grow [plants] in less ideal soil condi-
tions, and this project could help us,”
said Gary King, head of agriculture at
Kraft Heinz.
Palmer and his team worked in a
greenhouse, dubbed the Red House,that replicated conditions on Mars. The
only light came from powerful LEDs,
and the temperature and water supply
were strictly controlled. The team grew
450 tomato plants in buckets of soil
from the Mojave Desert in California,
which mimics many of the characteris-
tics of Martian soil.
Palmer said: “This process is pretty
much in its infancy. The reality is that I
firmly believe we can do this. I think we
can grow in regolith [the surface ma-
terial] on Mars. It’s just a matter of figur-
ing out all the limitations.”
Heinz has created a limited run of
“Marz edition” tomato ketchup at its re-
search facility in California — for em-
ployees only. It said the project had “en-
hanced knowledge of growing toma-
toes in a sustainable way, not just on the
red planet but also on our own”.Debbie WhiteMON/REUTERSin border conflict