To quell opposition to his government, Saddam Hussein reportedly poisons and drains the water supplies of southern Shiite Muslims, the Marsh Arabs, or Ma?d?n. The marshes of southern Iraq are intentionally targeted. The European Parliament and UN Human Rights Commission deplore use of water as weapon in region.
Three students are seriously wounded in a clash with police at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Police are preventing students from protesting the lack of water and electricity on campus.
In August 1992, bombs are set off along a Zhang River distribution canal collapsing part of the canal and causing flooding and economic losses. Violence continues in the late 1990s with confrontations, mortar attacks, and bombings. Conflicts over excessive water withdrawals and subsequent water shortages from China’s Zhang River have been worsening for over three decades. (See also entries for 1970, 1976, 1991, and 1999.)
The Serbian siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, includes a cutoff of all electrical power and the water feeding the city from the surrounding mountains. The lack of power cuts the two main pumping stations inside the city despite pledges from Serbian nationalist leaders to United Nations officials that they would not use their control of Sarajevo’s utilities as a weapon. Bosnian Serbs take control of water valves regulating flow from wells that provide more than 80 percent of water…
Armed skirmishes arise in part because of disagreement over the control of the headwaters of Cenepa River. Wolf argues that this is primarily a border dispute simply coinciding with location of a water resource.
The Orma and Degoodi clans wage war over grazing land and water due to a severe drought, with 10 fatalities.
In August 1992, farmers of Baishan village in Hebei province and Panyang village in Henan province fight with rudimentary explosives over control of water from the Zhang River, which feeds an irrigation canal for the two provinces. An attempt to divert the river leads to a confrontation and an attack on irrigation canals.
In June, hostilities between Moldova and Russia in a short but intense conflict inclujde a rocket-artillery attack on the hydroelectric turbines at the Dub?sari power station on the Nistru (or Dniester) River.
In Nigeria’s “Middle Belt,” dozens are killed in tensions between farmers and pastoralists over the use of farmland, grazing fields, and water sources.
A report suggests that proposals were made at a meeting of fundamentalist groups in Tehran, under the auspices of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, to poison water supplies of major cities in the West “as a possible response to Western offensives against Islamic organizations and states.”