FightING ILISU DAM  - SAVE HASANKEYF AND TIGRIS VALLEY

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Comments by the DIKASUM Coordinator about the Resettlement Action Plan (RAP),

                                                    by Handan Coskun   

 

by Prof. Ilyas Yilmazer

Handan Coşkun

Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality

Women’s Center,

DİKASUM Coordinator

Diyarbakir/Turkey

Email: handancoskun@hotmail.com

 

 

 

To the Export Credit Agencies in Austria, Switzerland and Germany!

 

Subject: Ilisu dam project, Resettlement Action Plan, B.7: Notes from Deep Interviews with the stakeholders

 

 

Since the re-commencement of the Ilısu Project, various independent NGOs and institutions working in partnership with the project owner State Water Works Institute (DSI) have visited the region in order to carry out research on the subject area. Encon Company also came to Diyarbakir in May with a fieldwork team of a team leader and pollsters. They had an interview with me in the municipality building.

 

As the Diyarbakir Metropolitan Municipality Center For Research and Application on Women’s Issues (DİKASUM), since 2001, we have been carrying out activities and doing research on the high suicidal rates of women in the region and the honour killings committed against them in order to explore the reasons of, raise social awareness about and develop solution strategies for these issues.

 

Displaced women who suffer from various kinds of traumas make up our primary target group. DIKASUM carries out projects towards their social rehabilitation and healthy integration to the urban life. Recently established three laundry houses, where these women can do their laundry for free and can also receive training and education on reproductive health, hygiene and acquiring literacy at the same time, are among the social facilities implemented through such projects. There are also 660 children between the ages of 3 to 6 registered in the children rooms of these laundry houses. These children receive training and education for developing their pre-school formation and hand skills.

 

Diyarbakir’s population has dramatically increased in the last 15 years due to migration, reaching to 1,300,000 from a population of 350,000 in the 1990s. Squatter housing has become widely common in the neighbourhoods which received high levels of migration within this period. Already suffering from many severe social problems related to the high levels of unemployment (60 % of the potential workforce), inadequate urban super- and infrastructure and the recently migrated and unintegrated population, currently Diyarbakır has neither the physical nor the social capacity to receive new waves of migration. Although the number of women’s establishments have recently increased considerably, activities and research towards determining and solving the problems of women are not at a  satisfactory level due to the magnitude of the working area. These problems, currently unsolved, will inescapably multiply after a new wave of migration. Most of these immigrants currently live in squatter houses established attached to or on the edges of the ancient Inner City Walls. During the interview, I talked about the need to develop a mass-housing project within this context, also emphasizing the interrelated urban problems, such as the need to clean the surroundings of the historic Inner City Walls and to restore them so as to render the historical heritage of the city visible.

 

As I have also forcefully stressed during the interview with the fieldwork team of the Encon Company, I do not see the dams as an opportunity for or an area of employment; and informed through my first hand experiences at the field site, I definitely do not want the Ilısu dam to be built. During the interview, I provided them with detailed information on Diyarbakir’s current problems in relation to migration and on my working area. Again, I also told them that I thought the design of the survey questions was not proper, that the villagers most of whom did not know Turkish well would have difficulties understanding the Kurdish translation. I indeed told them that I found the content and the design of the survey questions terrifying. Although both my ideas and my language were very clear from the beginning to the end of the interview, following was what was provided as the summary of my views in the relevant section of the Ilısu RAP: “Participants suggested that mass-housing projects should be prepared in order to eliminate the problem of housing that will result from the construction of the dam. Also, they recommended that all the non-governmental organizations in the region should cooperate to increase the social welfare in the region.” (Annex B7, p. 2/8, Notes from Deep Interviews with the Stakeholders)

 

Hereby I would like to inform you that in the DSİ Ilısu Consortium RAP, the paragraph where the interview with me was summarized does not reflect my views on the issue, and furthermore represents a distorted and falsified summary of the actual content of the interview. It is neither ethical nor correct to represent my suggestion on the need for mass-housing, which was mentioned in connection with the needs of a city receiving huge waves of migration in the last 15 years, as a solution strategy I foresee for the housing problems related to the construction of the Ilisu Dam. Apart from this, although I have emphasized that the government should collaborate with the local governments and NGOs not only on mass-housing projects but also on many other subjects like employment, education and health; it is disturbing that this general view on good governance was also distorted so as to look as if I were communicating my ideas on the ways to improve the social welfare projects to be carried out after the construction of the dam. The NGOs and local governments in the region regularly carry out activities in cooperation on aforementioned subject areas, what I had emphasized was the need for a more sensitive and delicate approach regarding this cooperation on the part of the central government.

 

I have to admit that it is very saddening to see the way in which my views were conveyed in the report. I hope that, as you are evaluating the content of and arguments laid out in the Ilisu RAP, you will be taking into account both my actual views on the issue and the fact that they were distorted and neutralized so as to suggest a positive approach to the İlisu Project in the report.

 

 

Best regards

Handan Coşkun