Link for video (Video için link): www.ft.com/turkishdam
FINANCIAL TIMES, March 22th, 2008
By Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton
Published: 20:22 | Last updated: 20:22
On the slow descent into the Tigris valley, steep cliff walls rise 100 metres on both sides at the confluence of seven natural gorges. The winding road continues into the Kurdish heartland of south-east Turkey until the Mesopotamian plain unfolds, revealing the first scattering of rock caves, of which there are thousands in the area. On the southern bank of the Tigris the ancient settlement of Hasankeyf overlooks the scene.
The town’s history dates back at least 7,000 years, with traces of Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, Artuqid, Ayyubid and Ottoman civilisations. Though dilapidated from years of neglect, Hasankeyf still enchants – fish seem to jump into the nets of fishermen, storks roost on the peaks of ancient minarets. It is fitting that they nest here: Kurdish children learn that storks, leg leg in Kurdish, come from the south, the direction of Mecca and Medina, and so are referred to as hajis – one who has made the pilgrimage – or haji leg leg.
But 80km downstream from Hasankeyf – which means “rock fort” from the Arabic hisn, rock, and keyfa, fort – lies a very serious threat to its future. At the village of Ilisu, a huge dam is being planned and constructed by the Turkish government. When the project is finished, Hasankeyf will be inundated, submerging thousands of years of history.
Abdulvahap Kusen, the mayor of Hasankeyf, sits in his small, modern office watched over by a poster of Kemal Ataturk. “It is like having cancer,” he says. “They keep telling you that you are going to die. You get used to the idea so you don’t do anything.
“Everyone thinks they are going to build a dam, so nobody wants to invest anything,” he continues. “We couldn’t change this cultural richness to economic richness. Instead of destroying cultural places for energy which can last 50 or 60 years, you can make money from them.”
At one point the mayor moved his office to a cave in symbolic protest. “Since the beginning of this project, no one from the people living here is involved. We always face trouble when we try to get information about the project. We have not been informed by the officials.”
The construction of the Ilisu dam, Turkey’s second largest hydro-electric dam, has gone largely unnoticed in the international media. This despite the fact that the project, backed by €1.2bn of European funding, will displace tens of thousands of civilians, cause significant environmental impact, flood one of the most important archaeological sites in the area and inflame Kurdish separatists.
The dam consortium, led by Turkish and European companies, says that only 20 per cent of the wider Hasankeyf area will be flooded, including the caves. Professor Abdusselam Ulucam, head of excavations at Hasankeyf, says that is not the case: “Eighty per cent will be flooded, only 20 per cent will remain.” The dam consortium plans to move nine major monuments to a nearby hilltop, including the foundations of an extraordinary 7th century AD Artuqid bridge, creating an Ozymandian vision of two vast and trunkless legs of stone in the desert. Ulucam believes that the major monuments of Hasankeyf cannot be moved without destroying them. The rock, he says, is too fragile.
The Ilisu project has become a flashpoint in a battle of energy versus conservation, modern development versus social preservation, and the political struggle of the Kurds. Proponents see the 1,200 megawatt project as an answer to Turkey’s energy needs, providing a renewable energy source – 3 per cent of Turkey’s current capacity – and bringing development and stability to the south-east. Opponents see it as a short-sighted effort to harvest energy at the expense of precious cultural resources, the environment and the local population. Some see it as a blatant attack on Kurdish society.
“The Arabs have oil, we have water,” says Yunus Bayraktar, an engineer at the Turkish construction company Nurol and the architect of the current Ilisu dam project, paraphrasing the previous Turkish prime minister, Suleyman Demirel. Bayraktar sees himself as a saviour of an otherwise destitute part of Turkey. “This project will be an economic bomb,” he says. According to the dam consortium, up to half a million people will benefit from the project, though it promises only 4,000 jobs for villagers during the seven years of construction.
As for the ancient ruins of Hasankeyf, according to Bayraktar, they are destined to be destroyed through neglect anyway. “You have to flood Hasankeyf to save it,” he says, looking over plans for a new cultural park that will be created from salvaged monuments. Like Fitzcarraldo, in the Werner Herzog film of that name, Bayraktar imagines dragging the remains of the massive bridge, his Molly Aida, up the hill for the benefit of tourists who will flock to the area. “This is my dream,” he says.
The Ilisu dam is not a new problem. The idea was conceived in the early 1950s, but did not gain momentum until the 1970s, when it became part of the massive GAP (South Eastern Anatolian) project to build 22 dams.
In the late 1990s, the Ilisu dam contract was awarded to the British company Balfour Beatty, but it pulled out of the project in 2000 due to strong international opposition to the flooding of Hasankeyf. Many thought that was the end of it. But in 2004, Ilisu was revived under a new consortium led by Austrian, German and Swiss export credit agencies (ECAs), government-backed bodies which provide loans and insurance.
“It’s really like a bad Hollywood horror movie” says Bruce Rich, co-director of the international programme at Environmental Defense Fund. “Bad projects do have a remarkable way of coming to life again.”
. . .
The issue that has raised the most questions, even more than the impact on Hasankeyf, is the plight of local villagers. Almost 200 villages will be partially or wholly flooded and some non-governmental organisations estimate that up to 80,000 people could be displaced or disrupted (the consortium puts forward lower figures of between 15,000 and 54,000). Local people, who live off farming and animal husbandry, will lose their homes, land and source of income.
Previous dam projects in Turkey have had severe consequences. Displaced villagers had to wait years for compensation and others were forced to move to shanty towns on the outskirts of major cities, with no hope of jobs. The export credit agencies currently involved have put pressure on the Turkish government to ensure that similar problems do not happen again. One hundred and fifty “terms of reference” have been drawn up for the project. These requirements attempt to mitigate the negative impacts caused by the dam and bridge the gap between Turkish law and World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development standards.
In order to ensure compliance with these terms, the ECAs hired a Committee of Experts to conduct periodic reviews of the process. The committee is made up of both international and Turkish experts in the areas of archaeology, resettlement policy and the environment.
Robert Zwahlen, the committee’s chairman, is clear about the limits of his role: “No dam in the world has been built that doesn’t change things. The question is, ‘Does society accept these changes or not?’”
Muammer Yasar Ozgul, president of the GAP project, settles into a plush chair in a large, quiet office in Ankara. He exudes the forbearance of a practised bureaucrat. “You can not find one villager who does not support the dam,” he says. In two weeks researching the story, visiting half a dozen villages and speaking to more than 50 villagers, we found only two proponents of the Ilisu dam. One was Choban Ahmet, a shepherd who carries a business card.
“Have you spoken to Choban Ahmet?” Ozgul asks, a refrain we heard from most officials concerned with the Ilisu project.
We met Ahmet at Hasankeyf. “This is how we used to live,” he said, looking sadly at the cold stone walls of a small cave. In the 1970s the prime minister of Turkey visited the region, saw that people such as Ahmet lived in caves, and decided that these dwellings did not befit a modern country. The people were moved to newly constructed houses nearby.
From a plastic architect’s tube, Ahmet excitedly unrolled the future: development maps of the region, the proposed archaeological park, and the new village of Hasankeyf. He pointed out where a new open-air museum and amphitheatre would be, and the giant lake which would spur tourism and water sports, including sculling, scuba diving and water skiing.
Ahmet was eager that we see Hasankeyf’s current failings, such as open sewer lines that run through the city. There is also a complete lack of infrastructure to harness the town’s tourism potential. Although an estimated 500,000 tourists come here every year, they are shuttled in and out on tour buses. The only lodging is the more-than-modest Hasankeyf Motel, which doesn’t have running water. As Yunus Bayraktar of Nurol put it: “They look, they drink a Coke, and they leave.”
Ahmet once had dreams of opening a bed and breakfast in the caves that used to be his home. But when he applied for a permit, he was denied by the state. Pressed on the apparent contradictions – that the state had helped create the depressed economic conditions in Hasankeyf by not investing in it or allowing local development, and had already promised him better housing before – he became agitated: “What choice do we have? Show me another plan. This is our only hope for a better life.”
. . .
Eighty kilometres downstream at Ilisu, work on the dam has already begun. The village is home to approximately 270 people and sits perched at the edge of the Tigris. As women bake their daily bread in communal earthen ovens, large diesel diggers scoop buckets of dirt in preparation for an elaborate security compound, the first step before construction of a water diversion tunnel can begin this spring.
One Nurol employee, a former army commander, offered us tea and freshly cooked fish sandwiches. Like many of the people working for the consortium, he is hardened to controversy surrounding the dam: “Are you here to shout ‘No dam! No dam!’” he asks playfully, adding: “If Hasankeyf is flooded, so what? Then they can have underwater archaeology.”
The local gendarmerie, a fixture at the entrance and exits of almost all Kurdish villages in south-east Turkey, gave us permission to film the village and to interview the muhktar, or head of the village. They warned us to be quick.
The muhktar, careful to answer our questions in Turkish not Kurdish, said that people support the dam, and that it will bring jobs and energy to his villagers, half of whom are unemployed. Walking through Ilisu village, one hears a different story.
“We don’t want the dam,” said a group of elderly men almost in unison as the muhktar looked on sheepishly. “The village has been good for us for thousands of years, why would we want to leave?” Much of the land around the village, and the village itself, has already been expropriated, and residents complain about the poor compensation they received for their houses. When asked about the promise of jobs, they were dismissive: “There won’t be jobs, they will bring in others to do the work.”
Down the road, as smoke billows from the communal oven, a woman preparing bread repeats the Kurdish phrase we hear often, “me baraj nave” (we don’t want the dam). We press her on why the muhktar says otherwise. She looks at him and shakes her head: “Poor muhktar, he knows nothing.” “Focus on the bread,” he admonishes her.
In south-east Turkey, a region that Turkish officials refer to as a “terror area”, many people believe that the Ilisu dam is being built to combat Kurdish rebels. “It’s just to bring an end to the Kurds,” claims a middle-aged woman at the village of Kesme Kopru III, just across the Tigris from Hasankeyf. She says her husband had recently been released after more than nine years in Diyarbakir prison. “If you can’t catch a fish,” her husband says, “you drain the sea.”
The dam site is 45km from the Iraqi border, and near “Hell’s Valley”, famously named for mountainous corridors used by Kurdish fighters. “The main reason is the security phobia of the state,” says Ayla Akat, a member of the Turkish parliament representing the pro-Kurdish DTP party, at the Kurdish cultural centre in downtown Batman, the oil boom town 30km from Hasankeyf. “It is a cultural massacre.”
The governor of Batman, Recep Kizilcik, appointed by the state, is more politically cautious but no less direct. “Concerning security, building up this Ilisu dam is very important for us. It is crucial for our administration.” He pointed to previous examples, including the Ataturk dam. “After the building up of the reservoir of the Ataturk dam, the terrorists couldn’t pass through.”
. . .
One only has to travel six hours west of Hasankeyf to catch a glimpse of what many villagers fear is their likely future in the Tigris valley. Along the Euphrates, just north of the Birecik dam, lies the ancient Roman site of Zeugma, submerged along with dozens of villages including Belkis.
The Birecik dam was both a hydro-electric and irrigation project with great promises of development and prosperity. Eight years later, villagers find it difficult to point to anything positive that has happened in the region. “People are so poor here they can not even afford to buy a bunch of parsley,” say a group of mostly Turkish villagers living in the “new Belkis”, a collection of concrete houses overlooking the dam. “Belkis became a village for pensioners. You cannot survive because there is no land to work on.”
Further on, the story is the same. Just north of Halfeti sits the ghost village of Savasan Koyu¸ marked by the minaret of its flooded mosque eerily rising out of the water. Though all the houses are abandoned, Mehmet Ali, 42, comes every day by donkey to run a tea-house for the occasional visitor to the sunken minaret. He says he is too old to learn another job. “The reason they built the dam is maybe for irrigation or energy, but they don’t care about anyone who is damaged or suffering. They didn’t employ anyone. What benefit did it bring us?”
The Committee of Experts visited Ilisu and Hasankeyf for the first time in December. Their reports were made public this month. The controversial Ilisu experiment appears now to be in jeopardy. The Turkish government has not met all of the agreed deadlines. The experts found significant problems, particularly in the area of resettlement. There is no full income restoration plan and grievance mechanism as required, villagers were not properly informed, and there has not been a proper archaeological survey or environmental plan.
Turkey, meanwhile, is moving forward. In January, it moved to draw down the first 15 per cent of the financing, €180m, which comes from commercial banks.
While Yunus Bayraktar dreams of the Ilisu dam and Choban Ahmet dreams of a new Hasankeyf, Nusret Ozdimer, a villager from Belkis displaced eight years ago by the Birecik dam, dreams of his old life. “When we dream, all our dreams are about the village.”
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Before the flood
For a slideshow and documentary video, including interviews with villagers in Ilisu and Hasankeyf, Turkish officials, the Ilisu dam consortium and the European export credit agencies, go to www.ft.com/turkishdam
