The Struggle Over Hasankeyf

PHOTO from Today's Zaman

From Today's Zaman's Yonca Poyroz Dogan:

Hasankeyf, which is under threat of being submerged because of the construction of Ilısu Dam on the Tigris River, is the only place in the world that meets nine out of 10 criteria to be included on the UNESCO World Heritage List, according to respected scientists who recently gathered in the town, one of the oldest and continually inhabited places on earth.

“We have gathered reputable scientists to prove that Hasankeyf should be included on the UNESCO World Heritage List,” said Güven Eken, who heads the Nature Society (Doğa Derneği). In order to be included on the World Heritage List, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of 10 selection criteria. The Great Wall of China fulfills five criteria, while Egypt’s Memphis and its Necropolis -- the field of pyramids from Giza to Dahshur -- fulfill three and India’s Taj Mahal meets only one criterion.

The Nature Society’s efforts together with Atlas magazine led to the gathering of about 60,000 signatures from people in Turkey including celebrities such as superstar singers Tarkan and Sezen Aksu and writers Yaşar Kemak and Orhan Pamuk. Their signatures in support of protecting Hasankeyf will be sent to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who will have to decide whether the Culture and Tourism Ministry will make an application to UNESCO.

Representatives of the Nature Society, scientists and Tarkan met with Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay last April and introduced a report that explains in detail how Hasankeyf can be a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Criticizing the government’s decisions to construct dams on sites that are protected by law, Eken said as those “illegal” projects start to be built, locals and the civil society would challenge them in court.

One promising decision was taken last week by the Council of State, which overturned previously given authority to the State Waterworks Authority (DSİ) in response to a court case filed by several civil society organizations.

“The Environment Ministry is guilty,” Eken said. “Even if the dam is completed, it will not be able to hold water according to the Council of State’s ruling.”

The decision also pleased the representatives of the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive. Recep Kavuş from the initiative said the Council of State’s ruling states that the DSİ cannot have authority over cultural values. The site was declared a natural conservation area in 1981.

March. On March 22 this year, 200 people planted approximately 60 trees close to the Tigris River under the slogan: “By planting trees in Hasankeyf and the Tigris Valley we sow hope and life.”

The initiative has also been struggling because there are many financial supporters for Ilısu Dam. Although they have had several campaigns demanding responses from the three Turkish banks that support the construction of the dam, they have not received a response, Kavuş said.

Prime Minister Erdoğan said in February that the construction of the dam and a hydroelectric power plant on the site would continue. He also said the consortium that has undertaken the project had found necessary financing after a group of European credit agencies last July withdrew their financial support for the project, asserting that it did not meet environmental standards for preservation of cultural heritage, and relocation criteria for moving the villagers.

Three Turkish banks, Akbank, Garanti and Halkbank, will provide $430 to $500 million toward the estimated $1.7 billion cost of the dam.

Turkish officials say the 1,200 megawatt dam will help reduce the country’s reliance on energy imports and eventually bring in money from tourism and fishing. Ilısu Dam is part of Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP) -- an economic development program for the country’s poor southeastern corner. The $32 billion project will build more than 20 dams and 19 hydroelectric plants to boost irrigated agriculture in the arid region.

Construction started in August 2006, and the dam will swallow up more than 80 villages and hamlets by the time of its planned completion in 2013.

One other challenge to the construction of the dam has been going on since 2006 at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

The above story also describes in detail the ways in which Hasankeyf meets the UNESCO criteria to be considered a World Heritage site. In February, Prime Minister Erdogan again voiced support for plans to build the dam and a hydroelectric plant on the spot. With European backing for the project now out of the question, the government has turned to the Chinese to finance the project. See also this vivid description of Hasankeyf by Today's Zaman's Kursat Bayhan, which the prime minister has never visited.

For more on Ilisu, see posts of Dec. 20 and July 26.

The Politics of Water

Graphic from Alyson Hunt/NPR (Source: United Nations Environmental Program)

Drought conditions in Syria, Iraq, and southeastern Turkey continue to create water refugees out of the hundreds of thousands of people in the region who depend on the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers to maintain their agricultural existence. As National Public Radio reporter Deborah Amos explores in a two-part series, the water crisis results not only from climate/weather conditions, but also Turkey's control of the headwaters of the two rivers and all three countries' mis-management/waste of the supply. In September, Turkey promised to release more than 400 cubic meters of water per second following complaints from Iraqi officials that the supply was fluctuating to at times less than 200 cubic meters per second. Yigal Schleifer covered the water dispute on his blog, Istanbul Calling, last September.

Will the Chinese Fund Ilisu?

PHOTOS of Hasankeyf, which the dam would destroy, from the Atlantic.

Yigal Schliefer at Istanbul Calling has posted a stirring report by Peter Bosshard, policy director at International Rivers, an NGO in California, on possible Chinese funding for the Ilisu damn project in the southeast. I wrote an extensive post on the troubled development project and the politics surrounding it back in July (see July 26 post). From Bosshard:

Turkey is so indebted it cannot finance the dam from its own resources. Reliable sources have told us that the Turkish government is currently discussing support for the Ilisu Dam with China. For years, the Turkish and Chinese governments have strongly disagreed over the treatment of the Uighur population, which is ethnically Turkic, in China’s Xinjiang Province. Yet in June 2009, Turkey’s President visited China and signed several cooperation agreements, including in the energy sector.

Under a plan which is currently being discussed, Andritz Hydro, the main contractor for the Ilisu hydropower project, would manufacture the turbines for the project in China rather than in Austria. Sinosure, an insurance company set up and owned by the Chinese government, would insure the bank loans for the contract. In a new twist in its emerging role, China would thus not enable its own dam builders to go abroad, but would underwrite the exports of Western dam builders which have shifted part of their manufacturing base to China.

For Bosshard's full report, click here.

Ilısu Dam Project in for Hard Times Despite Government Plans

PHOTOS of Hasankeyf from the Atlantic

On July 7, the German, Swiss, and Austrian governments announced plans to withdrawal from the Turkey's 1,200 megawatt Ilısu dam, an ambitious engineering project designed to generate 3.8 billion kilowatts/hour of electricity to the country per annum. The dam is part of Turkey's larger Southeast Anatolia Project, commonly referred to as GAP. Plans for GAP date to the 1970s, and the total project is estimate to cost an estimated €32 billion of which the Ilısu project was expected to cost €1.2 billion. From Amnesty International:

In March 2007 the German, Swiss and Austrian governments agreed to support companies from those countries to supply equipment and engineering services for the construction of the Ilısudam. This support was provided through ECAs [export-credit agencies], which arepublic or semi-public institutions thatgrant government-backed loans, guarantees and insurance to domestic companies that seek to do business overseas. Germany's Euler Hermes Kreditversicherungs-AG, Austria's Oesterreichische Kontrollbank Aktiengesellschaft(OEKB) and Switzerland's Swiss Export Risk Insurance(SERV) agreed to disburse a total of 450 million Euros in export risk guarantees.

When the three ECAs granted their support, a committee of independent experts was set up to evaluate and monitor the implementation of an agreement between the governments of Switzerland, Germany and Austria and the Turkish government on the impacts of the dam, including the social and environmental impacts. The agreement required the Turkish government to put in place mitigating measures, adequate compensation and a comprehensive scheme for the resettlement of affected communities. Following repeated breaches of this agreement, the governments of Germany, Switzerland and Austria put the contracts of national companies on hold for 180 days at the end of 2008. On 7 July 2009, when the Turkish government had not met the agreed standards, they decided to withdraw their support to companies involved in the project.

Had the ECA support not been withdrawn,Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as the companies receiving export credit guarantees, would be at risk of complicity in human rights violations and/or profiting from a project involving serious human rights violations.

The holds were ordered on Jan. 6 and the social and evironmental impacts referred to involved the expropriation of land from villagers who live on the proposed site and the failure of the Turkish government to conduct environmental impact assessments adequate to the demands of the ECAs. Since the Turkish government did not meet the 153 funding criteria placed on the project by the German government, Germany suspended funds and Switzerland and Austria followed suit. The German share of the project was €450 million. The funding criteria reflected World Bank environmental and heritage standards.

Ilısu would have been constructed on 300 square kilometers of expropriated land, involved the displacement of some 80 villages (mostly Kurdish) and 55,000 people (though Hürriyet reports it would have displaced 65,00 people), and flooded heritage sites, in particular the village of Hasankeyf, a city dating to Roman times and said to be home of over 20 cultures. The town was destroyed by the Mongols, but rebuilt by Selcuk Turks in the eleventh century. I posted on Hasankeyf in December.

Despite the withdrawal of foreign investment, Turkish Environment and Forestry Minister Veysel Eroğlu has said Turkey will continue to the poject. Particularly disconcerting, Eroğlu chalked opposition of the project up to From the AFP via Hürriyet:

"We have successfully carried out some important work in order to realize the project in accordance with international standards . . . The criticism is untrue. This is the work of foreign powers that do not want Turkey to become a regional power," he added.

An article in TDZ made no reference to Eroğlu's combative remarks, but did note the minister's insistence to carry on with the project for the economic good of the country's east and southeastern regions.

This claim is up to debate and figures into what has long been a debate about both the Ilısu project and Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP)as a whole. As Gareth Jenkins pointed out in an article last year, GAP is a long-standing project that has heightened tensions in the region for over thirty years. Though AKP has been quick to tout the project as benefitting the southeast, this is a dubitable claim. Additionally, it is largely seen by many Kurds and observers of Turkish politics as part of what Ece Temelkuran has termed Turkey's "Islamist banana" poltiics. (For Jenkins and "banana politics," see my post from last March.

So far, Turkey has invested an estimated total of $20 billion in GAP, and though GAP's irrigation projects have increased yields two to three times, it is reported to have left many of those whose lands were expropriated in an even greater state of poverty. Yigal Schleifer, in an article for Eurasianet last June notes a recent study by the Turkish Confederation of Young Businessmen (TÜGIK). According to TÜGIK, despite the investment in GAP, "the region’s share in the national income is lower today than it was 40 years ago. While the 2007 per capita income in the region around Istanbul was $14,500, in Turkey’s southeast it was only $5,200." The Ilısu dam project made up a significant sum of the $12 billion Prime Minister Erdoğan promised on May 27, 2008, and which he spoke of on his visit to Diyarbakır last summer. As for Ilısu, Schleifer points out little attention was paid to building local manufacturing jobs or to food processing facilities, industries that would have seen a real benefit for economic development in the largely Kurdish southeast. In the same piece, Schleifer writes that not all of those forcibly removed in previous phases of GAP received compensation and interviewed some of the displaced who were now working as loaborers on the farm lands they had once inhabited on the fertile Harran plains.

The Ilısu project was slated to be completed in 2013, but the ECA withdrawals -- despite the claims of Minister Eroğlu -- leave its completion up in the air. It is not at all clear, especially amidst the havoc of the financial crisis, that Turkey has the funds it needs to complete the project. However, as the Guardian reports, the dam, first planned in the 1980s, "has a history of troubles." The British construction company Balfour Beatty scrapped plans for a £200m investment in 2001 under pressure from environmentalists and human rights groups." Will the Turkish government complete the project, or will it look for funding elsewhere?