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A picturesque view of the
Atatürk Dam
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Sitting
below a life-sized portrait of the founding father of Turkey, Kamal Atatürk, Mr
Gülabi Polat gazes out of the window. He has a splendid view: the smooth
concrete face of the Atatürk Dam, the sixth largest dam in the world, swerves
majestically across the valley, controlling the waters of Euphrates, and
symbolising the rebirth of south-eastern Turkey.
Polat,
the director of the dam, leans back behind his shiny mahogany desk and proudly
declares that he speaks nothing but Turkish. Even through a translator he
refuses to comment on possible consequences the dam project has had for local
communities and neighbouring countries, Syria and Iraq. This, he says, is
not his business; he deals with dams, not politics.
And
yet, if one looks beyond all the engineering calculations, hydraulics equations
and the tonnes of reinforced concrete, the construction of the Atatürk Dam and
the GAP development that it forms part of have undeniably had political
repercussions on local, regional and even international levels. “The
Atatürk Dam is the heart of the GAP project. Think of the GAP project as a
living body: without the heart it cannot live,” Polat says.
A
Controversial Project
The
South Eastern Anatolian Project (abbreviated as GAP in Turkish) is Turkey’s
most ambitious and largest development project, involving the construction of 22
dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
By 2010 the project is to provide 22 per cent of Turkey’s electricity needs
and irrigate 1.7 million hectares of new farmland, 20 per cent of the total
cultivable land in Turkey. As the only “water rich” country in the Middle
East together with Lebanon, Turkey has visions of becoming the “breadbasket of
the Middle East”; exporting food to water-poor but cash-rich countries like
Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel.
Costing
more than US$32 billion in Turkish and foreign investment to date, GAP was
initiated in the 1980s as a purely economic project to exploit this forgotten
corner of Turkey by tapping into its only resource: water. By taking control
over the 82 billion cubic metres of water that annually flow through these two
abundant but unpredictable rivers, Turkey aims to boost agricultural and
industrial production, create new jobs and increase income levels in this
neglected region. Polat explains that the Tigris and the Euphrates, that
originate in the mountains of eastern Anatolia and flow south to Syria and Iraq,
are very irregular rivers. “There used to be great problems each year,
with droughts in summer and flooding in winter,” he says.
Turkey’s
southern neighbours, Syria and Iraq, claim to be suffering severe water
shortages due to the GAP development. They say Turkey is deliberately
withholding supplies from its southern neighbours, turning water into a weapon.
Turkey denies these claims, and insists it has always supplied its neighbours
with the agreed minimum of 500 cubic metres a second. It argues that the
dams in fact benefit Iraq and Syria as the water flow has been regulated,
protecting all three countries from seasonal droughts and floods.
The
GAP project has also been highly controversial in the West, with
environmentalists warning of damage to the region’s ecosystems and human
rights activists claiming the project is part of the Turkish government's wider
plan to ethnically cleanse the area of its Kurdish population.
Archaeologists have also protested against the flooding of at least 82
historical sites, including the classical port city of Zeugma, and Samosata, the
regional capital of Roman emperors that lies below the waters of the Atatürk
Dam reservoir.
Determined
Nonetheless
Most
recent protests aimed to block construction of the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris,
which would displace 78,000 people and flood large areas of the Tigris Valley
including many cultural heritage sites. Subsequent environmental studies and
feasibility reports led members of the international construction consortium,
including the British construction firm, Balfour Beatty, and the Italian firm,
Impreglio, to withdraw from the project. Shortly afterwards the main
financiers, Swiss bank UBS, also announced they were backing out of the project.
Turkey
is however determined to build the dam, with or without foreign assistance and
expertise. Atilla Ataç, a design engineer at GAP is adamant.
“Without Ilisu, GAP is a three-legged dog. We will build the Ilisu Dam
with or without foreign help,” he says. Ataç, a civil engineer of the
old school, says that as a developing country Turkey cannot afford to worry
about environmental consequences of dam construction: “I know there has been
some resistance to the project because of environmental issues. We can
worry about that later, we first need these dams to bring prosperity to the
region.”
Building
a New Image
Such
comments are particularly unhelpful to GAP’s public relations department,
which is working hard to re-brand the project as a “human centred development
project” that focuses on social issues and sustainable development.
Foreign visitors to the project are assailed with a flood of glossy folders and
booklets that have been especially designed to show the new caring face of GAP.
At
first sight it appears to be nothing but a clever PR response to international
criticism, but on closer inspection even sceptics will find substance behind
GAP’s new politically correct façade. Whether one speaks to officials
in Ankara, project engineers working to connect irrigation pipelines near the
dams, or villagers living within the GAP project area, one is left with the
impression that while GAP may have started off as a mega-engineering dam
project, it is today doing all it can to take the human factor and local
conditions into account.
Indeed,
Ayşegül Kibaroğlu, a young advisor for GAP in Ankara, explains that
there has been a shift in GAP policies, a rethinking of the project’s
underlying principles. “From the mid-90s the scope of the project was
broadened to include social, cultural, educational, and human aspects. We
shifted the main focus from technical to social and environmental issues,” she
says.
“We
are trying to break away from the image that GAP had in the beginning, but it is
hard. We are critical of ourselves and we are trying to improve the
project, to take on board the foreign criticism we get. The problem is
that these changes have not yet been registered abroad – it is a big task to
build a new image.”
Vedat
Özbilen, a consultant engineer, explains that the turning point came when
GAP started collaborating with the United Nations Development Project and
adopting new principles and working models. “We began to concentrate on
the people living in the region and the environment, and we looked at the effect
that irrigation had on both,” he says.
Özbilen
flatly denies allegations that the whole GAP project would be a thinly disguised
ploy to forcefully displace the region’s large Kurdish community. “The
villages in the region are a mix of Kurdish, Turkish and Arab villages,
scattered through the valleys; it would be impossible to flood only Kurdish
villages and save the Turkish villages,” he says. “The social
structure in the region is very complicated, but we consider all people in the
region to be equal. They are all equal in that they are all poor, and all
desperately want jobs. This is why our main priority now is to create
jobs.”
Involving
the Locals in Decision-Making
The
principles underlying the resettlement of populations displaced by the flooding
of valleys has also been reformulated, giving locals more say in where and how
their new homes are built. Thus the 30,000 people who were displaced by
the construction of the Bireçik Dam on the Euphrates were all involved in the
resettlement process, an unprecedented concession by the Turkish state.
Villagers were given a choice of sites for the relocation of their village; when
none of these sites appealed they were asked to indicate their site of choice.
In
addition, communities were given the choice of moving into state-built homes or
receiving funds to build their own housing. “In the traditional model of
relocation it took four to six months to develop a new urban plan; now it takes
one year, because we ask the opinion of locals. It takes longer but it is
better because people are informed and feel that they participate in the
projects,” says Özbilen.
Similarly,
in the irrigation sector, water management is being transferred to water user
associations, which are managed and elected by farmers. Thus on the Harran Plain
south of the regional capital, Şanliurfa, 200,000 hectares of newly
irrigated land is now managed by 14 water user associations. Farmers
living in the plain still can’t quite believe what is happening to them: many
of them have spent their whole life in poverty working as seasonal workers and
praying for rain. “Before irrigation we used to go to Adana (a coastal
town in Western Turkey) to pick cotton,” one local says. “Now, since
we have water, it is the other way round: we employ seasonal workers. It
is a dream come true.”
Criticism
of the GAP project continues unabated, but Turkey has learned to deal with it.
Not by turning a blind eye and continuing doggedly along the same line, but by
responding. Foreign criticism has been turned into positive action and a
rethinking of attitudes. Meanwhile the GAP region is already benefiting
from the project as education, health care and social facilities improve and job
opportunities and productivity increase. As GAP has evolved from a vast
economic scheme to an integrated development project that addresses the
region’s problems as a whole, foreign critics should perhaps take a second
look and realise that even monolithic engineering schemes can evolve into
something more.
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Francesca de Chatel is a journalist and writer specializing in water issues
in North Africa and the Middle East. She may be reached at: dechatel@hetnet.nl.
