Tag: ilisu

Flooding out terror? Turkey’s Ilisu dam project

Flooding out terror? Turkey’s Ilisu dam project

Editor’s Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow and Altay Sedat Otun is a research intern at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

By Soner Cagaptay and Altay Sedat Otun – Special to CNN

You may have heard of dams being built for water management purposes or electricity production, but probably not one being built for counter-terrorism purposes. Turkey’s proposed Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River would satisfy just that end.

When Ankara completes the proposed construction on the dam in 2013, a large artificial reservoir would flood canyons across the rugged terrain of southeastern Turkey, thus effectively flooding out the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) from the area and scoring a rare “hydro-victory” against terrorism.

The Ilisu Dam project is part of the government-funded Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), which traces its origins to the early days of the Turkish republic when plans to utilize the Euphrates and Tigris rivers for energy generation and irrigation were first developed. However, GAP it still awaiting completion. Major fighting between the PKK and the Turkish military has prevented completion of the project since the 1990s.

The PKK has enjoyed a great deal of sway in southeastern Turkey, using the mountainous terrain to their advantage in order to smuggle its members into Turkey from camps in Iraq. This area, which one of the authors visited, is pierced by canyons that run for tens of miles and are hundreds of feet deep. These canyons are almost impossible to properly monitor with a military force and form an effective land bridge between Iraq and Turkey that the PKK have used for decades.

In fact, it would not be exaggerated to describe these canyons as sort of a “PKK highway”; a member of the group can enter one of these canyons in Iraq and literally walk hundreds of miles deep into Turkish territory undetected.

Now this could all change: the large artificial lake to be created by the construction of the Ilisu dam would flood these canyons, blocking the “PKK highway.”

Perhaps not so fast. Soon after work on the dam began in 1997, however, the consortium of Swiss, German, and Austrian banks financing the dam began voicing their concerns with the project and withdrew their monetary support. In late 2008, the European members of the Ilisu Dam consortium put a six-month freeze on financing because the project “failed to meet World Bank standards for environmental and cultural protection.”

The World Bank raised concerns over the Ilisu dam project because it would flood the historic Tigris River town of Hasankeyf, which was once an important stop on the Silk Road connecting Asia to Europe. This town also serves as a source of income for the over 3,000 residents who depend on the 2 million tourists who visit the site every year.

Some Turkish activists have even tried for some years to have Hasankeyf added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list, but this would require the Ankara government’s signature, which has been unattainable. Some Turks have also taken the issue to the courts and attempted to establish that Hasankeyf is protected by Turkish laws on the preservation of historical and cultural sites and therefore under the protection of the European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage due to Turkey’s signatory status.

In order to alleviate concerns raised by the World Bank, its European Union partners, and the area’s residents, the Turkish government has proposed moving 12 of Hasankeyf’s 300 monuments to a newly created cultural park about a mile north of the city. Turkish government officials have also proposed the construction of Yeni (new) Hasankeyf in order to relocate the area’s over 3,000 residents.

Ankara argues that the dam should be built for it would bring prosperity to the country’s poorest region; by providing water for otherwise dry but fertile lands along the Tigris. The Ilisu Dam would also prove to be an important source for domestic energy production. Due to a growing economy, Turkish energy consumption has risen by 46% since the year 2000. When complete, the Ilisu Dam will have a capacity of 1,200 MW, making it Turkey’s fourth largest dam in size, and second biggest in generative capacity. Yet, in all truth, the dam’s counter-terrorism potential appears perhaps far more useful and valuable to Ankara.

For Turkey, the construction of the Ilisu Dam will kill two birds with one stone. It will help develop the largely poverty stricken southeast corner of Turkey, generate cheap domestic energy, and most importantly cut off a vital land route used by the PKK between their bases in Iraq and Turkish city centers.

For its opponents, the dam is viewed as the ax that will sever the head of the historic town of Hasankeyf and displace thousands of Kurds in a region that is already dealing with rising ethnic tensions. What is yet to be seen, however, is whether Ankara will be successful in its attempt to relocate ancient monuments and properly relocate and compensate the civilian population that will be displaced as a result of the dam.

Then, the Ilisu Dam project could enter the annals of counter-terrorism as the first case of using water to defeat terrorism.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay and Altay Sedat Otun.

via Flooding out terror? Turkey’s Ilisu dam project – Global Public Square – CNN.com Blogs.

May 4, 2012
Ilisu Dam: New York times: Feb. 17, 2012

February 17, 2012, 7:01 AM

Before the Flood

By ANDREW FINKEL

Tolga Bozoglu/European Pressphoto AgencyHasankeyf, Turkey.

HASANKEYF, Turkey — I had been warned before visiting this ancient town by the Tigris River that I was likely to be waylaid by someone named Mehmet, a “hydroelectric stooge.” Hasankeyf, a citadel of sandstone spires, palaces and mosques close to the border with Iraq and Syria, may soon be inundated by the reservoir of the new Ilisu dam. Mehmet and the town’s residents have readily accepted their town’s underwater future.

The Ilisu dam is part of the vast Southeast Anatolian Project (known as GAP, its Turkish acronym), a controversial effort to generate hydroelectric power for the entire national grid. Turkey, which imports much of the energy it consumes and is strapped for foreign currency, needs badly to find some way of meeting its growing demand for power.

Proponents of GAP argue that it is also a development project for the southeastern part of Turkey, the country’s poorest region. They say it will restore the Fertile Crescent to its former glory. Others say it will put the “mess” back into Mesopotamia. I had come to see for myself.

In the event, I saw no Mehmet when I toured the 13th-14th century mosques of Saladin’s descendants in Hasankeyf in October. The only person who sought me out was a charming elderly man who tried in the politest way possible to interest me in his bed and breakfast on the river’s edge. And it was pretty clear that the last thing he wanted was to see his way of life submerged. “We’re not goats. We don’t want to live there,” he told me, pointing to the high rises being built up on the hillside above.

Progress comes at a cost, of course, but for a long time I wondered whether the price of GAP was too high. The issue seemed to boil down to this: Ilisu will provide 3,800 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, or about 2 percent of what the country currently needs. Against that had to be weighed the irreversible damage that would be caused to the unique ecosystem (pdf) and cultural sites of the region — and, of course, the arrogance of expecting people to move from their homes.

Many of the arguments against the project once struck me as a form of vicarious Nimby. Might the pundits and the activists in faraway Istanbul be overlooking the good projects that GAP supports and downplaying their benefits in the name of environmental political correctness?

Some opponents of GAP have also charged that controlling the taps of the Tigris’s headwaters in Turkey would inevitably provoke conflict in the countries downstream. But water rights is perhaps the one topic that hasn’t flared up among these troubled states. And unlike other major dams in GAP, Ilisu is about electricity not irrigation; it regulates, but does not divert, the flow of water to its neighbors.

And then there was the argument that the dam is an instrument to divide and rule Turkey’s Kurdish regions. It seemed overly ingenious. If social control were the object, there would be more efficient ways to spend $1.5 billion.

Now I regret having sat on the fence for so long. What convinced me that the Ilisu dam is a terrible idea is not the splendor I encountered visiting Hasankeyf so much as the new shopping malls and half-constructed apartment skyscrapers lining the highway from the airport in Istanbul that I passed on my way home. They are what is gobbling up the country’s electricity and what will destroy the Tigris River basin. Most of Ilisu’s electricity will flow west, far from where it is generated.

Better to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars the dam will have cost, I now realize, on reducing waste in the national electricity grid. This runs at up to 18 percent, according to Izak Atiyas, an economist at Sabanci University, and he says it could be cut by half.

Turkish activists have tried for some years to have Hasankeyf added to Unesco’s World Heritage list, but this would require a government signature that has not been forthcoming. It may be too late to stop the flood. Up to 600 sites are threatened by the Ilisu dam, including Gre Amer, where evidence of Neolithic civilizations are coded in chips of rock and bits of clay — adobe secrets that will soon revert to mud.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. His latest book, “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Kn

February 18, 2012
Turkey’s riverside refugees

The ancient Turkish city of Hasankeyf fights for survival as a new damn is planned.

By Constanze Letsch, / Contributor / June 17, 2011

A minaret juts upward from the El Rizk mosque, built in 1409 (foreground, r.) near the remains of a medieval bridge that crosses the Tigris River. When the proposed dam is filled, only about the top 12 feet of the minaret will be above water. Jonathan Lewis

Hasankeyf, a city overlooking the Tigris River in the Southwestern Anatolia region in Turkey, prides itself on being the oldest inhabited settlement on earth. Having withstood the trials of millenniums and the occupation of civilizations from the Romans, Byzantines, Assyrians, Arabs, and Mongols to the Ottomans, all of whom left their mark, the ancient town now faces the threat of being flooded.

The construction of the Ilisu Dam, officially designed to improve the economy in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, would see the end to more than 6,000 years of permanent settlement and the relocation of 50,000 residents.

Firat Argun, who runs a guesthouse by the banks of the river, rallies against the construction of the dam. “Our roots are here, much like those of a tree,” he says and gestures around him. “This is the only place where I am at peace.”

His ancestors migrated to Hasankeyf from Baghdad 300 years ago, and like many local residents, he cherishes his Arab identity. His father and mother both grew up in one of the thousands of caves that dot the cliffs surrounding Hasankeyf where people used to live until the 1970s, when Süleyman Demirel, then prime minister of Turkey, ordered the construction of public housing and the relocation of the cave dwellers.

“The government declared Hasankeyf a protected historic area in 1978,” Mr. Argun says. “We were not allowed to move even a single stone. How can they now come and flood the whole town?”

The remains of an early medieval bridge that once provided the only passage over the river to Silk Road travelers still withstands the currents of the Tigris today. The Zeynel Bey Mausoleum on the north banks of the river dates back to 1473, when the Turkic tribe of the Ak Kuyunlu made Hasankeyf its capital. With its Kufic patterns of glazed turquoise tiles covering the walls, the tomb is one of the few examples of Central Asian architecture in the Anatolia region.

More than 300 historical sites lie scattered in and around Hasankeyf, many of which remain unexplored and will be lost once the dam is finished.

Last July, in an overly hasty excavation of some archaeological sites using heavy machinery, a cliff collapsed and killed a man, according to Berne Declaration, a Swiss nongovernmental organization. After the accident, the authorities closed down the main historical site, which includes a Byzantine castle perched atop a cliff overlooking the Tigris. It was reopened last month.

Despite the dam’s ongoing construction, the Ministry of Culture tendered for maintenance work on several historical sites last year, including the mausoleum and a medieval hamam, or public bath. Ali, a bricklayer from the nearby town of Batman, says: “I know that all of this will be flooded,” pointing toward a low wall that has just been covered with cement. “So I am not sure why I am doing this.”

via Turkey’s riverside refugees – CSMonitor.com.

June 18, 2011