The Impact of the Munzur Dams

The Impact of the Munzur Dams

Kurdish Human Rights Project

Compte d’auteur

It is now commonplace to suggest that the Turkish state persecution of its Kurdish population, which has so disfigured the history of modern Turkey, derives its impetus from the ‘Kemalist’ project of unitary secular nationalism, implemented by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during the founding of the Republic. Of course, such a view is far from inaccurate: Ataturks iconic status in Turkey is evident everywhere from his ubiquitous photos and busts to the reference in the Turkish Constitution to him as “the founder of the Republic of Turkey, its immortal leader and unrivalled hero”.2

A similar reverence is reserved for the principles of the Kemalist state, united as one against internal and external foes. In particular, the principle of the “indivisible integrity” of the state, territorially and politically, is absolutely fundamental to the ideology and self-perception of the Turkish polity. Article 3 of the Constitution puts it bluntly: “The Turkish State, with its territory and nation, is an indivisible entity. Its language is Turkish.”3 The assertion of an alternative ethnic or linguistic identity, whether by political intention or simply by growing up speaking another language, is thus seen by statist ideologues as striking at the most deeply embedded legal and ideological foundations of the Turkish republic. It is the overarching accusation of ‘separatism’, the state’s assumption that any form of Kurdish ...

Table of Contents

Foreword / 4

Section I: Displacement / 5
1.1 Origins of Kurdish displacement: 1921-1934 / 5
1.2 The site of the proposed Munzur dams: 1935-1950 / 8
1.3 The Modern Era / 9

Section 2: Political and Hydro-Electric Power:The GAP Dams / 15
2.1 Official claims of GAP / 15
2.2 “The Oil of the Future”: Water and Regional Hegemony / 16
2.3 GAP, Ilisu and the Kurds / 17
2.4 GAP and Double Displacement / 18

Section 3: The Munzur Dams (Tunceli / 21
3.1 Origins and Corruption / 21
3.2 Background: the Turkish Energy Market / 21
3.3 The Munzur Dams: A Summary / 22
3.4 Building the Munzur Dams / 23
3.5 Official Claims and Admissions / 24
3.6 The Absence of Environmental Impact Assessments / 25
3.7 Concerns of the Local Communities / 26
3.8 Environmental Concerns and Domestic Environmental law / 28
3.9 Local Experience of Previous Dams / 29

Section 4: Conclusion and Recommendations / 32

Appendices

A Memo from President Turgut Ozal to Prime Minister Derimel,
February 1993 / 33

B Turkey and Fulfilling the Copenhagen Criteria for Accession - - *
to the European Union: Theory or Practice? — Memo from the Kurdish Human Rights Project to the President of the European Union, EU Commissioner for Enlargement,
Permanent Representative of the Member States
(10 December 2002 / 36

C UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement / 46

D Munzur Valley Protection Association (MVPA) publication,
Munzur Valley and Dam Issues, including features: ‘Dams Planned
to be Constructed in Munzur Valley’;‘What will be lost due to
the planned dams in the Munzur Valley’; the demands of the
Tunceli Solidarity Council;‘Discussion of pros and cons’; and
“Munzur Valley National Park” Decree / 55

FOREWORD

The recent tragic history of mass displacement in the Kurdish regions of south-east Turkey has not been widely chronicled. It is accepted, however, that over 3 million people were forced from their homes and over 3,500 settlements destroyed during a concerted campaign by Turkish security forces that peaked in severity during the mid-1990s. The campaign involved the mass destruction and evacuation of villages, allied to disappearances, arbitrary detentions, rape and extrajudicial killings. In a series of cases brought by KHRP, the European Court of Human Rights determined that security forces had destroyed the applicants’ homes and property deliberately, in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.’ To this day, the effects of village destructions are still visible in the Kurdish regions: large swathes of rural areas are empty, while hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees live in squalor in shanties and cinderblock huts.

The official rationale behind the campaign of village destructions was the removal of support for the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK, now KADEK). However, it is clear that there was a more profound purpose to the policy: to resolve the “Kurdish question” by precipitating mass migration of Kurds from their traditional areas to the big cities of western Turkey, and in doing so expediting their assimilation into mainstream Turkish society.

The village destructions have now mostly ceased. The problem of those displaced wanting to return home bulks large in Turkish domestic politics. Receiving less attention, however, is the link between displacement, those wanting to return and the proposed construction of a series of massive dams known as the Southeast Anatolia Project (or, in Turkish, GAP). The GAP dams have and will not only cause mass physical and economic displacement of local people, but also the “double displacement” of those wishing to return home in the aftermath of the destruction of their villages.

The Munzur Valley exemplifies the policy of displacement through the mechanisms of GAP. The area has always been a centre of Kurdish cultural and political autonomy, and thus a focus of Turkish state policies including massacres, isolations and martial law. In light of this, the already financially and economically dubious dam projects planned for the Munzur Valley, particularly the Konaktepe Dam and Hydroelectric power plant (HEPP), must come under environmental, social and moral scrutiny.

This report first traces the history of the Turkish state’s treatment of the Kurds, including the roots of the centralised policy towards them. Secondly, it analyses the rationales and impacts of GAP, looking in particular at its effects, deliberate or otherwise, on local Kurdish populations. Finally, it reports on the findings of a Kurdish Human Rights Project fact-finding mission undertaken to investigate the likely effects of the dams.

The mission, consisting of two representatives of the Kurdish Human Rights Project and a translator, visited the region from November 13 to 18 2002. During its visit, the delegation met with representatives of NGOs, of political parties, the local mayor; trade unions; local lawyers; affected and internally displaced persons and concerned individuals. Interviewees included local party chairman of the ruling Justice and Democracy Party (AKP), DEHAP (the pro-Kurdish Democratic People’s Party), HADEP (the now dissolved pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party) and the CHP (Republican People’s Party); the local branch of the Human Rights Association (IHD); Goc-Der, the migrants’ association; the Munzur Valley Protection Association; the local mayor and people in the National Park itself.

We urge the project’s potential funders and the companies involved to seriously consider their future involvement in this project, taking into account the abysmal history of human rights abuses within Turkey.

Kerim Yildiz
Executive Director
April 2003

1 See Akdivar and Others v. Turkey (99/1995/605/693), Mattes and Others v. Turkey (58/1996/677/867), Selek and Asker v. Turkey (12/1997/796/998-999), Bilgin v. Turkey (23819/94), Dulas v. Turkey (25801/94) and Orhan v. Turkey (25656/94)

I. Displacement

I. I Origins of Kurdish displacement: 1921 -1934

It is now commonplace to suggest that the Turkish state persecution of its Kurdish population, which has so disfigured the history of modern Turkey, derives its impetus from the ‘Kemalist’ project of unitary secular nationalism, implemented by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during the founding of the Republic. Of course, such a view is far from inaccurate: Ataturks iconic status in Turkey is evident everywhere from his ubiquitous photos and busts to the reference in the Turkish Constitution to him as “the founder of the Republic of Turkey, its immortal leader and unrivalled hero”.2

A similar reverence is reserved for the principles of the Kemalist state, united as one against internal and external foes. In particular, the principle of the “indivisible integrity” of the state, territorially and politically, is absolutely fundamental to the ideology and self-perception of the Turkish polity. Article 3 of the Constitution puts it bluntly: “The Turkish State, with its territory and nation, is an indivisible entity. Its language is Turkish.”3 The assertion of an alternative ethnic or linguistic identity, whether by political intention or simply by growing up speaking another language, is thus seen by statist ideologues as striking at the most deeply embedded legal and ideological foundations of the Turkish republic. It is the overarching accusation of ‘separatism’, the state’s assumption that any form of Kurdish cultural expression, from language rights to children’s names, is a metaphysical attack on the Republic itself, that has been the root cause of so much unnecessary and tragic suffering in the Kurdish regions.

What is questionable is whether the sustained and often vicious attitude adopted by the state towards the Kurds for much of the last eighty years was Ataturk’s original intention. Before 1923, he frequently referred to the unity of interest between Turkey and the Kurdish tribes, avoiding the later euphemisms and refusals to even admit the Kurds’ existence that have denoted later regimes. In 1921, for instance, Atatiirk wrote to Kurdish chiefs, noting that,“the loyalty of the Kurdish people has been known to us for a long time. The Kurds have always been a valuable help to the Turks. One can say that the two peoples form one.”4 Indeed, during the conflict against Russia in the First World War, the Turks collaborated with Kurdish tribes, some albeit under considerable duress, in the deportations and genocide of the Armenian population in Turkey. Turkey was so effective in shielding tliis early form of ethnic cleansing from history’s gaze that Hitler, before implementing the Final Solution, made the notorious observation, “Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?”

Unfortunately for the Kurds ofTurkey, they were soon to be given ample reason to recall. It seems likely that, having first accepted Kurdish delegates in traditional costume into the so-called “Parliament of Turks and Kurds” of 1920, Ataturk always intended to turn on the Kurds after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne 1923, having first made use of them. Certainly that is the conclusion of A. Kahraman’s scathing indictment of modern Turkish historiography, Kurdish Rebellions: Suppression and Punishment, which details the overt nation-building process by which Ottoman cadres from parts of the shattered empire as far distant as Albania and the Caucasus “constructed the ideology of state on the basis of‘oneness’,”3 at the expense of the Kurds, the indigenous ‘other’.

Perhaps also the restiveness of Kurdish leaders in both Turkey and the villayet of Mosul in northern Iraq made Ataturk doubt that the Kurdish tribes could be brought into this national fold. The keenness of many Kurdish leaders to retain the Muslim caliphate also clashed with Ataturk’s zeal for secularism.

Another possibility is that the 1920s prominence of racial thinking dissuaded Ataturk from his belief that traditionalistic Kurdish society could be remoulded into the image of the Europeanised modernity he envisaged for the new Turkish state. One source, Kendal’s Kurdistan in Turkey, plumps for tliis latter explanation, noting the necessity of an inferior and degraded ‘other’ in the imagining of the modern Turkish community. “What better way to illustrate that the ‘Turkish people is great, civilised and valiant’, than to invent a palpable antithesis, the ‘savage and backward Kurds’, the only large non-Turkish minority in Turkey?”6

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Kurdish Human Rights Project

The Impact of the Munzur Dams

KHRP

Compte d’auteur
“This is the Only Valley Where We Live":
The Impact of the Munzur Dams
The Report of the KHRP Fact-Finding Mission to Dersim / Tunceli
Environmental / Human Rights
The Corner House
Kurdish Human Rights Project

This report, published in conjunction with the Cornerhouse in
April 2003, is based on the findings of a KHRP Fact-Finding
Mission to the region of the planned Munzur Dams from 12-18 November 2002.

This report was written by Anders Lustgarten,
KHRP Environmental Officer, and edited by KerimYildiz,
Executive Director, and Rochelle Harris, Public Relations Officer.

Front cover: Halbori Springs, site of the proposed
Konaktepe HEPP (top); the Uzunfayir Dam (below).
© Kurdish Human Rights Project

Printed in Great Britain
Published by KHRP/the Cornerhouse
ISBN: 1 900 175 57 6
All rights reserved