Afyon
22 October 1995
Afyon Karahisar – the town called
Opium-Black Rock. The big rock rising out of the centre of the town, with the
fortress atop of it. A clear military location. Has been so for millennia.
Giving access to the central plain of rolling wheatfields. Through here Cyrus's
army passed, a stopping-off point on the road to Iconium.
And as you pass across the plain, you pass by great grey
concrete masses set in the landscape. These are the dams built to block
Turkey's rivers and provide a controlled supply of water to the towns. A
nationwide project of water management.
And it raises big questions.
Water in Turkey
When the US War Department took a look around the world
in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resolution of the Gulf
War, the Pentagon concluded that in at least ten places in the world, war could
break out over questions of dwindling water resources.
Populations are growing. Agriculture is being
modernised, and is becoming more demanding of water. Industrialisation demands
energy, which in turn demands hydro-power. The poor rivers are being worked to
the limit. Water tables are being dramatically lowered. Poor water management
(excessive irrigation) is leading to salinisation of soils and silting of
rivers. And upstream states teeter on the verge of war with downstream states
who accuse them of robbing them of water from the rivers that run through them.
For instance, Iraq and Syria almost went to war in 1975
over a disagreement about the use of the waters of the Euphrates.
And Syria has been arguing with Turkey, over the
building of the Guneydogu Anodolu Project (GAP), with the centrepiece, the
Ataturk Dam, set to control the waters that flow through Syria.
The south-east of Turkey is underdeveloped territory.
Little industrialisation, few opportunities for employment. That explains why
the people of the south-east have travelled to Western Europe in search of work
– and to Istanbul, where they swell the socially explosive populations of the
shanty towns.
The Turkish government is giving priority to supplying the
area with (a) controlled water supplies to irrigate the dusty, dry lands, to
make intensive irrigation possible; (b) electricity generated from hydro-power
projects; (c) drinking water and domestic water for the cities (a consistent
throughput of water is necessary to ensure that sewage systems flow rather than
blocking up).
Hence the aim is that the GAP project (funded mostly by
Turkish money, since the World Bank refused to lend the money) will build 800
dams, 66 hydroelectric power plants and 68 irrigation systems. It will prevent
periodic flooding of the areas lying next to rivers. And it will provide
irrigation for 1.6 million hectares of land. This will double Turkey's
production of cotton, oil-plants, animal-feed plants and rice.
Such a massive groth of agriculture will inevitably
involve huge inputs of pesticides, fungicides and fertilisers, with the equally
inevitable result of contamination of underground water reservoirs – the
country's aquifers.
These water-management projects are taking place on both
the Tigris and the Euphrates.
When Turkey initiated the Atatürk Dam, and began filling
in in January 1990, the water supply in the Euphrates dropped by 75% for a
whole month. The same thing had happened previously, in 197-5. The joint effect
of dam-filling and a drought meant that Iraq (downstream from Turkey and Syria)
lost large amounts of water, and therefore Iraqi farmers lost large amounts of
crops. Both Syria and Iraq mobilised troops along their borders, ready for war
– whih was only avoided by the intevention of Saudi Arabia.
For the observer in the West, much of this went unseen.
It only came into open view during the Gulf War. When the Pentagon was
considering all the various measures that could cripple the Iraqi war effort,
serious voices proposed that the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris could
be diverted, to starve the Iraqis of water.
Water as a weapon of war.
But water is also central to the prosecution of the
Turkish government's war with the Kurds – a vicious, bloody war using every
kind of violation of human rights, ranging from torture through judicial
executions to the mass evacuation and demolition of Kurdish villages.
The GAP project was billed as the Turkish government's
attempt to help eliminate Kurdish poverty – an estimated one million Kurds
moved westwards in 1950-80. Many left Turkey to become "guest
workers" in, for instance, West Germany.
But the Kurds have been fighting for an Independent
Kurdistan. This struggle has involved battles variously with Turkey, Syria and
Iraq. And one of the reasons that Turkey will not give way on the issue is
because and independent Kurdistan would sit right across the headwaters of both
the Euphrates and the Tigris. An autonomous Kurdistan would have political
power over Turkey's water lifeline.
Also, one reason for the urgency of the Turkish
government's war with the Kurds is that the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) has
alrady committed "terrorist acts" against Turkey's damming of the
Euphrates. The PKK has support from within the neighbouring Arab countries, and
in 1990 a hitherto unknown "Kurdish-Arab Front Against Turkey"
threatened to blow up the Atatürk Dam.
As if these regional issues (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Kurds
etc) were not already complex enough, Israel now steps into the picture. The
Israeli state has discriminated massively against the Palestinians in the
allocation of water resources. Excessive Israeli water use is depleting
aquifers and drawing seawater into aquifers along the coastline. The political
price of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process will have to be a fair division
of water resources.
But there is simply not enough water available.
So Israel has been negotiating with water-rich Turkey,
to transport water from Turkey's dams by floating reservoirs, to the port of
Haifa. This is expected to involve investments of $50m.
And what about the drawbacks of the dams and irrigation
schemes?
First, local populations are moved out of their villages
so that the area can be flooded for the dam. In some cases there has been
resistance to forced evacuation.
Second, the dam projects are often highly expensive, and
create problems of their own. In summer there is water loss by evaporation; in
winter the rivers carry down sediment which fouls up the irrigation.
Third, with the beginning of irrigation farming, the big
landlords begin to drill for water; aquifers are lowered, and smaller peasant
farmers find that they have no well water. Also, the water draining back into
the rivers after irrigation tends to be more saline – and therefore deleterious
to agriculture.
So, that more or less makes sense of the politics of
water in Turkey. What it does not, give, however, is a sense of the human
suffering engendered by the dam projects. Yesterday's newspaper, however, contained
the following item:
"Malaria cases in Turkey have risen from 8,700 to
100,000..."