Does this mean there will be Kurdish education or road signs in Kurdish or a significant devolution of authority to local government? We will have to wait until the brouhaha settles to answer these questions. The air is thick with grievance and counter-grievance, charge and counter-charge. This is not in itself a cause for complaint. The government is still teasing out just how bold a set of changes public opinion will tolerate. This consultation is a good thing as long as it does not become a pretext for inaction. It would be an even better thing if this principle of consultation were extended to other government initiatives. One could suggest immediately that the government put what is now know as its “Kurdish overture” into practice by engaging with the local people around Batman and Cizre, 55,000 of whom may well be uprooted if a proposed hydroelectric dam across the Tigris River at Ilısu goes ahead. It was the insincerity of past consultation which obliged the three nations providing export credit guarantees for the project -- Switzerland, Austria and Germany -- to withdraw last month. An Amnesty International press release cited civil society reports to conclude that “there has not been any adequate consultation with affected communities and the resettlement policy is not in line with international human rights standards. Nor has there been an adequate assessment of the environmental and social impacts of the project.”
This has not deterred the government from announcing that it will find the $2 billion plus financing itself and plow ahead regardless.
There is continuous discussion in the columns of this newspaper about the quality of Turkish democracy. Much of the criticism is directed at a long tradition of administrative tutelage -- a sense among a self-appointed elite that they know best where the nation's interests lie. This editorial page often bristles with a sense of resentment against those who would shove their own notion of modernity down other people's throats and often supports the most ambitious of this government's claims to speak with an authentic voice to represent a population whose interests have been ignored. Yet we see on the issue of Ilısu an example of the very arrogance which the government says it deplores.
The Ilısu project has attracted bitter opposition inside Turkey, largely because of the damage it will do to the historic city of Hasankeyf, which will be inundated along its route. For years, Kurdish activists outside of Turkey have lobbied against Ilısu as proof of a plan to divide and rule the Kurdish regions by making some routes impassable by land. The State Hydraulic Works argues that Turkey needs the electricity and that over the years (the project was first mooted as far back as 1954), the necessary impact studies have been done, the plans for population settlement completed and the preparations for an archeological rescue operation in put place.
Metin Münir, from the Milliyet newspaper, who has a dogged and dyspeptic determination to get to the bottom of things, has offered another explanation. In a series of articles this week, he writes that the government has been determined to get tied export credit from abroad because this (according to their own understanding of the law) meant they would not have to go out to public tender and could reward the contract to whomever they chose. Now that this credit has been denied, they must go out to public to proceed. In a series of reports, he suggested that the environmental impact studies were commissioned at close to 25 million euros -- many times what they should have cost. Worse, it was left up to the construction company itself to subcontract these “independent” studies, which would determine the feasibility of their own work. So what would appear to be an attempt to provide an economic initiative for the Kurdish regions, he suggests, is simply an attempt to provide jobs for the boys.
It should be a warning that offering democracy with one hand should not mean taking it away with another.
