How Turkey’s energy, agricultural policies depopulated Kurdish-majority regions (Part 1)
 

Maaz İbrahimoğlu
Dec 06 2020 
http://ahval.co/en-102089

The Kurdish issue in Turkey has always been multi-faceted, with many seemingly unrelated areas affected by the same underlying cause. Urban poverty, declining biodiversity, severe income inequality, food prices soaring – many more issues can be traced back to the same roots.

Kurds in rural areas were forced to migrate to city centres en masse during the height of Turkey’s fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the 1990s. Various depopulation policies were utilised in Kurdish-majority areas, including the burning of forests and a several thousand Kurdish villages, construction of many small-scale, often quite energy-inefficient, dams and power plants on rivers, declaration of special security zones and construction of giant border walls, among others.

Millions of Kurds were deprived of their livelihoods when the land they both cultivated and used for their livestock was changed and made unusable. People with rural and agricultural skills, fluent in another language, ended up in class and linguistic conflicts in Turkey’s decidedly non-Kurdish western urban environments.

In this two-piece article, Zozan Pehlivan, an environmental historian and a professor at the University of Minnesota, tells Ahval about Turkey’s depopulation and environmental policies, the ‘ecological state apparatuses’, and how the Kurdish people and language have been affected.

The following are Pehlivan’s remarks from the interview, edited for clarity and gathered under separate headers:


The GAP

Kurds in rural areas have been experiencing more economic hardship;m the land can sustain less and less people every day. But, physically speaking, there is in fact more farmland in Kurdish-majority areas now due to the efforts of the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), a network of hydroelectric dams and irrigation projects that was the major accelerant for development as it was posed in the 1970s. More lands can be cultivated to the north of Lake Van, in the provinces of Malatya, Gaziantep, Mardin and Şırnak.

More pastures have been converted into irrigated farmlands, but ancestral farmlands around the thousands of villages that were either evacuated or burned down, or both, by state forces in the 1990s have not been utilised, and a whole economy centred around those fields that included millions of livestock has disappeared, translating into a far-reaching practice of impoverishment by the state.

There are frequent power outages in the region, despite the construction of hydroelectric dams regulating virtually every drop of running water in the region and the numerous biomass power plants that have been built. In addition to the outages, forest fires and forced expropriation of property make up a practice of dispossession.

We teach it differently at schools, but Turkey is in reality a very energy-poor country. As such, the state considers any and all exploitation of existing resources to be fair game. The GAP’s main aims were to generate more energy and encourage agriculture-based growth in the region, but what it did only manage to do was to create cheap electricity for the western part of the country.

In a region that is home to the two largest natural water resources, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, hundreds of thousands of people travel away from home to work elsewhere in the country as seasonal agricultural workers. It must be acknowledged that this phenomenon could have been avoided.

The number of seasonal workers travelling out of the Kurdish-majority regions to elsewhere in Turkey is inversely proportional to the amount of land opened for agriculture. That means the rural working classes travel westward to be subjected to terrifying labour exploitation, while landowners and their international partners are gifted vast swathes of land for industrial farming in the east. The GAP, under these conditions, will never create prosperity or welfare in the region.


The state constructed dams as part of the GAP, which drowned whole villages, towns and valleys, as well as the collective memory of the people, and their social, political, emotional ties to the land and their sense of belonging. The GAP brought historicide, trauma and ecological disasters to the region. The water has transformed everything, in possibly the worst way.

Depopulation

Turkey’s depopulation policies for Kurdish-majority regions go back to the second half of the 1980s. The government’s main motivation was to make the rural population migrate into cities, and of course this in itself had various social, economic and political motivations.

One of the main motivations in the 1990s was to cut off the socio-economic resources the Kurdish movement had in rural areas. Because members of the PKK were young people from surrounding villages, there was a certain familiarity with them to begin with among the law-abiding residents. They could disappear among villagers and obtain resources they needed, whether by kindness or threat, if necessary.

In the end, these efforts resulted in the evacuation or burning down, or both, of 2,000 to 3,000 villages in the region, depending on who is keeping track. Many villages were evacuated in extremely short notice, with people often given mere hours to pack up and leave.

As such, hundreds of thousands of people and millions of livestock were displaced and lost their homes.

Several million villagers exiled from their lands ended up in large cities in the rest of the country: in southern agricultural centres like Adana and Mersin, northwestern industrial hubs like Bursa and Izmit, commerce- and manufacturing-rich Izmir in the west and of course Istanbul, the megacity.

Many people were impoverished, but some made golden opportunities out of their suffering. Many riches were built on the dispossession of millions of rural Kurds.

The matter has not been properly studied in Turkey’s academia yet. Some scholars who tried have faced obstacles, including terrorism charges in several cases, but mostly the atmosphere just did not allow for it.

The village evacuations constituted the first and most extensive pillar of the depopulation policies for the region, which in themselves were quite a dynamic and ever-changing mechanism. Such policies in the 1990s were not the same as the post-2000s policies that emerged during and after the 2013-2015 peace process. There are some similarities to the 1990s in the current forest fires that resulted in depopulation, but they differ significantly in terms of ideology and methodology.

Back in the 1990s, the fundamental goal was the wholesale exile of the rural population. What we witnessed this summer in Şırnak province’s Cudi and Besta regions and in Van province was the state turning concerns over security and a psychology of fear targeting villagers who insist on staying in their rural homes into a political apparatus over its monopoly on violence.

Now the approach has shifted to restricting access to economic resources or even eliminating it altogether, rather than all-out destruction.

Restricted access to forests, meadows or water sources will infinitely impede the livelihood of people who rely on these resources. Herders will have fewer animals because they can’t take them to graze and have less to eat themselves because there is lower diversity and quantity of food to go around. Animals will lose their health because they are no longer in open air, and their increased vulnerability to disease will make it easier for any negative event to wipe out the herd – a devastating loss for villagers.


The methodological and ideological differences are perfectly encapsulated in the tragedy that is the recent dropping of villagers off a military helicopter in Van.