The 5th World Water Forum is being held in Istanbul on 16-22 March 2009. Since the previous Forum in Mexico, the government of Turkey has put in a great effort to make Istanbul the venue for this event and seen this as of critical importance for its water policies. The Metropolitan Municipality of Istanbul (IBB), the State Hydraulic Works (DSI) and the Istanbul Administration for Water and Sewage (ISKI) will be hosting this forum organised by the World Water Council (WWC), an organisation dominated by large water companies. This forum, organised in a manner totally opposed to a participatory approach and with no other visible aim than opening up water services to the market, has also come onto the agenda of movements working on water and related issues.
Non-governmental organisations, environmental movements and ecologists have formed an alliance bringing together 40 organisations around the issue of water and will make their voices heard through an Alternative Water Forum to be held on 20-22 March 2009. If the policies discussed during the preparatory meetings of the World Water Forum and announced on the website of the DSI are to be implemented, Turkey is likely to face a severe ecological crisis.
Policies Regarding Dams in Turkey
It cannot be claimed that Turkey has a water policy implemented in a systematic manner. So far, policies have been conducted gropingly and have usually been determined in response to short term needs.
The main areas of work of the DSI, the agency conducting work in the area of water on behalf of the state, are power, agriculture, drinking water and water used for other purposes, and finally the environment and flood protection. The organisation is most active and invests most heavily in power dams.
The DSI annual report for 2007 states:
“With the ‘Agreement on the Right to Water Use’, 2007 witnessed significant developments in the generation of hydroelectric power. The private sector submitted close to 1300 projects. The established capacity of these projects is close to 7 times the established capacity of the Atatürk Dam.”¹
Given that the Atatürk Dam has an established capacity of 2400 Megawatts (MW), it follows that applications have been submitted for licences amounting to a capacity of 17 thousand MW. When you add to this the 566 hydropower stations to be constructed by the DSI itself, 40 of them currently under construction, the building of 2,000 dams is on the agenda.
The problems that will be created by such a high number of dams, during construction and in later processes, do not find serious treatment in the DSI’s plans. However, consequences such as the issues of migration, reduction, even extinction, of species of fish, animals and plants, and health problems caused by dams are well-known. The hydropower dams planned for construction in the Black Sea region and on the Munzur River will result in serious damage to the ecological system of the respective regions since a plethora of small dams will be built in valleys that have the characteristics of nature parks. Ercan Ayboğa, of the Initiative to Protect Hasankeyf, comments in an interview:
“It is folly to ‘dam’ completely without exception all the rivers upstream and downstream. There are plans to build 2,000 more dams in our country. If this goes into effect, hundreds of thousands of people will have to migrate. This means impoverishment for these people because resettlement policy is very inadequate and full of mistakes. Many natural sites will be harmed seriously and lose their characteristics. Biodiversity will diminish, that is to say many endemic species will become extinct, micro-climates will change in unpredictable ways, the artificial lakes that will be formed will have water quality problems (and this will result in health risks for nearby settlements).”
To cite an example regarding the problems dams create, the DSI estimates that the Ilısu Dam will have an impact on 55 thousand people.² For their part, NGO’s campaigning in the region claim that 80 thousand people will have to migrate because of the dam. The construction of the dam has now become uncertain since the expected credit has been frozen, but if it were to go ahead, the lake of the Ilısu Dam would extend over an area of 313 square kilometres. The fact that the people who would have to migrate have no property rights is another factor that could aggravate the problem. It is not far-fetched to predict that an important part of this population will join the army of unemployed in urban areas.
The fact that some of the dams to be constructed will end up submerging under water historic cities and historic remnants that cannot be transported elsewhere will lead to another important problem evoked by the World Commission on Dams. In its document titled Dams and Cultural Heritage Management, the commission, recalling that the right to access to a cultural heritage is implied in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concludes “the loss of the cultural heritage of any population is a loss to all of humanity”. Two dams planned for construction, the Ilısu and Yortanlı dams, will destroy two ancient cities, Hasankeyf and Allinoi, with a history of thousands of years.
The fundamental problem with big dams is that they are built with a developmentalist perspective based on the exhaustion of natural resources without any regard for the environment. Hence these projects serve the interests of large corporations rather than those of the people. Ecological destruction is the price paid for “profitable” dams with a life span of 50 years. By contrast, small scale projects and energy sources such as wind or solar, support regional development better and do not inflict damage on the environment to the same extent.
Problems Regarding Drinking Water and the Water Supply Network
It is clear that since drinking water is a basic human need, the right to access to a certain amount of water ought to be recognised for everyone. However, recent debates and the fact that water has been recognised as a human right and enshrined in the constitution of some countries show the importance of bringing on the agenda the demand for the right to water, along with a series of other elements.
A meeting held in recent months, during which the WWC’s approach and various experiences of water privatisation were taken up, provides significant material on this issue. At the meeting organised on 9 September 2008 by the Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSİAD) under the title “Sustainable Water Management” as part of the preparatory work for the World Water Forum, the idea that water should be recognised as a human right and should thereafter be privatised was put forward. This is what the report to the meeting says:
“In conclusion, the characterisation of water services as a universal service obligation, as well as the recognition of water as a basic human right by ever growing masses of people, makes it imperative for the public authority to put in place certain mechanisms to assure that lower income groups who are unable to pay for the services in question will be provided with such services. The provision of services to lower income groups through the mechanisms mentioned, in other words the fact that the recovery of investment costs is made possible through service fees, will act as an incentive to the participation of the private sector, thus broadening the scope of services, on the one hand, and relieving the public authority of the necessary investment costs.” ³
This recommendation for a solution that has its basis in the unsuccessful cases of privatisation of water supply networks in developing countries is patently inappropriate as a solution to the problem, since it defines water as a private good and aims to open it up to the market. Given that a large part of the water supply network services has the character of a natural monopoly and that a certain amount of water is indispensable since it is a basic need, water ought to be recognised as a public good (common good).
According to Veysel Eroğlu, Minister of the Environment and Forestry, speaking at the same meeting, there exists, in the area of water, an investment pie worth approximately 50 billion dollars, of which hydroelectric dams make up 25 billion dollars, irrigation 20 billion dollars and drinking water 5 billion dollars. With this speech, pleading with the private sector and the global water monopolies to invest in water, the minister has made clear what the 5th World Water Forum means for Turkey.
There is a variety of ways to open up drinking water to the private sector. One method is the privatisation of the water supply through public-private partnerships, while another profitable method is to compel millions of inhabitants of urban areas to drink bottled water as a result of not supplying, or being unable to supply, water through networks. The scandals that erupted last summer over drinking water in Ankara and Izmir put the population of roughly 7 million living in the two cities precisely in this situation. If you do not wish to drink tap water that has been proved to contain heavy metal or arsenic, then you have to turn to the bottled water provided by private companies rather than the water from the supply network provided by public companies.
Local Elections and the Alternative Water Forum
The 5th World Water Forum will be held just one week before municipal elections in Turkey. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) in power and the Erdoğan government are doing everything they can to use this forum as an element of their election campaign. But a reverse effect has also been engendered, with more critical municipalities in search of a participatory water management to turn their faces to the Alternative Water Forum. The Association of South-eastern Anatolian Municipalities, consisting of 64 municipalities, most of them led by the Kurdish movement, has declared that it stands for public water services and will participate in the Alternative Water Forum. This alliance between the water movement and the progressive municipalities promises to create a significant dynamic in the coming period.
Along with its many negative aspects, the World Water Forum in Istanbul has also created a positive outcome by bringing together the anti-dam movement, the water movements, NGOs and progressive municipalities in Turkey. This alliance against the destructive water policies pursued by the DSI is the harbinger of a new, united and lasting public water movement.
Endnotes
1 DSİ Genel Müdürlüğü, 2007 Yılı Faaliyet Raporu, p. 9.
2 See The Ilısu Consortium, Annexes to Ilısu Dam and Hepp Project Update of Resettlement Action Plan. Final Report, Chapter 2, p. 3/106 (pdf-file, 1146 pages, 57 MB).
3 See Bülent Gökdemir, Küresel Su Krizine Çözüm Arayışları: Şebeke Suyu Hizmetlerine Özel Sektör Katılımı, Dünya Örnekleri Işığında Türkiye İçin Öneriler, p. 107, (pdf-file, 153 pages, 761 KB).