Part I: The Politics of Diversion and Exile on the Euphrates River
By Joe Lombardo, PhD
Nearly fifty years ago, Turkey’s first megaproject, the Keban Dam had its inaugural debut in the mid-1970s as what would become the first of many large dams built to correct the uneven distribution of economic power in the country. Influenced by American engineering feats in the early half of the twentieth-century, the Keban was a chimera in many ways, part-economic program, part post-military model that would incorporate the socially-isolated and politically-alienated Kurds and Eastern Turkish villagers peacefully. Yet this “sinew of development” seemed to be anything but a connective means to bring the two halves of the former Ottoman heartland together, and much of the narrative begins with, perhaps a naïve sense of triumphalism on the part of Cold War America, and its hopeful clients in countries like Turkey. [1] What is the legacy of US foreign aid in the years and decades after such projects like dams or power-plants are built? Furthermore, how do such large-scale projects reorganize in some senses, the political genes of a host country today?
In order to properly address the questions at hand, it is necessary to first shed light on the origins of how American notions of development proliferated. And secondly, to understand how these ideas materialized concretely through the experiences of those living in the shadows of large-scale megaprojects.
It all begins in the summer of 1967. Dr. Mustafa Parlar was a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Towards the end of his exchange, Parlar rented a car, and drove from California to New York, where he would then continue his journey back to his native Turkey. [2] From what we know in archival records, Parlar must have taken the southern route across the continental United States, with a stopover in Tennessee. For an entire generation of Turkish engineers and developers, there were few American states which could have mustered the kind of excitement this one had on their collective imagination. Embedded throughout the winding valleys of the Tennessee River, millions of kilowatts per hour of electricity churned forth from the dams and power plants that served as living symbols of American industrial might. What Parlar must have thought or said during his stopover is entirely lost to history, but what we do know is that it must have been an invigorating, if not inspiring, pilgrimage. Upon his return to Ankara, the young engineer was already a zealous convert of the Tennessee Valley Authority of which he feverishly preached.
The Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA became a focal point of debate among Turkish engineers during a restorative period following the 1960 coup d’état. In the mind of Parlar and his cohort, the TVA represented the solution to an old problem rooted in the late Ottoman period, the so-called Kurdish Question. Reduced to its most essential feature, the Kurdish Question is primarily an issue of self-determination for the Kurds in a region of Turkey called Eastern Anatolia, or the East. There, tensions between Turks and Kurds spiked as the newly-formed Republic embarked on a series of military operations to retain control of the East. There were three major Kurdish rebellions which occurred over a 14-year period. The first was in 1925 led by the charismatic Sunni cleric, Shaikh Said, who sought to restore Ottoman Islamic rule against the Republican authorities in the city of Diyarbakır. The second was the Ararat Rebellion in 1926, when the state fought and won a major victory over a small Kurdish proto-state at the foot of Mount Ararat in 1931. The final and arguably last push for Kurdish independence was the Dersim Rebellion, which lasted from 1937 until 1939, but once again ended in defeat for the insurrectionists. Constant warfare would therefore play a determining factor in shaping the political and social relationship between Western and Eastern Turkey. By the 1950s, most of the organized Kurdish resistance would come to a halt, ushering in a period of great silence across the region. It was in those years of smoldering defeat in which the Turkish state would begin to strengthen its grip on the East. In place of arms, ruling elites would do so through the control of the region’s most outstanding natural inheritance—the Euphrates River.
In 1962, Turkey’s leading development agency, the State Planning Organization or SPO, published a parliamentary research report examining the potential benefits of damming the Euphrates River at its confluence along the Tunceli-Elazığ border. Entitled the “The Parliamentary Research Commission Report and Addendum on the Keban Dam and the Lower Euphrates Basin Development Project,” various state bureaus, which included the Electrical Works Survey Administration, the Bureau of Energy, and the State Hydraulic Works, put forward their respective visions of the future Keban Dam. [3] Why a dam and why the Euphrates?
Unlike its neighbors in the Soviet Caucasus and in the Arab states, Turkey did not possess much in the way of oil and natural gas wealth. Yet within its national borders lay one of the largest tributaries in the Middle East, the Euphrates, and it was imagined that from its discharge, hydropower could be generated. In addition, the river itself also forms a “natural” boundary between Eastern and Western Anatolia, and thus the strategic location could potentially serve as a bridge between the two halves of the country. The Keban Project had two broad aims: the first was to supplement the existing electrical consumption of the Turkish industrial base in the cities of Istanbul and Ankara to the West; and the second, to accelerate the hitherto slow tempo of industrialization in the East. Given the massive scale of intervention, the Keban Project was to become the first civil engineering megaproject the Republic would undertake in its history.
The authors of the 1962 Report gave the impression however that a great deal of consensus had been reached about the future capacity of the Keban Dam. Yet by 1965, the same year in which the foundation of the dam would be laid, backroom debates within bureaucratic circles underscored that not only had a collective agreement not been settled, but that engineers and politicians were torn over how the project would be implemented, and by what means. These exchanges focused on two main issues: first, whether or not the amount of hydroelectricity would indeed be equitably distributed to both West and East; and second, what kind of managing authority ought to be established so as to effectively disperse the dam’s proceeds. In 1963, a young engineer by the name of Korkut Özal submitted legislation for a TVA-style authority for the Keban. Like Mustafa Parlar, Özal had also spent time in the United States observing and studying reclamation efforts in the West, and was also equally convinced that such a model like the TVA would be beneficial to the Keban Project.
His proposal, however, faced internal opposition within the SPO, as the organization was concerned over whether its model’s alleged “regionalism” would be politically appropriate. [4] Several years later, Parlar would also argue for the creation of a TVA program, dubbing it the Euphrates Basin Authority, but elaborated that such an authority ought to slant the benefits of the Keban Dam more in the direction of advancing material conditions of those closest to its source in provincial Elazığ. [5] Parlar was a decidedly more aggressive proponent of the TVA model than Özal, reportedly saying that Western Turkey had been for “far too long” draining the resources of the East, and that such an authority would be able to judiciously redress the existing asymmetrical relationship. [6] Beginning in 1967, Parlar engaged in a series of talks with representatives of a small Amerıcan engineering consulting firm called the Development & Resources Corporation or D&R in order to flesh what such a regional authority could look like. The choice of D&R was by no means accidental, for its founder was none other than David Lilienthal, the chief architect behind the TVA. In a letter from William E. Warne, Vice President of D&R, to Lilienthal, the former expressed that Parlar was taking the lead in supporting a TVA-style program, arguing in no uncertain terms that the existing disparities between the East and West would cause even more “serious problems” if a TVA on the Euphrates was not established. [7]
While the D&R representatives were sensitive to the problems expressed by SPO, the Americans felt that issue stemmed more from an insufficient understanding of development on the part of their Turkish colleagues. The chief economist of the company, Frederick Moore, underscored the concerns of the SPO, writing that “there is a need for a systematic regional development program” but the “central government fears to establish a regional authority because of the possibly divisive influences it might have”. At the same time, in a letter to General Director of the Electrical Works Survey Administration, D&R President John Oliver, reaffirmed their expertise on the matter, suggesting that the Turkish approach lacked a certain holism:
We prefer to inter-relate them in projects embracing all aspects of land and water resource development, thus providing a sound base for evaluation of economic, physical and institutional alternatives across a broad spectrum of fields. [8]
Reiterating this stance, Frederick Moore said that much of the problem could be solved if the SPO were to “look at the development of the region as a whole” in contrast to the prevailing method of project management which was to see the Keban Project through the individual prerogatives of the different state bureaus. [9] Moore, along with Oliver, thus placed a premium on this unified approach, suggesting that the SPO ought to essentially take control of the operation and enact a series of what he called “specialized activities” to that end. [10] Moore rationalized that the benefits of such a comprehensively-executed program would socialize the hydropower of the Keban Dam in a more effective manner across the East, thereby negating the issue of separatism. [11]
What the representatives of D&R misrecognized, however, was that the very evocation of the term “regionalism” or regional already struck a sensitive nerve in government. This misrecognition, as it were, stemmed from Lilienthal’s own fixation with decentralized planning as a universally-desirable method of development. During and after his tenure on the board of the TVA, Lilienthal actively stressed that the core achievement of the TVA was that it was a genuine product of “grass roots democracy” from below. [12] At the dawn of the Cold War, Lilienthal and the United States understood full well that they needed to offer an alternative model of development to the countries of the Global South, lest the Soviet Union would win over the bulk of their technical and political elites. The US therefore presented decentralized regional planning with a certain populist veneer that could theoretically lure these elites to American-style development. But it was precisely this evocation of regionalism which made the SPO and Turkish government balk, as it immediately conjured up the Republic’s violent encounters with Kurdish separatism and indeed, movements from below. Regionalism in their eyes was akin to allowing their already tenuous grip on the East to draw even thinner.
What even Parlar and Özal did not recognize, however, was that the historical evolution of American reclamation and hydroelectricity was also not rooted in a debate of holistically engaging in development. On the contrary, American irrigation projects enabled white homesteaders to colonize the American West and the TVA “blindly” reinforced the existing racial structures in the Jim Crow South. [13] Not only were indigenous Native American communities removed from their lands that were in the path of construction efforts, but in the process, erased any potential oppositional narratives. Thus when stripped of its own ideological historicity, the transference of one kind of development program like TVA into an entirely different context such as the East of Turkey produced different, but in some ways, similar categories of friction and erasure. It is thus in the politics of diversion, and ultimately, of exile, on the Euphrates River where the Keban Dam begins to substantially change the relationship local inhabitants would have to the state, and to their existing communities.
References
[1] As borrowed from Dr. Christopher J. Sneddon, in his article: “The ‘sinew of development’: Cold War geopolitics, technical expertise, and water resource development in Southeast Asia, 1954-1973,” in The Social Studies of Science, Vol. 42, Issue 4 (2012): 564-590.
[2] John G. Burnett, “Turkey—Mustafa N. Parlar” a letter dated June 29th, 1967. Located in “D&R Corporation Records (MC #014), Box 68, Folder 5, “Turkey – Keban Dam, 1963-1968” in the Princeton University Library.
[3] “Keban Barajı ve Aşağı Fırat havzası Kalkınma Projesi hakkında Meclis Araştırma Komisyonu raporu ve ekleri” 1.3.1962.
[4] Parlar was also convinced however, that the SPO may be correct that such an authority would have the potential to undermine the state’s central authority with the implementation of a TVA program in the Euphrates. William E. Warne “Memo to John Oliver”, August 7-15th, 1967. As found in “D&R Corporation Records (MC #014), Box 68, Folder 5, “Turkey – Keban Dam, 1963-1968” located in the Princeton University Library.
[5] Ibid.
[6] H.D. Frederickson and John L. Swift, “Turkey—Confidential”, a letter dated October 15th, 1967. Located in “D&R Corporation Records (MC #014), Box 68, Folder 5, “Turkey – Keban Dam, 1963-1968” in the Princeton University Library.
[7] Ibid.
[8] John Oliver, “Letter to the General Director of the Electrical Works Survey Administration”, dated September 25th, 1967. Located in “D&R Corporation Records (MC #014), Box 68, Folder 5, “Turkey – Keban Dam, 1963-1968” in the Princeton University Library.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization & the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010): 105.
[13] Derek H. Alderman and Robert N. Brown, “When a New Deal is Actually an Old Deal: The Role of the TVA in Engineering a Racialized Jim Crow Landscape” in Brunn, S. (eds) Engineering Earth (New York: Springer Publishing, 2011): pp. 1901-1916.