Part II: The Politics of Diversion and Exile on the Euphrates River

By Joe Lombardo, PhD

In Part I, I outlined the misaligned aims of the United States and Turkey during the 1960s when it came to development policy. US engineer consultants sought to portray the Tennessee Valley Authority (hereafter referred to as “TVA”) as a readily-available, globalized blueprint for success for countries in the Global South. In Turkey, however, there were growing concerns of US rhetoric of decentralization, particularly in the country’s unstable Eastern region. While Turkish engineers and politicians were impressed with the TVA, plans to remake the Euphrates river basin along American lines were ultimately scrapped. The Keban Dam was slated to generate power to the country as whole, with significant attention to be paid to boosting the economic viability of the East.

Today, the reality of the dam as a kind of political chimera continues to weigh heavily on those affected by the diversion of the Euphrates. A good metaphor can be found in writer Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard, 2011), that is, “unimagined communities.” An unimagined community is less of a location and more of a process to describe how the grand narratives of state-building embedded in structures like dams and hydraulic infrastructure succeed in eviscerating the voices of those who happen to live in their way. [14]

For Nixon, this erasure is not only the discursive silencing of its victims, often villagers or peasants, but also a process of material dispossession, the breaking apart of the social and cultural sinews of familiarity between a people and their land. The questions to be asked is how this term could be deployed to highlight the effects of the construction of the Keban Dam, but also, what happens to a community once it becomes “unimagined.” 

As a result of the dam’s construction, the confluence of the Euphrates, Murat, and Karasu Rivers began to flood the low-lying valleys of the Altınova and Uluova starting in the late 1960s. As with all dam construction, engineers conduct feasibility reports to identify suitable locations for the site of the foundation in addition to approximating what areas of land would be submerged. Turkish state representatives visited the towns and villages that had been slated for flooding, with offers of monetary compensation and replacement lodging. Ramazan Bey was all of ten-years old when his village of Hıdıroz was immersed in the waters of the Keban, prompting his family to relocate to the city center of Elazığ. Of the 25,000 people that were forced to move from their homes, Ramazan’s family was fortunate to have owned among the most fertile of lands, as his forefathers were engaging in lucrative cotton production. State officials therefore approached his father and offered him a lofty price of one lira per square meter for their land—a good deal of money for the time. His family thus began to invest the money in starting a business, but they were also able to retain some of their land which was not flooded, renting it out to local farmers. Indeed, Ramazan recounts, not all who received such compensation from the state were apt to use the way his father had: “What would you do,” he asks, “if someone were to give you millions of liras? [Some of them] just spent the money because they didn’t know what to do and so they spent it in the bars and pavyon. [15] There was one guy, really rich, and he received something like 58 million liras! But right now his son doesn’t even have any bread to eat.” While Ramazan’s father demonstrated a fair degree of business acumen, he did not perceive the exchange of land for money as something that was entirely positive. “Nobody could take any benefit from the money the government gave them, because they couldn’t use the money properly...They got the money according to the amount of land they had. We had a lot of land, so we got a lot of money.” In spite of their newfound wealth, Ramazan still thinks of the dam as an unfortunate disaster that had befallen them. 

Several miles north of the Keban Lake Reservoir is a large village by the name of Çemişgezek. Çemişgezek is nestled in a series of canyons populated by wild fruit trees, and stone vestiges of its former Armenian inhabitants. The villagers of Çemişgezek are apt to tell a slightly more bitter narrative of their exodus from the submerged valley to their present location in the mountains. “We are terrorized by dams and by [PKK] terror” says a local librarian, Kağan Hoca. Kağan’s family parted ways with their fruit orchard during the 1960s; their “new” home occupies one of the higher points of the village, from which one can take in an impressive vista of the valley below, just out of sight of the reservoir. Kağan’s introduces his father Cemal, a man in his late 80s steeped in the history of the district, who is placidly seated on the sofa nearby the window. He begins to explain why Çemişgezek historically was not—and to this day, never should have been—part of the province of Tunceli. “We were always part of Elazığ, never Tunceli,” Cemal states firmly. Both Kağan and Cemal are milliyetçi or Turkish nationalists like Ramazan, and refer to the province by its official name of Tunceli, as opposed to its defiant usage by the majority Kurdish population as Dersim. To a milliyetçi, Dersim evokes the province’s rebellious history which constantly fought off the Republic’s Turkification of the province. Cemal blames the government and the Keban Dam, and how it not only erected a watery grave of what he describes as a prosperous orchard, but severed the cultural historical ties of Çemişgezek with Elazığ. Cemal becomes emotional as he recounts how his land was lost, and at times would pause and sit gazing out of the window, preoccupied in thought. Kağan decides to cut the conversation short, and implores me to come with him to the office of a local businessman known as İsmail Amca at the center of the village. 

İsmail Amca is ten years younger than Cemal, and after several glasses of tea, begins to talk about his late elder brother, whom he does not wish to identify. This may be because İsmail’s brother held the unenviable honor of becoming deputized by the kaymakam or district governor, and was tasked with convincing his fellow villagers to sell their lands to the state prior to the flooding. “My elder brother was a member of one of the expropriation commissions which would go to the villages and buy the land. For twenty-five Kuruş, fifteen Kuruş, or even five Kuruş per meter which is what the state offered. People didn’t like that amount of money of course. A couple of lawyers came. And they opened a case to raise the price that the government was offering. And they were successful. But even though the prices went up, they were still too low.” [16] A certain stoic attitude could be gleaned from the conversation with İsmail, “What could you do against the government? The Keban Project is gonna be built. We knew it would be a disaster for Çemişgezek. It had 52 villages, now we lost 22 of them. [Kurdish] terrorism started, anarchy started, and some people were apt to join the PKK, but many were afraid of it so they didn’t.” [16] In spite of being offered lower pay relative to what Ramazan’s family had received, İsmail shuffles back and forth between viewing the dam as a benefit to Çemişgezek, only to later mournfully regret that it should have ever been built. 

The following was but a sample of the interviews conducted across Eastern Anatolia, and each narrative draws out several themes. First, that while the Keban Project was seen as a project to develop and ultimately strengthen Turkish rule over the East, the end result was the further estrangement and alienation of the very communities thought to have been “culturally loyal” to the Republic. Turkish nationalists, both of whom are Turkish and ethnically Kurdish, saw the Keban as that which disentangled their relationship to the state, placing even the value of compensation they received—regardless of how much was given—as secondary to their attachment to their villages, their former livelihoods. Yet another point of further consideration is how these narratives of grief and loss are interpolated by the interviewees with another common narrative in the East, that of “Kurdish terrorism”. [17] These shifting temporalities—for the Keban Dam was completed in 1974, a decade before the PKK declared war on Turkey in 1984—may also illuminate the way in which large hydraulic infrastructure such as dams are associated with political instability from the perspective of nationalist Turks. Studying the Keban Dam offers crucial insight towards grasping the technical contours of governance historically through the present, especially as Turkey continues to expand its hydroelectric capabilities in its most impoverished regions. It is likely that such an aftermath is not limited to the Tigris and Euphrates alone, and may serve as a political monograph in the messy consequences for river basins the world over.

References 

[14] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).  

[15] “Pavyon” is arguably the most commonly used term in discussions with villagers. It has a somewhat negative connotation of being a sleazy gentlemen’s club where women and wine take hold of one’s wallet. Many of the poorer villagers frequented these clubs, which often lead to bankruptcy and destitution  

[16] One Kuruş is 1/100th of a Turkish Lira.  

[17] The evocation of “terrorism” during this period often refers to the militant actions of the PKK, although in “familiar” company, Turkish nationalists often refer to it as “Kurdish terrorism”.  

[18] Keban Dam Photo.