Last summer, I had the fortune of spending two weeks in Southeastern Turkey with a group of researchers perusing fresh-off-the-press geoengineering projects in the cradle of civilization. We spent much of our time looking for Hasankeyf (حصن كيفا -Ḥiṣn Kayfa), a city that was pitched to us as THE gem of Turkish Kurdistan.
Hasankeyf is perched on an arid valley in the Batman [sic] Province and has been around in a relatively constant form for more than 11,000 years. For some of that history, it was the base port of the Roman empire. At another time it was the matriarchal enclave of Fatima, mother of the Hamdanid ruler Abu Taghlib. Most recently it was a small and personable city, representing a historical touch point for humanity’s long winded journey from Mesopotamia to… wherever you’re reading this from.
When we got there in June of 2022, we were a year too late. Hasankeyf was completely flooded, covered in 10 meters of water. Most important of the 11,000 thousand-year-old monuments were relocated a mile West to a newly built suburb overlooking the flooded city.
The flooding was a consequence of a freshly filled, 10 billion m3 reservoir. And the reservoir was consequence of the Ilisu Hydroelectric Dam completed on the Tigris River in 2020. And dams are a consequence of… well, a mythical Chinese emperor “Yu the Great” (大禹) who stole clay from the gods, stopped flooding of the Yellow River, and inaugurated dynastic rule in China that lasted four thousand years (but that’s for a different time).
The Ilisu Dam has been in the works since 1956 and was vehemently opposed by the residents of Hasankeyf since the beginning. Moreover, it was opposed by everyone from the Iranian Ayatollah and the Iraqi parliament to UNESCO. The PKK (the Kurdish opposition party from Southeastern Turkey) has threatened to bomb the dam on multiple occasions. At one point, more than half of the 10,000 workers of the dam’s construction site were security guards.
You know it’s going to be a bizarre project if the United Nations, PKK, and the Ayatollah are in agreement — perhaps there is even a grain of wisdom in here about achieving world peace.
But this story is not quite about the modern Atlantis city of Hasankeyf — the waterboarded cradle of civilization — instead, it’s slightly about the culprit. For part I of this story, I will touch on the interesting history that gave birth to the Ilisu Dam. Part II will explore its convoluted tradeoffs, entangled consequences, and cataclysmic transnational implications.
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There was this fascinating time in the United States, primarily in the first half of the 20th century, when Americans actually built things, and they built at scale. From the Panama Canal to the Triborough Bridge, interstate highway and the Marshall Plan, the capacity to build and tame nature signaled the emergence of the America century (for comparison, China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. did in all of the 20th century).
In the 1940s, the Department of the Interior, riding high on the Herculean successes of its hydroelectric and irrigation works, concluded that life has been brought to the desert. Consequently, the Bureau of Reclamation hosted a fellowship program for engineers from friendly nations to spend a year observing the construction of one of the major infrastructure projects in the American Southwest. The ultimate goal was for the engineers to glean the necessary insights and return to their respective countries to replicate the American methods of infrastructural development.
Cut to 1949: Süleyman Demirel, at the bright young age of 25, is inaugurated as the Department of the Interior fellow and gets placed in the Nevada Desert with a crew building the Hoover Dam. This was the largest dam in the world at the time of construction. To give you a sense of scale, the dam holds enough concrete (4.5 million cubic yards) to build a 4ft wide sidewalk fully circling around the earth; Lake Mead, the dam’s reservoir, holds enough water to flood the state (yes, the state) of New York in 1 ft of water (about 26 million acre ft).
Demirel was so impressed by the dam, he wrote in his journal at the time, “I am the first Turkish engineer who was sent to western states in the U.S. ... When I saw the [Hoover] Dam on the Colorado River in Nevada. . . I sat on a rock and watched it for three days.”
At the end of the fellowship, Demirel returned to a resurgent Turkey. He worked as an engineer in Istanbul and eventually joined politics at the hay day of the country’s economic ambition, a vision of modernity still heavily indebted to Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Ataturk visited Southeastern Turkey in 1931 with a messianic vision to “see factories, irrigated farming, roads, electrified villages, houses with healthy dwellers, and evergreen forests” as soon as possible, because “the civilization and life in İstanbul must be brought [t]here too.”
Modern Turkey’s early history was a battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim, Kurdish, and Armenian populations, particularly throughout the country’s East. Perhaps more directly, it was a battle to tame two of the most important rivers in the world, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
In the 1950s, Turkey launched a public corporation to build 22 dams on the two rivers, producing energy, irrigating fields, and ingratiating Istanbul rule to the local Eastern elite. The public corporation, Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (or the Southeasternanatolian Development Project) (GAP) was headed by Süleyman Demirel and structured directly on the Tennessee Valley Authority (public corporation established in the aftermath of the Hoover Dam construction).
In 2014, the former president of GAP explained the project in a way only an American from the Southwest can understand, “what I witnessed in GAP was this: if you ensure economic development, socio-cultural integration follows by itself . . . There are countless number of folks [in the GAP region]. What is their common ground? Think about the American dream. It is based on money. Money is based on the economy. It is not even an image, it is a dream! However, it still stands. How? Because of economic activity, opportunity, dynamism!”
In a 2014 interview, a member of parliament from Istanbul noted that the TVA model was “the greatest example ever in this scale” that “transform[ed] a large geography from a desert into a paradise not just physically, but with educational institutions, cultural establishments, and new cities.”
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While Demirel quickly moved away from GAP for an illustrious career in Turkish politics, he left a foundational mark on the institution and has continued to call it the most important development project in Turkish history. He served as Turkey’s prime minister seven times (two of the terms ended in a military coup), culminating in a presidency from 1993-2000.
In a tale as old as time, transforming large swarths of the planet with disparate material exhumed from far flung locals is a quintessentially mythological quest, one that sells religious providence just as well as political platforms. But in the accounting methodology of economic development and geoengineering, there is no line item for history.
At the end of June in 2022, near the Ilisu reservoir, I met Ridvan Ayhan. He was born and raised in Hasankeyf, got forcibly displaced from his home, and was consequently imprisoned for protesting the construction of the dam. He put it best:
Since the world has existed, mankind has constantly worked to leave a mark on this world wherever it has lived. They have left behind magnificent structures that represent them, and unfortunately we are not even aware of what kind of humanity we have destroyed.
Hasankeyf has hosted dozens of civilizations. All of this we have now destroyed for the sake of a dam. It is impossible to compare the cultural heritage of thousands years old Hasankeyf with some income from a power plant. There is no future without a past. This history is not just ours, it is the history of humanity, this is a historical massacre.
In the second part I will expand on how the Dam was funded, the local opposition to its construction, and the unexpected transnational impacts on Iraq and Iran.