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SHAME on Kurds who allowed Hasankeyf to be DESTROYED

A place for discussion and exchanging ideas about Kurdistan issues here, also a place for sharing article & views and analysis about Kurdistan .

Re: HASANKEYF should be a symbol of unity for ALL Kurds

PostAuthor: Anthea » Wed Apr 29, 2020 10:27 pm

The UNESCO Site That Never Was

In some of Zeynep Ahunbay’s earliest memories of southeastern Turkey, birds fly high above the town of Hasankeyf’s crumbling stone citadel. In one long, panoramic look, the conservation architect could take in an expanse of history, from the ancient stairs cut into limestone cliffs to the cluster of rickety cafes on stilts above the winding Tigris River

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When Ahunbay and her husband, an archaeologist, arrived in the early 1980s, Hasankeyf was a jewel. Life in the small town seemed to have barely changed over the centuries. Once a popular stopover on the Silk Road trade route, Hasankeyf saw minimal development between the 17th and 19th centuries. “So, what do you have? You have pure history,” Ahunbay says.

For more than a century, Hasankeyf offered scholars a window into 12,000 years of human occupation. Residents—claiming a blend of Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish descent—still point to the surrounding caves, where their ancestors were born and which some locals continued to inhabit into the early 2000s.

In the last few months, however, Hasankeyf has become a city under water. The waters of the Tigris overflow into abandoned neighborhoods, shops, and family orchards. In July of last year, the Turkish government activated the hydroelectric Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River, one of several installed as part of a multi-decade infrastructure plan for southeast Turkey.

Once complete, the reservoir’s surface area is expected to reach 121 square miles. It will cover the habitat of several rare or endangered species, and dozens of villages and small towns, including the better part of Hasankeyf

Activists fought the Ilisu Dam for decades. Their concerns included the archaeological and environmental losses, and the people of the region’s wellbeing.

The reservoir cuts across routes used by some of the last nomadic shepherding communities in the region, for example. And the area lies in Turkey’s southeast, where the nation’s Kurdish people—the country’s largest ethnic and linguistic minority—are concentrated. The majority of residents uprooted by the dam project are Kurdish, and the waters cover several sites deemed significant to Kurdish culture and history.

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The town of Hasankeyf, shown here in 2014, featured numerous sites of archaeological and historical significance.

The town of Hasankeyf, shown here in 2014, featured numerous sites of archaeological and historical significance. Omer Balamir/Flickr

In response to its critics, the Turkish government argued that the project is crucial to developing the country’s relatively impoverished southeast. “The nostalgia of living [here] may be romantic,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a statement. “But it does not address the social and economic needs of the region.”

Turkey has an abundance of historically significant places—the longest list of potential UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the world. To preserve each one would be impractical. And so, the loss of Hasankeyf can offer a case study into the difficult calculus that informs what societies choose to preserve or destroy.

Large dams are demonstrations of innovation and political might. They are long-term, capital-heavy projects that provide hydroelectricity to growing populations and irrigation for agriculture. They allow governments to contain and control the rivers within their borders.

At the same time, dams swallow up ecosystems, historical monuments, and human settlements—often communities with fewer resources and less political sway than their neighbors. This tradeoff has been demonstrated around the world.

The Three Gorges Dam in China inundated 1,208 known archaeological sites and displaced more than 1.1 million people by 2012. In India, the filling of a dam reservoir in 2019 forced tens of thousands of Indigenous people from their homes near the Narmada River.

In Turkey, large-scale dam projects have been a political priority since the Turkish republic’s founding in 1923, says Akin Unver, an expert in international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. The issue transcends both party and politics. Unver notes that dams have flooded many towns over the years. Hasankeyf is merely the latest.

"The dam will displace at least 15,000 people, according to the government—activists estimate it will be closer to 78,000."

Still, activists have argued that the town’s cultural heritage sets it apart. Archaeologists believe humans have settled the area of Hasankeyf since at least the 10th millennium B.C., when our species began to domesticate wheat in southeast Turkey. For example, a mound excavated near Hasankeyf revealed the remains of stone houses, obsidian arrowheads, and human burials from about 11,500 years ago.

Later, Hasankeyf grew into an important trading and textile production hub on the Silk Road. It was the final stronghold of the Ayyubid dynasty of Saladin, a Kurdish Muslim ruler whose domains included parts of Syria, Yemen, and Egypt.

In prosperous times, Hasankeyf’s rulers boasted of their power through investments in art and architecture, many of which have survived into the present day. The impressive Er-Rizk mosque, for example, dominated the skyline until authorities moved it to higher ground this winter. “It’s a masterpiece of craftsmanship,” says German building archaeologist and architectural historian Peter Schneider, of the Brandenburg University of Technology.

Many of these sites hold special significance for the Kurdish people. Between Hasankeyf and its surrounding villages, Turkey’s Ilisu Dam will ultimately displace at least 15,000 people, according to the government—but activists estimate the number will be closer to 78,000. Many of these residents are Kurds, a fact led critics in the 1990s to question whether anti-Kurdish sentiment motivated the government’s plans.

The Turkish government has repeatedly denied this suggestion. Nonetheless, says Djene Bajalan, an expert in Kurdish history at Missouri State University, “the notion that this economic project is an assault on a symbolic aspect of Kurdish culture holds a lot of weight among Kurdish people.” The government, he says, has “tried to demonstrate that the Kurds don’t have a history.”

Locals, archaeologists, ecologists, and the Kurdish diaspora have fought the Ilsiu Dam intensely. At one point, they hoped the site could be saved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (It meets multiple criteria for UNESCO nomination, activists claimed in a petition that garnered over 13,000 signatures last year.)

But only a national government can propose a site to UNESCO. From the Turkish government’s perspective, Unver says, “the people of the region will benefit from the dam far more than from the financial spillover of it being a UNESCO World Heritage Site.”

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This decorative arch is part of Hasankeyf’s citadel, moved to higher ground before the flood. Durrie Bouscaren

Other efforts to save the town have focused on engaging the international community. For example, activists brought their concerns to the European Court of Human Rights with the hope of protecting Hasankeyf. In February of 2019, however, a chamber of seven judges rejected that application and sealed the town’s fate.

In preparation for sinking Hasankeyf, contractors built a steep rock harbor around the citadel, cutting it off from the community below. For determined local teenagers and the occasional tourist, it’s not difficult to scramble up over the white stones to reach the top.

From there, it’s possible to take in the scope of the dam’s consequences. Standing on a ledge in the citadel, one can see a collection of identical, sand-colored homes in the distance, reminiscent of a suburb in the United States. The government built these houses of “New Hasankeyf” for the former town’s residents. But the structures are fraught with leaky ceilings, cracked walls, and unfinished electrical wiring.

Some residents say they have reached a level of acceptance with Hasankeyf’s future. They hope they can find work in a new tourist economy that will rise around the lake. They make dark jokes about learning how to scuba dive. “Of course, everyone is sad,” says lifelong resident Ugur Ayhan. “But there’s nothing to do anymore.”

For preservationists like Ahunbay, the pain is too deep to permit even a last visit to say goodbye. “We were not able to stop the vandalism,” Ahunbay says. “[But] these feelings will maybe tell the future generations that the place was loved and treasured.”

Even in Hasankeyf’s final days, it continued to yield archaeological secrets. As a construction crew prepared to relocate the historic Er-Rizk mosque in November 2019, they uncovered stone foundations below the town bazaar. Rescue archaeologists set to work, but they could only do so much before the waters arrived.

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/hasankeyf/
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Re: HASANKEYF should be a symbol of unity for ALL Kurds

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Re: HASANKEYF should be a symbol of unity for ALL Kurds

PostAuthor: Anthea » Tue May 12, 2020 9:20 pm

History sinks into water and garbage

The spokesperson of the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive (Kurdish: Heskîf), Rıdvan Ayhan, demands the immediate removal of the mountains of garbage floating on the Ilisu reservoir

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As the snow melts, the level of the Ilisu reservoir is rising rapidly. The reservoir has de facto turned the rivers Tigris, Botan, Kezer and Başur into stagnant waters and buried the 12,000-year-old settlement of Hasankeyf under water. Directly opposite the new settlement "New-Hasankeyf" there is a large waste dump.

The wind and backwater drive the garbage from the valleys and gorges into the lake. Due to eutrophication, the oxygen level of the reservoir begins to drop rapidly, although it is not even summer yet. The initiative to save Hasankeyf demands immediate action.

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The garbage promotes the spread of diseases

Ayhan tells that the living beings in the lake are threatened by the garbage and that the water authority (DSI) bears full responsibility for this. "With the water, history was buried and instead came the garbage.

This garbage must be collected and destroyed. If the garbage stays, the already endangered creatures here will be exterminated. The DSI or the local government or whoever must do something. If this continues, various diseases will spread," Ayhan warns.

Our history sinks before our eyes

Mesopotamia is a highly important region in the history of mankind. In Hasankeyf up to 12 thousand years old settlement remains have been found. This largely unexplored history is now sinking into the floods of the Ilisu Dam.

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Mesopotamia is one of the regions where the sedentarisation of mankind began. Urban culture, states, writing, administration and finally rule are developments that are based on developments in Mesopotamia, especially in the European context.

The significance of the region for the Asian region is also being intensively researched. Mesopotamian history allows a look into the development of the self and the status quo of humanity and shows different possible ways of life, from matricentric societies to empires.

One focus of this Mesopotamian history is the village of Hasankeyf, located by the Tigris Valley. More and more new finds prove an eventful history going back at least 12,000 years, i.e. to the Neolithic. Ancient churches can be found next to mosques and sanctuaries of the ancient religions and Mesopotamian original religions. This place and this landscape breathe history.

However, the fate of this place seems to be sealed. For the place is sinking, despite worldwide protests of civil society in the economically nonsensical and only for war purpose oriented Ilisu dam.

With its dam system, Turkey is putting pressure on its neighboring countries, especially Iraq and Northern Syria, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the ways of the Kurdish freedom movement are intended to be cut off.

Quite incidentally, more than 80,000 people have also been displaced from their land. In the meantime, only the roofs of the houses and the trees in the gardens of the displaced persons from this fertile region are still sticking out of the ground.

The sign "Hasankeyf, Hoşgeldiniz, Hûn bi xêr hatin, Welcome", stands in front of this horrible picture. If the water continues to rise, the sign will also disappear. Normally, sunken cities are associated with natural disasters, but here a place was destroyed on purpose. Why? Because an oppressive regime, without hesitation, is prepared to destroy human history for its own interests.

Soon there will be nothing left of the ancient town and the breath of history will be choked in the floods. In the distance we see a blanket or a pillow floating in the water. It has got stuck on a tree. On the bank of the rising reservoir stands an old woman leaning on her stick. Some people stop and watch the catastrophe, others take photos. The silence is sometimes broken by construction machinery and sometimes by the cackling of the ducks.

    12,000 years of history is sacrificed to
    dam project designed to last 50 years
The Tigris flows through the middle of the drama. It has been flowing in this bed for thousands of years and can bear witness to history, but it and its biodiversity are also sacrificed to the Ilisu dam.

The rising water has so far flooded more than 250 settlements in Siirt, Mardin, Batman and Şırnak. In the past days the water reached Hasankeyf. Many of the historical places are already flooded. Also the houses of the people and their cemeteries are under water.

One of the inhabitants of Hasankeyf is Hediye Tunç, who says: "The state has taken away our house and farm. I have lived in Hasankeyf for 60 years. Last week, our two two-storey houses have sunk. We are sitting on the street. Nobody cares about us."

The mother of eleven children complains: "God may not accept this cruelty. He should not leave us," and continues: "We do not want to leave our country. Where else should I go? Before this catastrophe we were happy. The water of the Tigris flowed with passion." She notes that she has not received any compensation from the state.

42-year-old Sunmez Er from the village of Organ, which sank a month ago, says: "A great many villages have sunk. We do not know where. The state has flooded our most fertile land. The graves of our grandmothers and grandfathers have been flooded. We had to leave them there. We expect nothing from the state anyway, but we want our rights. The state hasn't kept a single promise so far.”

The flooding is a disaster not only for the people but also for nature. A 650 square kilometer area of nature is being destroyed. According to the Hasankeyf Coordination, an association of initiatives to save the historical cultural site in Northern Kurdistan, at least 15,000 people have been displaced.

The number of people affected is likely to be much higher and is cautiously estimated to be about 100,000 inhabitants inside the Tigris shore zone. This project, however, does not bring any benefit at all, but only profits for large corporations. It poses a threat to Iraq and Syria as well because Turkey uses water as a weapon. The sinking of the Tigris level due to the GAP dam system has already had a negative impact on Iraqi agriculture.

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Re: HASANKEYF should be a symbol of unity for ALL Kurds

PostAuthor: Anthea » Thu May 14, 2020 12:26 am

There is only ONE

KURDISTAN

1213
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Hasankeyf belongs to KURDISTAN

    NOT North Kurdistan

    NOT South Kurdistan

    NOT East Kurdistan

    NOT West Kurdistan
But the Great Nation of KURDISTAN
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Re: HASANKEYF should be a symbol of unity for ALL Kurds

PostAuthor: Anthea » Wed May 20, 2020 9:13 pm

First turbine at Ilisu dam

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday inaugurated the first turbine of the Ilisu Dam and hydroelectric power plant on the Tigris River.

The inauguration was he held via video link, with the President stating that the project is expected to contribute 2.8 billion Turkish liras (over $413 million) to country’s economy.

Construction began on the concrete-faced rockfill dam in 2006, and the project has been steeped in controversy, with environmental groups concerned about the amount of people displaced and its impact on the 10,000 year-old city of Hasankeyf, and valuable biodiversity in the region.


https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/news ... am-7933216

Heartbreaking news :(( :(( :(( :(( :((

This is the GREATEST shame Kurds will ever face

Kurds inability to UNITE and save Hasankeyf

The MOST important part in the whole of Kurdistan and Kurds have let Turks destroy it
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Re: HASANKEYF should be a symbol of unity for ALL Kurds

PostAuthor: Anthea » Tue May 26, 2020 11:26 pm

Turks destroy Hasankeyf graves

Turkish forces have desecrated Kurdish graves and destroyed the Sheikh Ibrahim mausoleum in Hasankeyf, an ancient city in the Batman province of Turkey’s largely Kurdish south-east (North Kurdistan)

Armoured vehicles moved into a graveyard in the village of Gunseli on Monday and smashed up tombstones previously badly damaged by government troops. In a deliberately provocative act, soldiers hung the Turkish flag from trees in the graveyard where hundreds of Kurdish bodies are buried.

Their destruction of the Sheikh Ibrahim mausoleum deprived the region of one of its holiest sites. It was the latest in a series of sickening attacks on Kurdish and Alevi graves and holy sites over the past few months as the Turkish state escalates hostilities.

Earlier this month, the dead body of Grup Yorum bass player Ibrahim Gokcek was removed by police from an Alevi religious centre in the Gazi district of Istanbul to prevent a funeral service from taking place.

Mr Gokcek’s remains were taken on a 12-hour drive to Kayseri in central Anatolia, where fascists from the Grey Wolves group pledged to dig up the revolutionary’s grave and burn his body, encouraged by members of government coalition partners the Nationalist Movement Party.

Last week, the Morning Star reported the grim discovery of hundreds of Kurdish bodies buried underneath a pavement in the seaside village of Kilyos, on the outskirts of Istanbul.

They had been removed from a cemetery in Bitlis province after it was destroyed by the Turkish state in 2017 following the collapse of peace talks between the government and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The 12,000-year-old city of Hasankeyf, which stands on the banks of the river Tigris, has been the subject of international protests after the Turkish state began flooding it as part of its much criticised Illisu dam project.

The destruction is seen as an extension of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s cultural genocide against the Kurds. Comparisons have been made with Isis’s destruction of Islamic cultural sites and the “historical massacre” of statues and buildings in Syrian’s ancient city of Palmyra.

The flooding of Hasankeyf displaces about 80,000 people from the area, according to the local authorities.

The most recent outrage comes amid rumours that Mr Erdogan is set to call a snap election for August, when lockdown restrictions to limit the spread of Covid-19 are expected to have ended.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article ... -hasankeyf
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Re: HASANKEYF should be a symbol of unity for ALL Kurds

PostAuthor: Anthea » Thu May 28, 2020 10:25 pm

Turkey destroyed protected site

Albania and Turkey are the only countries that have destroyed cultural heritage sites under the protection of Europa Nostra

“Before the violent and brutal demolition of the National Theater of Albania in Tirana,” Europa Nostra told Panorama, “none of the 36 heritage sites included in the 7 Most Endangered list since 2013 have perished.

Hasankeyf, in Turkey, may be comparable, seeing as the city was submerged as a result of the construction of a dam on the Tigris river.”

The ancient town of Hasankeyf in Turkey and its archaeological sites were flooded after the completion of the Ilisu Dam.

Hasankeyf was under the protection of Europa Nostra. It was not recognized and protected as a UNESCO Heritage Site as the Turkish authorities made no attempts to have it recognized as such - nor did the Kurds X(

In March 2020, the Albanian National Theater was included in Europa Nostra’s 7 Most Endangered Sites in 2020 list. Nonetheless, in the early hours of May 17, the Albanian government demolished the National Theater X(

https://exit.al/en/2020/05/27/albania-a ... rotection/
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Re: Kurds are traitors to KURDISTAN giving HASANKEYF to Turk

PostAuthor: Anthea » Fri Jun 12, 2020 12:31 am

Cofiwch Hasankeyf:

Water as a weapon in Wales and the Middle East

In Wales, we know the political impact of water. Water is in no short supply here but, as the drowning of Capel Celyn in 1965 serves to painfully remind us, water still matters.

Who has control of water and what that water is used for – including where the water goes – are highly charged issues with wide-reaching, and often destructive, implications. No where else is this truer than in the Middle East.

On 25th February, one word in the opening line of Wikipedia’s page on Hasankeyf was changed. Previously it had read, “Hasankeyf is an ancient town and district located along the Tigris River in the Batman Province in southeastern Turkey.” Now it reads, “Hasankeyf was an ancient town …”.

This simple change of tense reflects decades of struggle against the Ilısu Dam, the hydroelectric dam responsible for the drowning of Hasankeyf. The dam has been in development for decades and has met passionate opposition, ranging from the local community and international activists to guerrillas.

Of the many complaints around the creation of Llyn Celyn, the reservoir at the bottom of which the village of Capel Celyn, in the Afon Tryweryn valley, used to reside, was that the flooding would destroy and scatter a precious Welsh speaking community. Which it did.

And the same is true in the case of Hasankeyf, or Heskîf‎, حصن كيفا‎, Հարսնքվ, Κιφας, Cepha, or ܟܐܦܐ. These are the many names of the town in Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Latin, and Syriac. This incredible diversity reflects the rich, 12,000 year history of Hasankeyf. These names contain the many cultures and empires who have made their mark on Hasankeyf. They left many historic monuments and Hasankeyf’s iconic caves which honeycomb the cliffs.

Tragedy

Until recently Hasankeyf was as alive as ever. Prior to the flooding of the town and expulsion of its residents by the Turkish regime, Hasankeyf was home to a harmonious synthesis of Arabic and Kurdish identities, with three languages spoken (including Turkish).

For the stateless Kurds in particular, subject as they have been to systematic oppression by Turkey and the other states which the historical region of Kurdistan overlaps with (Iraq, Iran, and Syria), the loss of a Kurdish speaking community is a tragedy.

The drowning of Hasankeyf is another line on Turkey’s rap sheet of crimes against the Kurds. But this goes even further than just one town, or even just the Kurds.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers

The Ilısu Dam sits on the Tigris river. This river flows from the Turkey’s Taurus Mountains, into Iraq, through major settlements including Mosul and Baghdad, and finally empties into the Persian Gulf.

This geography is important. Iraq needs water. So does Syria. It has the Euphrates river which, on the other side of Mesopotamia (the “land between the rivers”), begins in Turkey’s Armenian Highlands, snakes through the middle of Syria, into Iraq, and meets the Tigris at Al-Qurnah in Iraq, which local folklore holds to be the historical site of the Garden of Eden.

These rivers provide water to vast and incredibly diverse populations across Syria and Iraq. This is the geographical reality which Turkey has used to its advantage.

By controlling the upstream flow of water on the Tigris and Euphrates with dams like the Ilısu Dam, not only has Turkey drowned towns like Hasankeyf – which had the arrogance to sit still in same spot for 12,000 years – but Turkey also controls a vital geopolitical resource: water. Turkey has used this to shape the Middle East and extract favours from other states in the region.

In Iraq, many fear Turkey’s dam will drain the Tigris-Euphrates marshlands (only recently restored after they were emptied by Saddam Hussein) further displacing their inhabitants, the Marsh Arabs. Water is a sword Turkey can hold over Iraq, limiting or increasing the supply as a form of blackmail.

The same goes for the Syrian regime. But Syria has another political force, which is something like a state but not quite: the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

Sanitation

In the vacuum of the Syrian civil war, a Kurdish-led, multi-ethnic coalition of political forces across north and east Syria has built a pluralist, feminist, radical democracy, sometimes referred to by the region’s Kurdish name: Rojava. The Kurds and their allies manage this while they also form the frontline military force against ISIS, including right now holding thousands of ISIS fighters prisoners with basically no help from Western states, even for fighters from those countries.

Turkey despises the Kurds and their pluralist democracy. Kurds living alongside Arabs, Turkmen, Syriacs, Ezidis, and other ethnic minorities, sharing democratic structures with them; a commune-based democracy built on the emancipation of women: all of these things are an affront to the Turkish state’s totalitarian mentality. Turkey dismisses this radical and incredibly successful in democracy as a bastion of terrorists, despite the Kurds repeated calls for dialogue, which Turkey intentionally ignores.

So, Turkey uses water as a weapon. On top of the control it has over the Euphrates, which runs through the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, it has attacked and destroyed vital water infrastructure in the region. On the first day of Turkey’s latest invasion of Northeast Syria, triggered by Trump pulling troops out of the region, Turkey attacked the Alouk water station in Serekaniye, a border town on the Syrian side. Since then the site has been repeatedly taken out of action.

Turkey continues to attack water and electricity infrastructure, (with military equipment potentially originating from the UK), dam rivers, and burn newly plant orchards and other agriculture.

Hundreds of thousands of people are left without safe, reliable drinking water. A tragedy at any time, this crisis is further exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis where access to water is vital for the maintenance of sanitation protocols.

You can’t wash your hands if you don’t have access to water. “Stay alert” in Western Kurdistan means “keep an eye out for drone strikes.”

What to do

Wales knows the power of water. We know how vital it is for life as well as the destruction that can be waged in its name. The people of Hasankeyf should not have been turned out of their homes, just like the people of Capel Celyn should have been able to remain and nurture their precious Welsh speaking community.

The people of Northeast Syria, who want nothing more than for Turkey to just leave their democracy in peace, deserve reliable access to clean water. Despite this dire situation, you can help.

Right now, activists from across the world are trying to raise £100,000 to help the people of Northeast Syria rebuild water infrastructure destroyed by Turkey. You can donate to that fundraiser here and I encourage you to do so.

Beyond this, the campaign calling on people to Boycott Turkey is growing. The UK provides weapons and military equipment to Turkey – some of it potentially produced in Wales. Welsh tourists cross Europe to holiday on Turkey’s beaches. This puts money straight in the pockets of the regime and is used to fund drone strikes and torture chambers used against the Kurds and their allies.

If you want to help the Kurds, don’t holiday in Turkey and don’t buy Turkish products. Beko, the fridge manufacturer, for example, is linked to the Turkish military. A boycott campaign helped bring down South African apartheid and it can bring an end to Turkey’s merciless persecution of ethnic minorities.

Meanwhile, the fundraiser, Water For Rojava, doesn’t have long left. Before submitting my own donation, I thought back to last year when I visited Hasankeyf and saw the rising waters, and the abysmal theatre of the Turkish armed forces who surrounded us by their hundreds with automatic weapons, at one point joking about gunning us down, all to halt our simple protest which was to be nothing more than jumping in the Tigris on a sunny day.

Our histories are very different, but Wales nonetheless has a lot in common with the Kurds and Kurdistan.

When we cofiwch Dryweryn we should also cofiwch Hasankeyf. Not to remember them as historical relics of struggles lost but as living memories which compel us to fight for a better world and make sure that tragedies like these never happen again.

https://nation.cymru/opinion/cofiwch-ha ... ddle-east/
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Re: Kurds are traitors to KURDISTAN giving HASANKEYF to Turk

PostAuthor: Anthea » Sat Jun 27, 2020 12:40 pm

Disappeared in 20 days

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Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers. One of the first places mentioned in the Bible.

The people who lived here 12,000 years back in time learned to dig channels.

Controlled irrigation produced good crops, and modern agriculture was born.

The Stone Age was soon over, now humans could live and live the same place. Until this year.

From that time tourists could visit the oldest parts of the ancient city

About the construction machines that rolled into the city, shops, cafes and homes leveled with the earth, just a week after Turkey's candidate was elected president of Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization.

Now Turkey has dammed the Tigris River, where the historic city is located.

North of the area that was once called Mesopotamia, but which is now flooded. Taken off the map, been replaced with a lake. All this to make a hydroelectric power plant.

The hydroelectric power plant will account for 2 percent of Turkey's power supply.

Turkey has built 585 dams since 2002. Within three years, Turkey's electricity generation of renewable hydropower will be the highest in Europe.

"A wind of peace, brotherhood and prosperity will blow from the dam," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the opening ceremony in May.

A total of 55 villages in the Kurdish-dominated Southeast of Turkey have suffered the same fate. Authorities have forcibly displaced at least 55,000 people. Although Hasankeyf is referred to as one of the world's oldest cities, the cradle of civilization.

Distressed

Only one in five archaeological sites was examined before the water wiped them out. She can't take into care what's happened.

"I am angry, frustrated and despairing. The world community has lost the first traces of humanity," she told NRK.

ARCHAEOLOGIST: Nevin Soyukaya believes that by flooding Hasankeyf, we have lost a lot of knowledge about the history of civilization.

At least 12,000 years old history is lost, she explains

"It is knowledge of the history of civilization that we had not even been able to dig up and get an overview of.

Resistance

Historic mosques, churches, bridges, marble columns and sculptures had given the city a high ranking of Unesco's World Heritage Sites, but Turkish authorities have never filed an application for it.

Several groups and politicians from the region and internationally have fought Hasankeyf's cause. They have written one last desperate letter to, among others, the Turkish authorities and Unesco.

There they claim that Turkey is guilty of two violations of points of the Granada Convention. A convention signed by the Council of Europe member Turkey in 1990.

This is how the narrow valley looked before rocks and saw water destroyed these ancient settlements. The picture is from 2014.

Caves:

A total of 6,000 caves have been flooded. Here people have lived ever since the early Stone Age.

The UN system is also exempt from the letter:

"Unesco's silence around this controversial project is unacceptable. Although Hasankeyf is likely to meet nine out of ten criteria for incorporating unesco's World Heritage Site, the groupings that would save Hasankeyf are writing.

New life in new Hasankeyf

The authorities have built a new Hasankeyf, on safe ground from the water masses. Several of those who have had to move have been given new housing here. Historical mosques and a tomb have also been moved.

These relocated monuments and a new historical museum, according to the authorities, will still make tourists want to visit the area.

The American activist, John Crofoot, has devoted ten years of his life to fighting the flood. Now, at home in Atlanta, he mourns the loss of the ancient city that he had lived for several years.

Crofoot believes the new museum has an overly large Turkish-Ottoman battle side. Several peoples and religions have been left out.

    The museum does not mention Kurds, Armenians, Persians, Arabs, Alevites, Shiite Islam or Christians. During parts of the Ottoman period, more than half of the families in Hasankeyf were Christians, crofoot emphasizes, which also points out that there were at least four churches in the city
Hasankeyf was flooded in just 20 days, amid the corona outbreak. It was very handy for the authorities," Crofoot said.

That way, no one could demonstrate one last time. Nevertheless, he does not blame the authorities for exploiting the corona situation.

"It has rained very much this year, there were very good conditions for filling up the water reservoir," explains Crofoot.

A lost battle

    There have been reports that have concluded that Hasankeyf could be saved if one scaled down the dam; Studies have concluded that in just 60 years, it will not be economically profitable to operate the turbines associated with the dam anymore.
The only thing, which according to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is certain, is that now in excess of three billion crowns annually will flow into the Turkish treasury.

https://www.nrk.no/urix/oldtidsbyen-som ... -20-dager-

Studies have concluded that in just 60 years, it will not be economically profitable to operate the turbines associated with the dam anymore

    12,000 year old Hasankeyf destroyed
    for a hydroelectric dam lasting 60 years
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Re: Kurds are traitors to KURDISTAN giving HASANKEYF to Turk

PostAuthor: Anthea » Fri Jul 03, 2020 10:13 pm

Hasankeyf damages farmers produce
causing economic desperation


Kurdish farmers from the village of Segirka in Batman province have worked around the clock for years, borrowing money from the government and selling their wives’ gold to establish greenhouses. The newly-built dam at Hasankeyf has flooded the area, putting their livelihoods at dire risk.

Image

The Turkish government approved the building of Ilisu Dam at Hasankeyf, on the Tigris river, with the stated aim of generating electricity for the region, creating jobs and boosting the local economy. However, the decision has uprooted thousands of people from more than 200 villages and settlements, as it submerges the affected area a further 15 centimeters per day.

The dam forms part of the far-reaching Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP), the largest and costliest project in Turkey’s history which aims to boost revenue in the poverty-stricken area, but has driven locals away from their livelihoods instead.

Farmers in the Kurdish village of Segirka have depended on selling agricultural produce as their livelihoods for decades. They established some 200 greenhouses over the years, largely planting cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers for the latest harvest.

Due to its proximity to the dam, the rising water levels gradually approached the village starting in late May. By July, it reached the new greenhouses, damaging the produce of more than 100.

Farmer Ishan Sonmez planted 600 tons of cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers this year. After the flooding, he can sell none of it.

“We have worked over the last five years to establish the greenhouses … and invested a huge amount of money in them, but now they have all fallen under water. We are victims!” he told Rudaw.

The government has not sent any teams to estimate the losses or promise compensation.

Some farmers have borrowed large amounts of money from the government, but without selling their vegetables, they cannot pay it now.

“The government has to come here and compensate us so that we can pay our debts. Otherwise, we will be in great loss,” Islam Us told Rudaw.

Weysi Yildirim, another flood victim, said “all our produce is now below water. Had they informed us that there would be water, we would not sell our gold and go into debt.”

Lokman Madakol, another greenhouse owner, says the farmers are helpless now: “we have opened our hands because only God can help us.”

The Kurdish historic town of Hasankeyf has also been submerged by the same dam. Its residents visited the town in late February to bid a painful farewell.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeas ... y/03072020
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Re: Kurds are traitors to KURDISTAN giving HASANKEYF to Turk

PostAuthor: Anthea » Sun Jul 05, 2020 8:17 pm

Ancient Valley Lost to ‘Progress

In his push for economic development, Turkey’s president has flooded the archaeological gem of Hasankeyf and displaced thousands of families

There was something exceptional about Hasankeyf that made visitors fall in love with the town on first sight.

Graced with mosques and shrines, it lay nestled beneath great sandstone cliffs on the banks of the River Tigris. Gardens were filled with figs and pomegranates, and vine-covered teahouses hung over the water.

The golden cliffs, honeycombed with caves, are thought to have been used in Neolithic times. An ancient fortress marked what was once the edge of the Roman Empire. The ruins of a medieval bridge recalled when the town was a wealthy trading center on the Silk Road.

Now it is all lost forever, submerged beneath the rising waters of the Ilisu Dam, the latest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s megaprojects, which flooded 100 miles of the upper Tigris River and its tributaries, including the once-stunning valley.

I visited the area repeatedly with the photographer Mauricio Lima for half a year to witness the disappearance of the valley unfold in slow motion. The steadily expanding reservoir displaced more than 70,000 anguished inhabitants. Unexplored archaeological riches were swallowed up along with farms and homes.

The waters have rendered Hasankeyf an irretrievable relic of the bygone civilizations that had been similarly drawn to the beauty of the valley, carved over millenniums by one of the Middle East’s greatest rivers.

When Mr. Erdogan turned on the first turbine of the hydroelectric dam, celebrating the project’s completion in May, the president had his eye on more immediate concerns, but also on future glories, promising that it would bring peace and prosperity to southeastern Turkey.

“The wind of peace, brotherhood and prosperity that will blow from the Ilisu Dam will be felt in these lands for centuries,” he told the ceremony via video link. The dam would contribute billions to the economy and irrigate thousands of hectares of farmland, he said.

Government officials have emphasized that hydropower offered their greenest option when they decided to push ahead with the dam a dozen years ago, allowing Turkey to reduce its dependence on imported coal and gas.

But many who lost their homes and livelihoods say they were never really consulted. They are bitter and traumatized. Environmentalists and archaeologists, in Turkey and abroad, are angry and frustrated, too, at the loss of the valley and its treasures.

Their efforts to save Hasankeyf collapsed in the face of Mr. Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism. International law, lagging behind the shifting attitudes around climate change and the value of protecting the environment, was inadequate for safeguarding the cultural heritage, they say.

Zeynep Ahunbay, a conservation architect, campaigned for more than a decade to save Hasankeyf, not only for its archaeological gems but also for the value of its ancient natural setting.

“You see this valley, it is so impressive,” Ms. Ahunbay said, describing what it was like to round the hillside and see Hasankeyf come into view. “You see this river cutting the rock and it goes down and down, and in the end you have the citadel of Hasankeyf. It is really marvelous, and nature and man have formed this place.”

“To disturb or change the natural process of the river is also criminal,” she said. “You lose the beauty, you lose history, you lose nature. You are a loser all the time.”

When Mr. Erdogan first announced his determination to build the dam, he championed it not only for the energy it would provide Turkey’s expanding economy but also for the development it would bring to the impoverished and insurgency-riven southeast.

The dam is part of the massive Southeastern Anatolia Project irrigation plan that was begun in the 1980s.

Villages in the valley and along the rim were razed.

The golden cliffs of the valley, honeycombed with caves, had been inhabited since Neolithic times.

When the plan was first conceived in the 1950s there was little thought of its impact on the environment or on those who would be forced to leave. But as Turkey developed democratically, opponents of the dam began organizing.

International activist organizations became involved, too, challenging international investors over concerns about the environmental impact, the loss of cultural heritage and the damage to communities downstream in Iraq and Syria.

Ms. Ahunbay did not oppose the dam itself, but campaigned to preserve Hasankeyf and resisted a plan to move the ancient monuments to higher ground and to entomb one in concrete.

As president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, an international professional association that works to protect cultural heritage sites, she and a group of colleagues took the case to the European Court of Human Rights. They lost in the end because none of the plaintiffs were residents of Hasankeyf.

The protest campaigns had early success in 2009, pushing several European partners to withdraw financing mainly because Turkey did not meet the requirements of social impact assessments.

But Mr. Erdogan was undeterred. He ordered Turkish banks to step in and finance the project instead.

Money seemed no object. The government built two new towns to relocate those displaced, and new highways and bridges to skirt the reservoir. Turkish companies, closely allied to Mr. Erdogan’s government, won the building contracts.

The project had become a moneymaking exercise, a local bureaucrat said, asking that he not be identified by name for fear of reprisals from the government.

“They spent a horrendous amount of money,” said Emin Bulut, a local journalist and activist, who said the bill ran to trillions of lira. “They could have fixed all the problems of the south with that.”

In 2012, government officials arrived to begin evaluating property that would be submerged to compensate those who would be displaced. But the money became a source of resentment, dividing the community, and even families, and raising accusations of corruption. The arguments broke apart any unified opposition to the dam.

“We surrendered when they came to measure the houses,” said Birsen Argun, 44, who together with her husband ran the Hasbahce Hotel, the only hotel in Hasankeyf, set in a garden of pomegranate and walnut trees along the river. “We brought it upon ourselves.”

Her husband tried to persuade his brothers to refuse the money and fight for a bigger payment in the courts but they accepted the payout. People withdrew the money from accounts without telling others, she added.

“We brought it upon ourselves,” said Birsen Argun, who ran Hasankeyf’s only hotel with her husband.

Many of those who did try to organize a protest movement grew up in Hasankeyf, and were even born in the cave homes of the citadel, like Arif Ayhan, 44, who started out selling old coins to tourists and then became a rug dealer.

Politics split the campaign, he said, especially when supporters of the outlawed Kurdish movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, joined the rallies against the dam, chanting slogans and enraging the police.

“This is why we failed,” he said. “We live in the most beautiful place in the world but we could not appreciate the value of this place.”

After years of warnings, the end came suddenly. Last August, the government closed the dam gates and released waters from a reservoir upriver. Families scrambled to move out of villages, abandoning homesteads, selling off livestock and even hastily building new houses and access roads on higher ground.

“We hoped the water would not come,” said Remziye Nas, mother of four, in the village of Bzere, where the water was lapping below her house. “We did not believe it would be flooded.”

In the small town of Temelli, perched above the dam, Hezni Aksu, 60, looked down from his terrace to where his family’s farmhouse and lands were among the first to go under water.

“This land was from our ancestors,” he said bitterly. His son was now an unemployed construction worker. “They made migrants of us.”

The dam disrupted traditional ways of life along the Tigris in Turkey as well as downstream in Iraq and Syria.

In Hasankeyf, under a heavy police presence, bulldozers demolished the old bazaar one weekend last November. As the ceiling caved in and dust fell inside his shop, something snapped inside Mehmet Ali Aslankilic. With a shout he set fire to his belongings in a lone, anguished protest.

“It was my uncle’s shop. I had been working there since I was a child,” he said afterward. “Burning my shop was the only way I could deal with this.”

A few doors down, Mehmet Nuri Aydin, 42, packed his woven rugs of long sheep’s wool into sacks. “We don’t want to go but we have to,” he said, adding that few shopkeepers could afford the rents in the new town.

There was no wider demonstration. Since a failed coup in 2016, Turkey has banned all protests, so the campaign to save Hasankeyf had long since petered out. Activists were even careful about what they posted on social media. Government officials kept photographers away.

With the bazaar demolished, families started to load furniture onto trucks and move to specially built homes in the new town. They gathered up the last pomegranates from the trees and piles of firewood, some even wrenching off doors and window frames from their old homes.

“Our hearts are burning,” said Celal Ozbey, a retired civil servant as his wife and sons carried out tables and bundles from the house. They had been assigned a house in the new town but he was not sure they would stay, or if economic life would revive. “Time will tell,” he said.

Fatime Salkan had refused to leave the low-pitched stone house that belonged to her parents, overlooking the 15th century El-Rizk mosque. Officials warned her to move but she was among several dozen single people who, under a quirk of Turkish law, was not considered eligible for a new home.

“They told me to leave many times,” she told me last November. “If an engineer comes, I will say I am going to swim.”

She watched from her terrace in December when Dutch engineers lifted the last of the medieval monuments, the 1,700-ton El-Rizk mosque with its intricately carved portal, onto wheels and transported it across the river.

They deposited it on a man-made hill beside the new town, where the government has assembled various salvaged monuments and built a modern replica of the medieval bridge. They look out of place on the bare hillside, which will be made into a new archaeological park.

Archaeologists insist that monuments ideally should be preserved in their place, but concede that if there is no other option, it is better to save them somehow. For the purists, though, the new Hasankeyf is artificial and charmless.

“The real history is down there and we are drowning it,” said Zulku Emer, 41, a master craftsman who was laying a cobbled street beside the new park. “That’s the Turkish way. We ruin something and then try and live in it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/worl ... p9ZNdyflDk
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Re: Kurds are traitors to KURDISTAN giving HASANKEYF to Turk

PostAuthor: Anthea » Mon Jul 06, 2020 10:31 pm

An ancient valley lost to progress

There was something exceptional about Hasankeyf that made visitors fall in love with the town on first sight

Graced with mosques and shrines, it lay nestled beneath great sandstone cliffs on the banks of the Tigris River. Gardens were filled with figs and pomegranates, and vine-covered teahouses hung over the water.

The golden cliffs, honeycombed with caves, are thought to have been used in Neolithic times. An ancient fortress marked what was once the edge of the Roman Empire. The ruins of a medieval bridge recalled when the town was a wealthy trading centre on the Silk Road.

Now it is all lost forever, submerged beneath the rising waters of the Ilisu Dam, the latest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s megaprojects, which flooded 100 miles of the upper Tigris River and its tributaries, including the once-stunning valley.

I visited the area repeatedly with photographer Mauricio Lima for half a year to witness the disappearance of the valley unfold in slow motion. The steadily expanding reservoir displaced more than 70,000 anguished inhabitants. Unexplored archaeological riches were swallowed up along with farms and homes.

The waters have rendered Hasankeyf an irretrievable relic of the bygone civilisations that had been similarly drawn to the beauty of the valley, carved over millenniums by one of the Middle East’s greatest rivers.

When Erdogan turned on the first turbine of the hydroelectric dam, celebrating the project’s completion in May, the president had his eye on more immediate concerns but also on future glories, promising that it would bring peace and prosperity to southeastern Turkey.

“The wind of peace, brotherhood and prosperity that will blow from the Ilisu Dam will be felt in these lands for centuries,” he told the ceremony via video link.

A resident walks across a bridge to the old town of Hasankeyf, Turkey, partially submerged by the Tigris River, Feb 20, 2020. Mauricio Lima/The New York Times

A resident walks across a bridge to the old town of Hasankeyf, Turkey, partially submerged by the Tigris River, Feb 20, 2020. Mauricio Lima/The New York Times

The dam would contribute billions to the economy and irrigate thousands of hectares of farmland, he said.

Government officials have emphasised that hydropower offered their greenest option when they decided to push ahead with the dam a dozen years ago, allowing Turkey to reduce its dependence on imported coal and gas.

But many who lost their homes and livelihoods say they were never really consulted. They are bitter and traumatised. Environmentalists and archaeologists, in Turkey and abroad, are angry and frustrated, too, at the loss of the valley and its treasures.

Their efforts to save Hasankeyf collapsed in the face of Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism. International law, lagging behind the shifting attitudes around climate change and the value of protecting the environment, was inadequate for safeguarding the cultural heritage, they say.

Zeynep Ahunbay, a conservation architect, campaigned for more than a decade to save Hasankeyf, not only for its archaeological gems but also for the value of its ancient natural setting.

“You see this valley, it is so impressive,” Ahunbay said, describing what it was like to round the hillside and see Hasankeyf come into view. “You see this river cutting the rock and it goes down and down, and in the end you have the citadel of Hasankeyf. It is really marvelous, and nature and man have formed this place.”

“To disturb or change the natural process of the river is also criminal,” she said. “You lose the beauty, you lose history, you lose nature. You are a loser all the time.”

When Erdogan first announced his determination to build the dam, he championed it not only for the energy it would provide Turkey’s expanding economy but also for the development it would bring to the impoverished and insurgency-riven southeast.

The dam is part of the massive Southeastern Anatolia Project irrigation plan that was begun in the 1980s.

When the plan was first conceived in the 1950s, there was little thought of its impact on the environment or on those who would be forced to leave. But as Turkey developed democratically, opponents of the dam began organising.

International activist organisations became involved, too, challenging international investors over concerns about the environmental impact, the loss of cultural heritage and the damage to communities downstream in Iraq and Syria.

Ahunbay did not oppose the dam itself but campaigned to preserve Hasankeyf and resisted a plan to move the ancient monuments to higher ground and to entomb one in concrete.

As president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, an international professional association that works to protect cultural heritage sites, she and a group of colleagues took the case to the European Court of Human Rights. They lost in the end because none of the plaintiffs were residents of Hasankeyf.

The rising waters of the Tigris River floods the old town of Hasankeyf, Turkey, with he new town in the background, Feb 23, 2020. Mauricio Lima/The New York Times

The rising waters of the Tigris River floods the old town of Hasankeyf, Turkey, with he new town in the background, Feb 23, 2020. Mauricio Lima/The New York Times

The protest campaigns had early success in 2009, pushing several European partners to withdraw financing mainly because Turkey did not meet the requirements of social impact assessments.

But Erdogan was undeterred. He ordered Turkish banks to step in and finance the project instead.

Money seemed no object. The government built two new towns to relocate those displaced, and new highways and bridges to skirt the reservoir. Turkish companies, closely allied to Erdogan’s government, won the building contracts.

The project had become a moneymaking exercise, a local bureaucrat said, asking that he not be identified by name for fear of reprisals from the government.

“They spent a horrendous amount of money,” said Emin Bulut, a local journalist and activist, who said the bill ran to trillions of lira. “They could have fixed all the problems of the south with that.”

In 2012, government officials arrived to begin evaluating property that would be submerged to compensate those who would be displaced. But the money became a source of resentment, dividing the community, and even families, and raising accusations of corruption. The arguments broke apart any unified opposition to the dam.

“We surrendered when they came to measure the houses,” said Birsen Argun, 44, who together with her husband ran the Hasbahce Hotel, the only hotel in Hasankeyf, set in a garden of pomegranate and walnut trees along the river. “We brought it upon ourselves.”

Her husband tried to persuade his brothers to refuse the money and fight for a bigger payment in the courts, but they accepted the payout. People withdrew the money from accounts without telling others, she added.

Many of those who did try to organise a protest movement grew up in Hasankeyf and were even born in the cave homes of the citadel, like Arif Ayhan, 44, who started out selling old coins to tourists and then became a rug dealer.

Politics split the campaign, he said, especially when supporters of the outlawed Kurdish movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, joined the rallies against the dam, chanting slogans and enraging police.

“This is why we failed,” he said. “We live in the most beautiful place in the world, but we could not appreciate the value of this place.”

After years of warnings, the end came suddenly. In August, the government closed the dam gates and released waters from a reservoir upriver. Families scrambled to move out of villages, abandoning homesteads, selling off livestock and even hastily building new houses and access roads on higher ground.

“We hoped the water would not come,” said Remziye Nas, mother of four, in the village of Bzere, where the water was lapping below her house. “We did not believe it would be flooded.”

In the small town of Temelli, perched above the dam, Hezni Aksu, 60, looked down from his terrace to where his family’s farmhouse and lands were among the first to go under water.

“This land was from our ancestors,” he said bitterly. His son was now an unemployed construction worker. “They made migrants of us.”

In Hasankeyf, under a heavy police presence, bulldozers demolished the old bazaar one weekend in November. As the ceiling caved in and dust fell inside his shop, something snapped inside Mehmet Ali Aslankilic. With a shout he set fire to his belongings in a lone, anguished protest.

“It was my uncle’s shop. I had been working there since I was a child,” he said afterward. “Burning my shop was the only way I could deal with this.”

A few doors down, Mehmet Nuri Aydin, 42, packed his woven rugs of long sheep’s wool into sacks.

“We don’t want to go but we have to,” he said, adding that few shopkeepers could afford the rents in the new town.

There was no wider demonstration. Since a failed coup in 2016, Turkey has banned all protests, so the campaign to save Hasankeyf had long since petered out. Activists were even careful about what they posted on social media. Government officials kept photographers away.

With the bazaar demolished, families started to load furniture onto trucks and move to specially built homes in the new town. They gathered up the last pomegranates from the trees and piles of firewood, some even wrenching off doors and window frames from their old homes.

“Our hearts are burning,” Celal Ozbey, a retired civil servant, said as his wife and sons carried out tables and bundles from the house.

They had been assigned a house in the new town, but he was not sure they would stay, or if economic life would revive.

“Time will tell,” he said.

Fatime Salkan had refused to leave the low-pitched stone house that belonged to her parents, overlooking the 15th-century El-Rizk mosque. Officials warned her to move, but she was among several dozen single people who, under a quirk of Turkish law, were not considered eligible for a new home.

“They told me to leave many times,” she told me in November. “If an engineer comes, I will say I am going to swim.”

She watched from her terrace in December when Dutch engineers lifted the last of the medieval monuments, the 1,700-ton El-Rizk mosque with its intricately carved portal, onto wheels and transported it across the river.

They deposited it on a man-made hill beside the new town, where the government has assembled various salvaged monuments and built a modern replica of the medieval bridge. They look out of place on the bare hillside, which will be made into a new archaeological park.

Archaeologists insist that monuments ideally should be preserved in their place but concede that if there is no other option, it is better to save them somehow. For the purists, though, the new Hasankeyf is artificial and charmless.

“The real history is down there, and we are drowning it,” said Zulku Emer, 41, a master craftsman who was laying a cobbled street beside the new park. “That’s the Turkish way. We ruin something and then try and live in it.”
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Re: Kurds are traitors to KURDISTAN giving HASANKEYF to Turk

PostAuthor: Anthea » Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:09 am

There was only one Hasankeyf
and we have lost it


The state-run Anadolu Agency (AA) has received criticism over a report titled, "Hasankeyf waits for its guests with its new face," referring to what has remained of the ancient city after it was submerged in the water because of Ilısu Dam, which has become operational in late 2019

Mehmet Kızmaz, a journalist and a member of the Hasankeyf Coordination, which has been struggling for the valley, said, "There was only one Hasankeyf and we have lost it."

    Here are two photos of Hasankeyf; one before Turkish government's project the other one is from shameful project of government.

    Click on photos to enlarge:
    1229

    1230

    Ahh my beautiful! they are the enemy of history, nature, and beautiful people. pic.twitter.com/Izo8XX38aB
    — Zozan Yasar (@zozanyasar) July 7, 2020
He also compared AA's story to that of The New York Times, which was titled, "An ancient valley lost to 'progress'."

AA's report was about the transfer of some historical buildings after Hasankeyf was submerged.

"Their efforts to save Hasankeyf collapsed in the face of Mr. Erdogan's increasing authoritarianism," the story said.

"When we compare the two reports, we see how insensitive Turkey's media is," he said, adding that the world was more interested in what happens than the press in Turkey.

"I wonder if AA can see Hasankeyf in the photographs it shared? There is not even a small trace from the old Hasankeyf," said Kızmaz.

"It is something like you kill someone and then false reports are about it. After this, talking is also ineffective. We have lost Hasankeyf. No matter how we self-criticize, think, we have lost it. There was only one Hasankeyf and we have lost it.

"It is very unreasonable to continue a project that was evaluated in 1955 in 2020. When I saw the photographs, I felt I was being buried. This image is nothing but pain sank in the water. Not only history but also the memory has been destroyed." (AÖ/VK)

http://bianet.org/english/society/22702 ... ve-lost-it
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Re: There was only one Hasankeyf and Kurds let it be destroy

PostAuthor: Anthea » Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:26 pm

No victims in Ilısu dam project
that displaced thousands


Turkey's Agriculture and Forestry Ministry has said there are no victims of a dam project in the southeastern province of Batman, which has partially submerged the ancient town of Hasankeyf and forced thousands of families to evacuate the region

The Ilısu Dam has left parts of the 12,000-year-old town of Hasankeyf under water and forced thousands of families to evacuate their homes, some of whom have qualifying for government housing nearby. The town’s ancient remains have been transported to a nearby plane for display.

“Following meticulous efforts, the Batman Governor’s Office provided rent assistance to families in need and further resettled families in new public housing, thereby preventing any victimisation,” Diken news site on Wednesday quoted Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli as saying.

“In order not to aggrieve the citizens of Hasankeyf, the electricity in the town was cut off after all of the citizens were evacuated,’’ Pakdemirli said.

Locals have voiced criticism over the restrictive criteria for qualifying for public housing, which was denied to civil servants. Moreover, only homeowners living in the area between 2013 and 2016 were found eligible, they said.

“In order for citizens to be legally eligible (for public housing), they have to be residents of the downtown district,” Pakdemirli said.

Furthermore, those who were not part of a family dwelling or without registered residence in the town were denied home ownership, he added.

Construction on the Ilısu Dam project began in 2006 and has been steeped in controversy, with environmental groups voicing concerns about the displacement of local residents and the impact on Hasankeyf and the region’s valuable biodiversity.

https://ahvalnews.com/ilisu-dam/no-vict ... istry-says
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Re: There was only one Hasankeyf and Kurds let it be destroy

PostAuthor: Anthea » Mon Jul 13, 2020 12:17 am

Turkey starts operating 3rd turbine

Turkey on Sunday launched the third turbine at the Ilısu Dam along the Tigris River at Hasankeyf

Turkey's fourth-largest dam, Ilısu will contribute TL 2.8 billion ($412 million) to the Turkish economy annually and is expected to generate 4.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.

Since the launch of the first of the six power turbines on May 19, the dam has generated 200 million kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Haluk Koç, district governor of Hasankeyf, where the dam is located, said the historical artifacts that had to be relocated in Hasankeyf due to dam construction will be open to the public soon after renovation work is completed.

Koç said a project to be awarded by the State Hydraulic Works (DSI) would prepare a new landscape for all relocated historical structures, from an 800-year-old bathhouse to an Ayyubid mosque, to be exhibited in the new Hasankeyf, to be built nearby, on higher ground.

He said the project is expected to be finalized at the end of 2021.

Ilısu, a project carried out within the framework of the Southeast Anatolian Project (GAP) to boost development in the region, is by volume the second-largest dam in Turkey after the Atatürk Dam, whose reservoir has a capacity of 48 billion cubic meters of water and was completed in 1992.

The Ilısu Dam saw an estimated investment cost of TL 12 billion.

According to an earlier statement by Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli, Turkey’s 587 hydroelectric power plants, all of which have come into service in the last 18 years, have generated 895 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, contributing nearly TL 233 billion to the country’s economy.

The energy generated at Turkey's three largest hydroelectric power plants – the Atatürk, Karakaya and Keban dams – increased by 106% in 2019 compared with the previous year, and the three have contributed over TL 400 billion to the Turkish economy since their inaugurations, previous data by the DSI showed.

The Atatürk Dam alone has contributed more than TL 150 billion to the Turkish economy over 26 years, according to 2019 data, while the Karakaya Dam has generated TL 93.8 billion for the economy since its inauguration. The third-largest hydroelectric power plant, Keban Dam, contributed TL 157.3 billion in over 45 years.

https://www.dailysabah.com/business/ene ... -ilisu-dam
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Re: There was only one Hasankeyf and Kurds let it be destroy

PostAuthor: Anthea » Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:26 am

River water level
halves as dam fills


The famous Tigris River is flowing at lower than usual levels in Iraq

Turkey, the upstream country, began filling the Ilisu dam a year ago. Tigris river levels at the Iraq-Turkey border have halved, say water experts.

"The water level on the Tigris River was around 600 cubic metres per second. But after the building of Ilisu system (dam) it became around 300 to 320 cubic metres per second," says Ramadan Hamza, a senior expert on water strategies and policies in the University of Dohuk.

Hamza says this risks leading to drought in Dohuk, Mosul, Salahaddin, Baghdad and al-Kut.

Hezha Abdulwahed, the director of the water department in Dohuk, notes that river levels have fallen despite an increase in rainfall.

"There is a huge difference (in water levels) and the drop is about 8 billion cubic metres of water in April and May compared to the same periods last year," he says.

The Ilusu dam has the capacity to store 10 billion cubic metres in its reservoir, according to Abdulwahed.

If Iraq fails to negotiate with Turkey over its share of the river, the upstream country will have full control of the Tigris by 2022, Hamza adds.

Turkey has also built dams along the Euphrates river, heavily impacting downstream Syria. The Kurdish-led authorities in northeast Syria have accused Ankara of deliberately withholding water from the areas it controls, as have international human rights organisations.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/130720201
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