water wars come to a boil in Turkey

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/johnston03272009.html


Pulse of the Planet
Water Culture Wars


-snip-

I am an environmental anthropologist who traveled to Istanbul as part of a group of people invited to speak on water and cultural diversity in sessions that took place late in the week, on Friday and Saturday. These were the only sessions in the entire forum that, in their original inception, allowed an explicit focus on the relationship between the development and management of water and the status and conditions of culturally diverse people. A threatening topic in a country where critics protest, and a former Turkish President proudly acknowledged, water development is used as a means to diffuse potential conflict by displacing cultural minorities and drowning contested territory.

I arrived here on a Monday to the news that two friends from International Rivers were arrested at the opening session of the Forum. They unfurled a protest banner inside the conference that said “No risky dams” and chanted this slogan five times, a protest that involved all of a minute before they were pulled out, and arrested. The next day they were given the option of a minimum one-year sentence in prison or deportation. Their crime? Attempting to influence public option.

A few days later, at a meeting of environmental and human rights activists, I met one of the 25 people arrested in the public protest of the opening ceremonies outside the forum, a Turkish citizen who was hit with tear gas and water cannons and now faces prosecution on two counts. His crime? Unlawful public protest and failure to comply with orders from a police officer.

-snip-

I was told to take care. The police were everywhere, with undercover and uniformed security in every corridor and at every session. Using water, dams, and genocide in the same sentence, in public, was not tolerated here in Turkey, where dam development on the Euphrates and Tigris river basin will drown ancient cities, flood the biblical Garden of Eden, and forcibly displace tens of thousands of Kurds without compensation from the heart of a contested Kurdistan. I appreciated the caution, and noted that, truth be told, such intolerance was not unique to Turkey.

-long snip-

The power struggles over words in last week’s World Water Forum are definitive, and left unchallenged, suggest a world of trouble, in the years to come.
----------------------------------


looks like Turkey isn't as civilized as I thought.

[Kali]

1. nah - that kind of shit is the hallmark of "civilization"