Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi Research Articles

GAP BÖLGESİ NDE TOPLUMSAL VE KÜLTÜREL DÖNÜŞÜM(LER): ZAMANIN DÜZLEMİNDE DEĞİŞEN KENTSEL VE MEKÂNSAL YAPININ SERENCAMI

The inequality in income distribution, cultural degeneration, housing, training, health and forced emigration from rural areas to cities existing in the edge of social layers take important place in the focus of the spiral revealing urban/urbanization and settlement problems in the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP- Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi) Region. While the facts such as social inequality/exclusion, terror and sheltering are reversing the urbanization processes in the context of the problems being deterministic on the generality of the region’s cities, the foresights set forth for rural and urban life together with the GAP have become wide of the mark. The fact that the targets foreseen for settlement and urban policies in the regional plane are not long lived due to ongoing problems reveals a strong side of external factors in the process of taking healthy decision of social internal dynamics. The “inhibitions” (violence and social exclusion) which are difficult to be envisaged within sustainable country policies may bring out the outbreak of new problems in attaining the targets. In this context, the fact that regional development polices tried to be constructed over limited natural resources or researches determining the concentration of contradictions in this field take shape around an arrangement that may accommodate to the spirit of the time and/or social transformations at a sufficient level comes out a necessity.

The Impact of Hydro-Politics on the Relations of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria

This article examines the impact of water on the relationships between Turkey and its downstream riparian states, Syria and Iraq. This article defines water resources in international standards and examines the historical relationships between the three states, which have been complicated by the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP). Examining the history of Turco-Iraqi and Turco-Syrian relations, this article shows that GAP, though a point of contention, has not been the principal factor governing the relations between the three countries.Water is a basic need for all living things. Water not only sustains life, but is also important for agriculture, industry, and every human endeavor. Given its importance, its scarcity can complicate the relationship between states that must obtain this com- modity from a shared source. While water is a political and diplomatic issue in every region of the world, there is no other region where the lack of water resources has frustrated the foreign policy designs of states more than in the Middle East. A major source of water in Turkey comes from the two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, which descend from the highlands of the southeast, and irrigated the region known to historians as the Fertile Crescent. The issue of ownership of the waters from the Tigris and Euphrates river basins has linked Turkey, Syria, and Iraq in contentious relation- ships in efforts for each actor to maximize their access to water.Scholars have focused on the domestic implications of the Southeastern Anatolia Project (known in Turkish as GUneydogu Anadolu Projesi, hereafter GAP), the dangers that it poses to Kurdish identity and culture, the potential environmental devastation the project could cause, and the success, or lack thereof, of GAP in achieving its goals. The purpose of this article is to define the complications that have arisen between Turkey and Syria, and Turkey and Iraq through GAP's development.The first section will examine the history of water conflicts as well as water in international law and will provide a perspective on each of the riparian states' concepts of their rights pertaining to the waters in question. By identifying the forms of resource scarcity and the classification of rivers, this article will explain how each actor has used existing international law to support their claims to the usage of the Tigris and Euphra- tes. This article will also analyze how past conflicts over water have failed to be resolved through international arbitration and trilateral negotiations, highlighting the importance of bilateral negotiations between Turkey and the two downstream riparian states.The next section will provide a brief history of GAP and will outline the stated goals of the Turkish government. The modern Turkish state has attempted to harness the great potential of the Tigris and Euphrates through developmental projects, includ- ing GAR The stated goals of GAP are to harness the power of the rivers to provide hy- droelectricity for Turkey, to significantly expand the agricultural land under cultivation, and to increase the productivity and prosperity of the southeastern Anatolian region.1 In practice, however, GAP has been shown to be a domestic sociopolitical project on the part of the Turkish state to deal with and pacify the marginalized, largely Kurdish region. The southeast has lagged behind the rest of the country in social and economic development, as statistics will illustrate.Three sections will then review the trilateral water agreements that exist between the three riparian states, the Turco-Syrian relationship, and the Turco-Iraqi relationship. Trilateral negotiations began in the 1960s and culminated in the 1987 agreement that stipulated a total amount of 500 cubic meters per second would flow out of Turkey for Syrian and Iraqi consumption. However, since the signing of the agreement, Turkey has unilaterally altered the flow of water, often without warning, which has caused separate rifts with both Syria and Iraq, resulting in the increased importance of bilateral relation- ships between each and Turkey. …

The struggle over Turkey’s Ilısu Dam: domestic and international security linkages

While on the surface the Turkish state appears to have asymmetrical power vis-a-vis downstreamers and local societal opponents, and therefore, the ability to shape basin politics, domestic, basin and international protest over the ‘securitised’ Ilisu Dam in Turkey proved more decisive in that respect. A cornerstone of the GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi, Southeast Anatolia Project) multi-dam project to harness the water from the Euphrates and Tigris, the dam project elicited successful resistance from Turkey’s downstream neighbours, social and environmental NGOs and professionals targeting the international donors and contractors. On the basis of document research and interviews, this article investigates which factors opened up the space for politicising the project, and how this politicisation played out in both the domestic and international domain. The link between the securitised (where water is almost by default a security issue) and non-securitised spheres of hydropolitical decision-making (where it is not) proved crucial to the success of the anti-dam opposition.

Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) of Turkey and Regional Development Applications

Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP: Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi in Turkish) is the largest regional development project in Turkey, and also one of the major projects in the world. There are 13 major projects in the lower Euphrates and Tigris basins that consist of dam's hydropower plants and irrigation schemes and accompanying growth of agriculture, transportation, industry, telecommunications, health and education sectors and services in the region. A total of 22 dams and 19 hydropower plants are to be constructed by DSI. After completion of the project, 1.7 million hectares of land will be irrigated and the ratio of irrigated land to the total GAP area will increase from 2.9 percent to 22.8 percent while that for rain-fed agriculture will decrease from 34.3 percent to 7 percent. The GAP area is bigger than Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland and Luxembourg.

A cross-cultural material development project to train Turkish development personnel in the Southeastern Anatolia Regional Development Project (GAP)

The southeastern region of Turkey has been undergoing extensive water and human development efforts since the 1970s through the Southeastern Anatolia Regional Development Project, known worldwide by its Turkish acronym—GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi). This project has its goal the building of 22 dams along the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys that will provide 22% of the nation's hydroelectric power and irrigate 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) of land. The region contains some of Turkey's greatest cultural and social diversity, and is home to significant populations of Turkish nationals of Kurdish and Arabic heritage. Considerable concern exists among the GAP Administration that Turkish development personnel, who, for the most part, are urban-educated in the cities of Ankara or Istanbul and find themselves assigned to work in the southeastern region, lack sensitivity and knowledge about issues related to cross-cultural communication and interaction. An established Memorandum of Understanding between the GAP Administration and Kent State University led to an invitation to provide training in intercultural communication, with the goal of developing training materials designed for use within the region. This article documents the collaborative undertakings that occurred between 2001 and 2002 that included initial training of GAP employees, joint material development based on the culture general assimilator (Cushner and Brislin, 1996), a concurrent training of trainers effort, application of the developed materials by trained GAP employees supported by a grant from the British Embassy, and evaluation of the impact of training by an external agency.

Projet GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi) Anatolie du sud-est (Turquie)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeThe GAP Project (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi) in Turkey is the most important regional development project in the world. It concerns the catchments of Euphrate and Tigre rivers. The total cost of theinfrastructures is estimated at U.S. $ 32 billions, with 22 dams (the largest one is ATATURK dam - 48,7 billions m3 and 2400 MW - in operation since 1993) and 19 hydropower stations. 1,78 million hectares will be irrigated. With the GAP Project, Turkey will increase its power production by 35% and its irrigated area by more than 50%. For Turkey this project is politically important, as the concerned area has a majority of Kurd population. But it is also a cause of tension in the Middle East, where water is a disputed resource, between Turkey and Syria and Irak.