One area where both the Turkish state and international capital have shown they have not changed is on the environment.
Deals with Swiss, Austrian German companies, covered with government export credit guarantees, seem to be going ahead to finance the first stage of the notorious Ilisu Dam which will displace 70,000 or so Kurdish people and drown the beautiful and historic city of Hasankeyf, an ancient city in the Kurdish area of and
with flooding and destruction because of the determination of the Turkish state to destroy non-Turkish heritage and the determination of certain greedy European governments and businesses to make money out of environmental destruction.
Pened Munzur. For further Hasankeyf is imminently threatened
already has. entirely ment. off their land with trivial compensation. Local people have been in the forefront of opposition to the dams, and will continue to resis, as will those living in the area of similarly threatAt present the main European campaign is in Germany and Austria.
information go www.weed-online.org/ilisu and www.hasankeyfgirisimi.com
meanwhile has such a drought this summer that it cannot even fill the hydro-electric dams it
People in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, have just spent 10 days almost
without running water because of drought and mismanageancient partly pre-Islamic religious practices) area in Northern Iraq in August in which upwards of 500 poor villagers were killed.
The US have predictably blamed Al-Qaida - though of course using the name raises more questions than it answers.
The threats from Turkey have been accompanied by repeated calls on the US to deal with PKK forces in Northern Iraq, so far with little result, and repeated threats to invade Northern
Meanwhile various types of economic and intelligence warfare at least are and other foreign policy matters from a longer term perspective.
As far as domestic policy and the Kurds and other oppositionists are concerned, the methods of the Turkish state have not fundamentally changed. It is true that for the last few years the Kurds have been allowed to celebrate Newroz relatively unhindered in some places in Turkey: Amed (Diyarbakir) is clearly meant to be a show-case, for example, in that a big gathering out of town is now permitted on March 21.
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Activists are routinely persecuted all over Turkey, including Diyarbakir, and state-sponsored assassination of ГОЛА