Ilisu Dam Campaign
Box 210
266 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7DL
The Rt. Hon. Stephen Byers MP,
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry,
Department of Trade and Industry
1 Victoria Street
London SW1H 0ET
23rd October 2000
Dear Secretary of State,
Preliminary Report of Fact Finding Mission on the Ilisu Dam
Please find attached the preliminary report of an international Fact Finding Mission of Non-Governmental Organisations from the United Kingdom, the USA, Germany and Italy which visited the Ilisu area from the 9th-16th October 2000. The Fact Finding Mission was organised by the Kurdish Human Rights Project and The Ilisu Dam Campaign. The NGOs represented on the Fact Finding Mission were, in alphabetical order: Campaign "An Eye on Sace" (Italy), The Corner House (UK), Kurdish Human Rights Project (UK), Pacific Environment Research Centre (USA), World Economy, Ecology and Development (Germany).
The purpose of the Mission was to assess the progress of the Turkish government in meeting the four conditions that the UK government and other governments have said must be satisfied in order for the project to obtain export credit support.
The Mission met with affected people, prominent municipal officials, lawyers, and local professional associations relevant to the project. Throughout its visit, the Mission was followed by state security police, who also sat in on one interview uninvited.
The Mission confirms earlier concerns that:
- Conditions in the region make a fair and just resettlement to international standards unattainable;
- Well-documented failures of past and current resettlement projects in Turkey, acknowledged by the Turkish government, have still to be addressed in any substantive way;
- Doubts still exist as to the true number of people who would be potentially affected;
- Consultation with the affected people in the Ilisu area has been piecemeal, inadequate, biased in its format and constrained by an air of intimidation. Some key consultations which the Turkish government apparently claims to have taken place have in reality not occurred;
- Host communities have not been asked to draw up resettlement plans and their budgetary requirements have not been assessed, in contravention of World Bank standards;
- The adequacy of the socio-economic surveys required to meet international standards has been questioned;
- Lack of capacity and institutional fragmentation render a coherent resettlement programme unachievable. Major institutional reforms will be necessary before there can be any confidence that resettlement will be carried out to international standards. There is also a need to overhaul existing compensation procedures;
- Planned sewage treatment facilities in upstream towns are inadequate to ensure water quality in the reservoir area, either because they will not cover the entire population or because they are still at the feasibility stage;
- The downstream impacts of Ilisu may be underestimated because no comprehensive analysis has been undertaken of the cumulative impacts of both Ilisu and its companion downstream dam at Cizre. The two projects are interdependent but have been wrongly represented as separate and unconnected;
- Time and financial pressures on investigations and salvage of the archaeological wealth of the affected area render such rescue efforts reckless, haphazard and contrived. More important, efforts to salvage archaeological resources are limited to artefacts and cannot extend to the thousands of caves in the area, even though the cave civilisation is the essence of the irreplaceable treasure that is Hasankeyf.
The Mission concludes that the four conditions imposed by the export credit agencies (ECAs) have yet to be met – and that the prospect that they will be met in the near future is remote.
The Mission therefore recommends that the UK and other governments reject export credit support for the project.
I hope that the report is helpful in your deliberations on the project.
Yours sincerely
Kate Geary
Campaign Co-ordinator
