TURKEY: With water policy now a matter of national security, analysts put the decision to build down to fears over water shortages, writes Nicholas Birch in Hasankeyf
Locals in the southeastern Turkish town of Hasankeyf say you can see nine civilisations from the cliff-top fort above the river Tigris.
The cave dwellings opposite are neolithic. The fort itself is Byzantine. Eighty metres below on the valley floor, an imposing tomb commemorates a 16th century prince who picked the wrong side in wars between the Ottoman and Persian empires.
If Turkey's government gets its way, much of this will be gone within a decade, covered by waters trapped behind what will be the country's biggest hydroelectric dam, Ilisu.
It's a prospect that didn't even occur to Abdusselam Ulucam, the archeologist who took charge of the Hasankeyf excavations last spring.
"Why else do you think we opted to start on the only part of the site that won't be affected by the lake," he said, standing in the fort's newly excavated barrack building.
He wasn't the only one taken by surprise. Though plans for the Ilisu dam date back to the early 1980s, many assumed the project had died in 2001 when international lobbying broke up a consortium headed by UK construction firm Balfour Beatty.The present Turkish government's early promises to save Hasankeyf only strengthened that belief. But it changed its mind last summer, giving a new Turkish, German, Austrian and Swiss consortium the nod to seek international credits.
Most analysts put the U-turn down to growing Turkish fears over future water shortages. A United Nations report last year warned that Turkey risks being water-poor by 2025.
The threat spurred Turkey's senior politicians and generals - at a bi-monthly meeting last October - to label water policy a matter of national security.
They also urged the rapid completion of the $30 billion-plus (€23.78 billion-plus) Southeast Anatolian Project, or Gap, Turkey's grandiose scheme to create a regional breadbasket by damming the Euphrates and Tigris.
Ercan Ayboga of the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive thinks Turkey's European Union accession also played a part in the decision.
"EU regulations on major construction projects are stricter than Turkey's," he says, "so Turkey would do well to build its dams quick".
Aware of precedent, the new consortium has moved rapidly to defuse potential protests. Its 1,500-page environmental assessment report was in print before the end of last year.
It's even proposed moving Hasankeyf's better-known buildings to a new theme park on the edge of the projected lake.
The plan is rubbished by experts. "Hasankeyf is not Abu Simbel," says Abdusselam Ulucam, referring to the the massive temple saved from Egypt's Aswan Dam.
"Try to move the rubble and lime mortar they used in construction here, and it'll crumble to dust." Other Turkish archaeologists have applied to the European Court of Human Rights to block the dam's construction.
Among the minimum 55,000 locals due to be displaced by the lake, however, attitudes are more ambiguous. An ethnic Arab like most of Hasankeyf's 5,000 inhabitants, Abdullah Kandemir has spent the past decade labouring on archaeological digs and has no desire to see such riches buried for ever.
But talk of his town being transformed into a major tourist centre irks him. "How are we supposed to build hotels and restaurants to attract visitors when we're not even allowed to enlarge our own houses?" he asks, referring to stringent conservation laws imposed on Hasankeyf in 1978.
In the villages strung out along the Tigris valley, fatalism is widespread. "We don't want to move, but who are we to stop the state," says Kesmekopru farmer Cemal Kaya.
Unsurprisingly, in a region marked by high unemployment, others respond positively to government assurances of work building the dam and financial compensation for lost land.
But analysts say such optimism risks being misplaced, particularly if compensation at Ilisu is based on land-ownership as it was with other southeastern Turkish dams.
According to a local NGO's recent survey of the area to be affected by Ilisu, less than 5 per cent of farmers own over 1,000 hectares (2,471 acres). More than 50 per cent have no land at all.
"Gap has made the rich richer and the poor poorer," says local newspaper editor Arif Arslan. "Ilisu will be no different from anywhere else." It's a sentiment shared by Hatun Bayazit and her new neighbours. Until 2002, when the waters of the Malabade dam rose to engulf it, they tilled land 100km (62 miles) north of Hasankeyf.
Now they live in tatty government tower blocks on a barren hill outside the regional capital Batman.
There is no bus service, and drinking water is brought twice weekly by the fire brigade. The school, mosque and shops are 3km (1.9 miles) away down an unmetalled road near-impassable after rain.
"Seen from here, life in the village looks like heaven on earth," Hatun Bayazit says, staring out of her window at the sun-bleached square.