VildanAtmaca/JINHA

WAN – Women are organizing against the dams and other attacks on nature planned for the province of Van, in the east of Northern Kurdistan.

40 years of the Turkish state's brutal war in the region have devastated nature as much as social life. As of 2013, according to Turkey's Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs, there are 478 operational hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. 534 more plants and hundreds of dams are in the planning stage.

The Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) initiated by the government years ago was a development project that saw hundreds of villages forcibly emptied to build dams, destroying historical and natural sites. Environmentalists say these development projects aimed to change the social, demographic and geographic profile of the region to the state's advantage.

Now, in war-torn Van, the plans to build power plants, dams and the large military installations have escalated in the period of the peace process. The state is planning hydroelectric plants in the towns of Çatak, Bahçesaray and Muradiye, which will disrupt the river ecosystems in the Van area.

"Ecocide always happens in critical places and times in this place, where there has been a long struggle for identity rights," said DenizGedik, of Lawyers of the Environmental and Ecological Movement (ÇEHAV) founded in 2009.

She pointed to the dam explicitly built "for security reasons" in Dersim province, the high-security military installation planned in Lice and the massacre of villagers' mules in Roboski and Yüksekova as examples of ecocide in Northern Kurdistan that target human and natural life in an attempt to bring the region under state control.Deniz has seen the state take every available legal avenue to realize these projects.

"But when there's a popular response saying 'we won't let this go through,' we see administration change its approach," she said. She pointed out that the division between human life and nature was a historical project, not a given, resulting from the development of a mindset that sees nature as an object of exploitation.

At the Women's Conference in January, activists selected Van as a pilot city to built an ecological city and to stop the mushrooming concrete buildings destroying the city's natural setting in the mountains on the shore of Lake Van.

Beriva nNefise Hakan, of the Ecology Committee of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), said that the AKP's massive construction projects are an attempt to force people into urban life and to assimilate their Kurdish identity—along with the PKK movement that emerged as a struggle to defend that identity. The committee is working to bring ecology classes to schools in the region. She said that the city should be a tourist and cultural destination, not a monotonous sea of concrete.

(gk/fk/cm)