Water at Heart of Turkey's Policies on Kurds and Mideast Neighbors

Stephen Kinzer

New York Times, February 28, 1999  
 

The recent capture of Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan has focused new attention on the war he has waged against the Turkish army for 14 years. In recruiting fighters and supporters, Ocalan has fed on the resentment many Kurds feel for what they consider the government's unjust discrimination against them. But he could never have built such a potent force without great amounts of help from other countries.

There are many reasons why Ocalan found foreign supporters for his bloody rebellion against Turkish rule, and why Turkey has resisted his rebellion so fiercely. Some are to be found in history, others in psychology, and still others in geopolitics.

Lurking behind them all, however, is water.

For more than a decade until last October, Ocalan lived semi-clandestinely in Syria, and the Syrian government gave him money, arms and political cover. Iraq also helped him, allowing him to build bases along the Iraqi-Turkish border. Neither Syria nor Iraq were embracing his cause out of any love for Kurds; on the contrary, governments in both countries have fiercely repressed their own Kurdish populations.

But Syria and Iraq want water from rivers that spring from Turkish soil. Turkey has given them what it considers ample amounts of water, but rejects what it calls their "unacceptable claims." They have supported Ocalan's fighters as a way of applying pressure on Turkey to give them more water.

The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers created the "Fertile Crescent" where some of the first civilizations emerged. Today they are immensely important resources, politically as well as geographically. Through a system of dams in its southeastern provinces, Turkey controls their flow and is determined not to give up its control. That is one important reason that Turkish leaders have so resolutely refused to grant any autonomy to the Kurdish region, which straddles both rivers.

Few if any countries understand the growing importance of water as fully as Turkey does. In one of the world's largest public works undertakings, Turkey is spending $32 billion for the huge Southeast Anatolia Project, a complex of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric plants. Its centerpiece, the Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates River, is already completed. In the reservoir that has built up behind the dam, sailing and swimming competitions are being held on a spot where for centuries there was little more than desert.

When the project is completed, perhaps in the next decade, it is expected to increase the amount of irrigated land in Turkey by 40 percent and provide one-fourth of the country's electric power needs. Planners hope this can improve the standard of living of 6 million of Turkey's poorest people, most of them Kurds, and thus undercut the appeal of revolutionary separatism. It will also deprive Syria and Iraq of resources those countries believe they need -- resources that Turkey fears might ultimately be used in anti-Turkish causes.

The region of Turkey where Kurds predominate is more or less the same region covered by the Southeast Anatolia Project, encompassing an area about the size of Austria. Giving that region autonomy by placing it under Kurdish self-rule could weaken the central government's control over the water resource that it recognizes as a keystone of its future power.

In other ways also, Turkish leaders are using their water as a tool of foreign as well as domestic policy. Among their most ambitious new projects is one to build a 50-mile undersea pipeline to carry water from Turkey to the parched Turkish enclave on northern Cyprus. The pipeline will carry more water than northern Cyprus can use, and foreign mediators like Richard Holbrooke, deeply frustrated by their inability to break the political deadlock on Cyprus, are hoping that the excess water can be sold to the ethnic Greek republic on the southern part of the island as a way of promoting peace.

It is no accident that Turkish President Suleyman Demirel is a water engineer by profession and entered public life as director of the State Waterworks Administration. His background and that of his classmate in engineering school, the late President Turgut Ozal, have done much to make Turkey so water conscious. Both men vigorously supported the Southeast Anatolia Project in the 1980s even though Western countries, including the United States, refused to provide loans or credits for it because they did not want to alienate Arab countries.

One of the most important developments in the Middle East in the last 20 years has been the emergence of a strong partnership between Turkey and Israel. Both countries have much to gain from it; for Israel water is among the greatest potential benefits. Israel is thirsting for water, and Turkey is overflowing with it. Intensive studies are now under way to see whether tankers, pipelines or other means can be used to send Turkey's water to its new Israeli friends.

Not coincidentally, the basis for the Turkey-Israel partnership was laid when Demirel headed the Turkish government and another water engineer, Yitzhak Rabin, was in power in Israel. "If we solve every other problem in the Middle East but do not satisfactorily resolve the water problem, our region will explode," Rabin once said. Other Middle Eastern leaders have agreed. The late King Hussein of Jordan asserted that conflicts over water "could drive nations of the region to war."

Turkey may be the world's most water-conscious country, and the Middle East the region where water issues are most urgent. But competition for water, and for the power that control of water represents, is intensifying from Africa and Central Asia to Los Angeles and the Everglades.

"The world's population of 5.9 billion will double in the next 40 to 90 years," former Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., has written in a new book titled "Tapped Out" that examines global water problems. "Our water supply, however, is constant," he wrote, as "per capita water consumption is rising twice as fast as the world's population. You do not have to be an Einstein to understand that we are headed toward a potential calamity."

Countries that control water are likely to be the big winners of the future. Turkey is among them. Its policies have for years been shaped by a desire to use water to achieve political aims, and the policies are beginning to pay off.

"Water has been used as a means of pressure, for example the Syrians sponsoring Kurdish separatism because they want more water," said Ishak Alaton, a visionary Turkish businessman whose company has won the contract to build the water pipeline to Cyprus and is conducting a feasibility study for a pipeline to Israel. "It can also be used for peace, as we are hoping in Cyprus. You can't overstate its importance. I firmly believe that just as the 20th century was the century of oil, the 21st century will be the century of water."