Conservation Note
The Great March of Anatolia: Turkey's rivers and the dam programme
Engin Yılmaz of Doğa Derneği on Anadolu Vermeyeceğiz, the citizen campaign against a hydroelectric programme spanning thousands of kilometres of river.
This episode was a conversation with Engin Yılmaz, then General Director of Doğa Derneği, the BirdLife International partner in Turkey, about the campaign known as Anadolu Vermeyeceğiz and the protest march that accompanied it.
The subject was the scale of Turkey’s hydroelectric programme. Rights over rivers and streams were being transferred to energy companies for the construction of small hydroelectric plants and dams across the country: on the figures cited at the time, some 1,738 planned, with around 2,000 further dams already under construction, and river systems totalling in the order of 10,000 kilometres facing irreversible alteration.
What made the campaign unusual was that it was not led by conservation organisations. It was driven by the communities on the rivers concerned, for whom the issue was water rights and land as much as ecology, and the conservation case attached itself to a movement that already existed. That is a different political position from the one environmental groups usually occupy, and much of the conversation was about what follows from it.
Doğa Derneği and BirdLife International hold the record of how the programme developed subsequently.