BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
Turkey’s on a dam binge, again. Building that is. It seems 22 more are slated to be built.
So, why write about this? Many of the rivers being stopped up rise in the Armenian Highlands, hence they are of interest and concern to all Armenians. But, this damming operation has more sinister objectives.
While the developed world has come to its senses, realizing that dams are problems, too, not always solutions, and started to tear down many of them, Turkey is going in the opposite direction, despite its significant economic advancement. Why?
Dam building has been a big deal for Turkey, and may even have been reasonable at one point in time, but only up to a point. Everyone was on a damming binge in the 1950s when Turkey initiated its dam building programs. Irrigation and hydropower were and are legitimate concerns. For the Turks, those were not the exclusive drivers of what included some huge water projects.
Ankara had a misguided notion about building dams in what is really Armenia or neighboring Kurdistan. The Turkish government, steeped in its racist Kemalist ideology, thought that Kurds could be Turkified through “modernization”
