LIFE ON THE SOUTH-EAST FRONTIER

Where blood and water don't mix

Source: Economist, 12/14/91, Vol. 321 Issue 7737, Star of Islam p10, 3pp

IF ONE thing could break Turkey, it is a continuing failure by the Turks to see what they need to do about their share of the unhappy Kurdish people. If one thing could establish Turkey as a Middle Eastern power, it is the fact that nature gives it enough water to become the Middle East's reservoir. The irony is that the danger and the opportunity both sit in the distant, dirt-poor and largely ignored south-east corner of the country.

The war against the Kurdish guerrillas in the south-east has been going sharply worse since midsummer, much worse than it ought to have done. The guerrillas are run by the Kurdish Workers' Party, a Trotskyist movement offering dreamy irrelevancies in a still semi-feudal part of the world. They face at least 20,000 soldiers of the regular army and the gendarmerie (which in Turkey is much more like an army than a police force), plus 30,000 village guards and some admittedly rather helpless local policemen. Yet in the three months starting in July the guerrillas managed to kill, even on the official count, almost twice as many people as in the same period last year. The final quarter of 1991 looks like being even bloodier.

Moreover, the fighting has spread. Last year most guerrilla attacks took place near the eastern end of Turkey's southern border. This year they have reached up into a curve of provinces farther north--Siirt, Bitlis, Mus and Bingol. The bigger towns are fairly quiet (though the governor's house in Mardin recently got a rocket attack), but outside the towns large parts of the 13 south-eastern provinces are now no-go areas for the security forces after dark. Road-blocks are frequent, a train was derailed in August, and the guerrillas have temporarily kidnapped several groups of foreigners to demonstrate their expanded range of action. They are recruiting more local youngsters; some teenage local girls were found among the bodies after a recent fight in Siirt. It is still hit-and-run stuff, but suddenly rather formidable.

The army seems to have no new ideas. One is told by the general staff in Ankara that the ``gradual decrease'' in guerrilla activity shows the insurrection is being defeated; yet the army's own figures reveal a marked increase in that activity throughout 1991. One innovation was to set up joint combat teams of soldiers and policemen, but some of these have been so counter-productively brutal that the super-governor of the south-east has talked of disbanding them. Like C.S. Forester's first-world-war generals, the Turkish army appears to have no solution except to go on swinging the hammer, and hoping it hits a nail.

Among Turkish politicians the instinct has been to deny that there is a Kurdish problem at all. The Turks had to create a new national identity for themselves only a couple of generations ago, when they lost the Ottoman empire in 1918. They want to believe that the Kurds are part of this new Turkish nation. They point out that Kurds can rise to high positions in the Turkish state (which is true). In the foreign ministry you are solemnly told that there is no such thing as a Kurdish language, only a dialect of Turkish (which is not true). Those inexplicably obdurate guerrillas just happen to be operating in that particular dialect-zone. Nobody will even agree how many Kurds there are; estimates vary between 10% and 30% of Turkey's 56m people.

Until recently only President Ozal himself, and some Social Democrats, recognised that the Kurds have their own sense of identity, and that a solution of the Kurdish problem therefore requires political imagination as well as military clout. Earlier this year Mr Ozal persuaded parliament to pass a law making it easier to use the Kurdish language, but this had little practical effect; there were still no Kurdish television shows, no Kurdish newspaper, no teaching of Kurdish in schools. The new government says it will give the Kurds the freedom of their own language. The trouble is that by now it may be too late for such relatively minor measures.

By now, cutting the guerrillas away from their local support may need something more drastic. This might be regional self-government for the Kurdish area, preferably as part of a general decentralisation in which about a dozen different regions of Turkey get more power over their own affairs, including the right to elect their own governors. Spain's degree of decentralisation is not a bad model. There is nothing unthinkable about this; some Social Democrats have suggested it. But it would be a major revision of the Turks' idea of their post-Ottoman nation-state. Can this constitutional change be put on the agenda by a government as hesitant as the new Turkish one may be?

If the change does not happen, the odds are that the war in the south-east will get even worse--and, given the number of Kurds who have moved into the cities of central and western Turkey, may spread out of the south-east into a countrywide terrorist campaign. If the army's optimism proves wrong, this could be Turkey's crisis of the 1990s.

The water deterrent

Here is another layer of irony. For the second main thing about this part of Turkey is a vast water-engineering project that, given time, might greatly have eased the whole problem.

The Kurdish south-east is desperately poor; income per head in Hakkari, in the corner between Iran and Iraq, is one-tenth of Istanbul's. The admirable South-Eastern Anatolia Project is designed to narrow the gap. It takes advantage of the fact that the rolling uplands of Anatolia collect huge amounts of water, much of which flows to the south. The project, when finished, will consist of a total of 22 dams that will irrigate 1.7m hectares (6,600 square miles)--increasing Turkey's present total of irrigated land by over a half--and will have a hydroelectric generating capacity of over 7,500 MW. This will create a lot of extra jobs in agriculture, and should bring in a fair amount of light industry. The Kurds will be much better off.

Unfortunately, it may be too late. So far only 51,000 hectares have been irrigated, most of them in Sanliurfa province, too far west of the fighting area to make much difference. The filling of the Ataturk dam's reservoir, the centrepiece of the whole project, is behind schedule. Strikes and lack of money have delayed work on other parts of the operation. The original completion date of 2001 is slipping towards 2005, or later. This is not going to improve the Kurds' condition soon enough to affect the outcome of the insurrection.

The South-Eastern Anatolia Project, however, may prove to be a powerful instrument for another purpose. It puts, in effect, a Turkish tap on the Euphrates and the Tigris, the two historic rivers that flow out of Anatolia into the Arab world to Turkey's south. The Euphrates carries about 31 billion cubic metres of water a year into Syria, whence it flows into Iraq; the Tigris takes about 17 billion a year directly into Iraq.

The diversion of water for Turkish irrigation will cut the flow of the Tigris by at least a fifth--the Turkish estimate--and that of the Euphrates by even more. That may be just about acceptable to the countries at the receiving end. But, if the need arose, the tap could be shut much more fiercely. Both Syria and Iraq noticed what happened when the filling of the Ataturk reservoir began early last year. For a month, the Euphrates became a trickle. The Syrians and Iraqis protested, but Turkey refused to resume normal water service until the full month was up (and, even so, found itself behind schedule with the filling of the reservoir).

We have the water; you need it. The same point is made, more amiably, by the Turkish suggestion of a ``peace pipeline''. This would carry about 2.2 billion cubic metres of water a year from a couple of other Turkish rivers a bit farther west, the Seyhan and the Ceyhan, along two routes: one via Syria and Jordan to western Saudi Arabia, the other via Kuwait to the Gulf sheikhdoms.

So far the potential Arab recipients of this water have been cool to the idea, partly because it raises the question of whether Israel should be allowed to join in, but also because they fear the water, once flowing, might be stopped for political purposes. The first objection will presumably disappear if the Americans succeed in making peace between Israel and the Arabs. The second will probably fade away as it sinks in that a water pipeline with a risk attached is better than no pipeline at all.

In this part of the world, water is a form of power. The Turks swear they would never use their control over the sources of so much water for political ends. They too would suffer, they explain, if they turned the tap off. They would lose electricity from the 19 energy-producing dams of the South-Eastern Anatolia Project. They would also risk a lot of flooded Turkish countryside if the tap was kept turned off for long. All this is true, but beside the point. If one of Turkey's southern neighbours were to think of doing something unpleasant to Turkey, it now knows that Turkey could do something unpleasant in return, without touching a trigger.

Water power can be used to win friendship and co-operation. But it is also like nuclear power: once people know you have it, they suddenly grow more respectful. Turkey's water-rich south-east, if the Kurdish rebellion does not blow it up, is going to make Turkey stand taller in the neighbourhood.