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October 25th, 2023
Courtesy of Foreign Policy a look at how Turkish President Erdogan’s mega-infrastructure projects are enriching construction companies while reshaping his country’s waterscape for the worse:
On a humid midsummer morning, the fishermen of Tekelioglu, a village in western Turkey, gathered to talk about how their lake disappeared. The decline began a decade ago, they agreed, after a nearby dam on the Gordes River was completed in 2009. A few years later, temperatures rose, the winter rains stopped falling, and in 2021, the lake dried up entirely.
Marmara Lake once spanned 17 square miles. It supported hundreds of livelihoods and thousands of migratory birds: “A bird paradise,” the fishermen said.
Now, it’s like it never existed. The fish died. The birds changed their paths. The tortoises that lived around the lake started wandering into nearby gardens and homes in search of water. Today, a few rotting fishing boats lay abandoned on what used to be the lake’s shore. A fig tree has sprouted on the southern shore of the dry bed.
The Gordes Dam is one of hundreds built during Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 20 years in power, intended to provide water for drinking, irrigation, and notably, electricity generation. About 20 percent of Turkey’s power comes from hydroelectricity—its biggest renewable source by far—making it a major driver of the country’s dam-building push.
In pursuit of these ends, however, dams have remolded Turkey’s waterscape entirely: Villages and cultural sites have been flooded, while lakes and rivers are parched. Some dams, such as Gordes, are malfunctioning only a few years after being completed. The companies that built them—many of which have strong ties to Erdogan—continue to reap huge profits in spite of their failures, wreaking catastrophic damage on the environment, destroying livelihoods, and exacerbating Turkey’s water crisis in the process.
Scenes from Mamara Lake on Oct. 4 (from left): A dead plant on the dry, plowed lakebed; a photo of the lake on the wall of the village tea shop and community center, which used to sit on the banks of the lake; and a makeshift anchor for one of many fishing boats that used to ply the waters.
Scenes from Marmara Lake on Oct. 4 (from left): A dead plant sits on the dry lakebed; a photo of the former lake hangs on the wall of the village tea shop and community center; and a makeshift anchor, used for one of many fishing boats that used to ply the waters, lies in the dirt.
During times of antiquity, the Aegean region of western Turkey was part of the well-watered Fertile Crescent. Today, the region is overheated and overdeveloped, marred by a vicious cycle of forest fires and drought. The population of Izmir, the region’s major city, has swelled from 1.2 million in 1980 to 3 million today, placing huge demands on its water supply. The Gordes Dam was meant to solve this scarcity. Some 60 percent of the dam’s supply was to be pumped to Izmir, and the remaining 40 percent would be used to irrigate 150,000 hectares (about 580 square miles) of surrounding farmland, where peaches, grapes, and walnuts are cultivated.
But these promises never materialized.
In 2022, Tunc Soyer, Izmir’s mayor and a prominent member of the opposition to Erdogan, called the project a “fiasco.” The city was paying for the Gordes Dam’s water, he said, but had still not received a drop.
Construction on the dam began in 1998 after a $170 million contract was awarded to Kocoglu Construction. It took more than a decade to build, but after opening in 2009, it started losing water immediately. Cracks had formed across the base of its 5.5 million cubic meter (about 1.5 billion gallon) reservoir and in the tunnel that carried the water to its destinations; even after being drained and repaired in 2015, the reservoir continued to leak.
The dam’s reservoir has not been more than 7 percent full since 2020. State officials claimthat the repairs have worked, and that droughts, not leaks, are causing the low levels. But data from Izmir’s water authority shows that levels in the five other reservoirs in the region rose between 2020 and 2022 as Gordes’s level fell. All have been afflicted by low rainfall this year, but Gordes’s current level, 6.83 percent of its full capacity, is far belowthe average of the others, 35.67 percent.
In 2021, the former regional head of the state water agency, Hasan Baykal, offered testimony about the project, saying that surveys carried out prior to construction had shown that the ground was not suitable for the type of dam that was built. Because the ground is made of porous limestone, water would simply drain away unless the bed of the dam was covered in concrete. Yet once the tender was issued and construction underway, the vital concrete base was left out in order to cut costs. To date, there has been no investigation nor official response to Baykal’s claims.
Unfortunately, in Turkey, this type of mismanagement is an all-too-familiar story.
Erdogan has long used construction as a tool for channeling money to his political allies. During his tenure as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, he oversaw a warp-speed redevelopment and expansion of the city, with entire districts built from scratch. When he took office as prime minister in 2003, he and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) promised to modernize Turkey and change its culture of rampant corruption. As part of this modernization push, he accelerated construction across all sectors—including dam building—but instead of curbing corruption, he just put his own stamp on the problem.
The consequences of this infrastructure kleptocracy were put on full display earlier this year, when Turkey experienced a devastating earthquake—made even deadlier and more destructive by constructors’ and regulators’ repeated disregard for safety regulations.
Now, this kleptocracy is wreaking havoc on Turkey’s water infrastructure.
A Vanished Lake
Satellite images show Marmara Lake in 2016 (left) compared with the dry landscape in 2023. Images from Copernicus Sentinel-2 via Maxar Technlogies.
The most famous example of this is the Ilisu Dam, located on the Tigris River in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast region. Hailed as a major driver of development in the poorest part of the country, plans for the dam had been touted since the 1950s but were repeatedly canceled or postponed due to concerns over the devastation it could wreak on its surroundings. In 2001, the Council of Europe urged Turkey to find an alternative to the dam, and an international construction consortium pulled out of the project. Work restarted in 2007 but stalled again when foreign lenders pulled out of construction on the grounds that the dam did not meet the World Bank’s environmental and heritage standards.
After international constructors backed out, Ilisu was contracted to a consortium of three Turkish companies: Nurol, Cengiz, and Celikler, all of which have won numerous lucrative state contracts and are headed by businessmen who have personal ties to Erdogan or have praised him publicly. When Ilisu was finally completed in 2018, water started backing up against the dam, causing river levels to rise.
It wasn’t long before the ancient cave city of Hasankeyf, located 25 miles northwest, was underwater. The flooding destroyed churches, mosques, and tombs of 10,000-year-old civilizations, dislocating some 80,000 people in the process. A local activist group described the submersion as an “apocalypse.”
Kocoglu Construction, the company that built the Gordes Dam, also has ties to Erdogan. Its director, Sukru Kocoglu, was the head of Turkey’s politically influential Construction Industry Employers’ Union when Erdogan rose to national power. After winning and completing the Gordes Dam contract, Kocoglu became an outspoken backer of Erdogan and his infrastructure megaprojects.
Ugur Pekkara works at the village tea shop and community center in Tekelioglu, which used to sit on the banks of the Marmara Lake, on Oct. 4. Pekkara, like many other local residents, longs for the lake to return, along with the times when he could sit by its cool waters.
In 2011, he praised Erdogan’s “crazy project”—a $15 billion plan to build a new shipping canal through Istanbul, widely criticized for its potential environmental and economic consequences—on the grounds that it would bring huge profits for constructors. That same year, Kocoglu hailed Erdogan’s latest election win and controversial changes to Turkey’s constitution, which, by abolishing the office of the prime minister and ushering in an executive presidency, amounted to a major power grab by Erdogan.
His political loyalty appears to have paid off. Even after the faulty construction of the Gordes Dam, Kocoglu received two additional contracts for large public-private partnership projects: Turkey’s second biggest airport, located in the Mediterranean province of Mersin, and a road tunnel from Izmir to nearby Manisa.
Despite the contracts pouring in, however, Kocoglu Construction was unable to insulate itself from financial trouble, and in 2014, it collapsed under a mountain of debt. Workers downed tools on the half-finished tunnel and airport. The tunnel contract was transferred to Kalyon Construction—which, as it happens, is majority-owned by Calik Holding, the CEO of which was Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, until 2013—along with $68 million in extra funding to finish the job.
