Kerim Yildiz, the director of the Kurdish Human Rights Project, said: "For minorities on the ground whose homes, livelihood and ways of life are threatened by this project, this a huge victory." (...) -----------------------------------------------------
Ethnocentric Western media portray Turkey's GAP project (Eastern Anatolia Development Project) as another evil third-world dictatorship scheme for repression and domination. Third-world governments are by definition corrupt, repressive, barbaric, etc. - all things which civilised white capitalist christian governments are not, as the media ceaselessly hammers home. So when Shrubya revives old American traditions of plain-speaking imperialism, he's compared with Saddam, instead of his illustrious predecessors [1].
Therefore, when Turkey does anything, it's gotta be bad. In the real world, sometimes that's true and sometimes not. The Ilisu and Yusufeli dams make sense as part of the GAP project, which has one clear and simple aim: To relieve the poverty of the Kurds in Southeastern Turkey. This is why the late PM Ozal, himself a Kurd, decided to build 22 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates in order to provide irrigation for 30.000 square miles of arid land and electricity for regional development. Syria hated the idea and accordingly started a proxy war by sponsoring the PKK, putting a stop to GAP and forcing Turkey to spend the money that would have gone to increasing Kurds' welfare on fighting the PKK.
The Turkish state is a doppelganger of the Soviet one, and its painfully slow transition towards accountability and transparency ensures that big engineering projects end up in trouble like the Soviet projects of old. The FAO [2] and UNDP point out that in the GAP project, "social development is lagging behind physical development". IOW state planners are riding roughshod over environmental and social concerns and aren't doing enough to improve agricultural methods so that the irrigated soil doesn't become a salt wasteland after a decade, as it has in Syria. All this is changing, but slowly. It doesn't help, of course, that the relevant ministerial portfolios are in fascist hands at the moment, another direct result of Ocalan's efforts.
The displacement of local populations would therefore not necessarily be to their disadvantage if done right, and not by bureaucrats of the fascist MHP party. The unique archeological sites might also have been recovered as was done in Egypt. IOW, the environmental, cultural, and social impact could have been minimised if GAP planners had been aware that such things existed back in the 80's.
So the GAP project has nothing to do with forcing Kurds to evacuate their homes or depriving Syria and Iraq of water. Iraq has more water than Turkey and it's Israel that's sitting on Syria's water under the Golan. Syria wants Turkey to share its water resources but it feels no compunction in hogging and polluting the Orontes river that flows into Turkey's Hatay province, which Syrian maps depict as Syrian territory. Ozal proposed supplying Israel with water from Turkey's southern Manavgat river in order to offset the loss of the return of the Golan to Syria. He called this the "water for peace" project. Well, Israel's getting the Manavgat water now but still won't hand back the Golan or let the West Bank have any water.
The world is complicated, so don't believe the hype.
Hakki
[1] William H. Taft: "while our foreign policy should not be turned a hair's
breadth from the straight path of justice, it may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment."
Woodrow Wilson: "Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists in having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused."
[2] http://www.un.org.tr/fao/act_future.html