Turkey Trip
by Christine Zarr
“What do you want us to say about Turkey and about South-Eastern Anatolia Project when we get back?” This was a question Warren Muir put to HasNa’s GAP friends when our group of twenty-two people (including five Turkish speakers) toured some of the area of GAP’s immense integrated development program in an oval area about three hundred miles long by about one hundred and fifty miles wide. We did this in late May 2005. Reflecting on my answer, I felt that things in Turkey were far better and the atmosphere far more hopeful and normal than I had expected.
“Eye-opening” describes the trip. Seven days we spent, traversing hundreds of miles of the upper Euphrates and Tigris area, looking at the biggest barrage - the Ataturk Dam, reading maps, seeing movies, hearing explanations and briefings; seeing the water racing along in the canal outside Urfa, seeing families irrigating and tending plots in the flood plains, seeing new vineyards, new olive, pistachio and pomegranate plantations on rocky uplands, seeing cheerful and respectful children in bright blue school overalls, seeing plenty of purposeful confident women in all garbs on big city streets, seeing hard-working, respectably dressed, polite men working in shops, businesses, restaurants and hotels. One feels that the Government of Turkey has been aiming to do what a proper government should do – helping people by careful thought and by careful spending.
I am telling my American acquaintances that I count fifty-one different engineering projects in one brochure – nineteen in the Tigris (or Dicle River) basin and thirty two in the Euphrates (Firat River) basin:- the pipes and canal systems, the pumping stations, the dams themselves and the hydro-electric generators. It seems that fourteen of the big items are completed and, if completely funded, twenty two dams and nineteen associated hydro plants will be built. The Turks have used at least SIXTEEN BILLION OF THEIR OWN MONEY and may spend that much again to finish their plans. They have not had much outside help. I am stressing to my friends the integrated social planning, the huge modern roads, and the encouragement of modern farming, modern education, modern large business and modern small business. I speak about the sparkling clean airports and the up-to-the- minute hotels we stayed in.
The 2004 Almanac states that seventy-one million people live in Turkey; about 10% of those live in South-West Anatolia and they are relatively poor. The GAP’s integrated social development plans assist families to adjust to modernity and cope with the moves forced upon them. For that purpose, foreigners (including France, Switzerland, the UNDP, the FAO and the World Bank) have helped with $55m in grants recently. However, $47m. of those grants come from the European Union. Americans would like to know that many Land Grant Universities have contractual relationships with GAP.
We were, of course, tourists. Fest Travel provided our immense bus, with super-careful driver; and our guide was Faruk Bey himself, good-tempered, well-organized, with experience and some fascinating local contacts and friends. We can report on the richness of the history, the culture, the cuisine and the panoramic natural surroundings; we can also report that we felt safe, despite a Washington Post report about Kurdish separatist activity in Northern Iraq and despite knowing how near we were to Syria and Iraq. At Diyarbakir, we were warned against pickpockets and the municipality provided us with young men in flack jackets at the request of the hotel people “because we were a group of old folk.” On the edge of Mardin, young men with machine-guns smiled down alertly on our bus from behind sandbags and coiled barbed wire, yet we felt safe walking to a restaurant at night. Several other small tour buses circled around in the same week. I heard guides speaking in German, French and Dutch and there were groups of Turkish tourists too. We met maybe a hundred others at 3.00 a.m. on the top of Mount Nemrut!
Most of all I have been telling my acquaintances about the phenomenal welcome given to us all by HasNa’s friends and their families; about the way more than once our bus was met on the road before even we entered a town, about how so many of the former participants drove long distances to meet up with us, about the lunch we were guests at on the upper floor of the club overlooking the flooded Euphrates, about the way groups of us were invited to people’s homes for delicious and copious “home cooking,” and for interesting conversation. We feel we were very lucky to visits those places at that time, and we thank the HasNa participants for their gifts to us, their invitations to their homes and for their company.
