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l Alison Clarke The Ilisu Dam Campaign,formed this year to oppose the
planned hydropower project inKurdistan (or southern region of Turkey...depending on yourviewpoint), has been busy raising awareness, gathering sup-port and taking action.
This March saw 50 campaignersforce Balfour Beatty, the British construction firm eager to take onthe dam's construction, to abandon their annual general meeting. Videofootage taken at the meeting was subsequently aired on BrusselsTV, spreading the message of the project's inevitable social dis-placement and environmental ruin. Campaigner and comedian MarkThomas talks about the strength of collective resistance to the pro-ject, seeing it as embodying all the elements of the global strug-gle against capitalism and the need for diversity and networking.
"The thing about it, is that it spills out everywhere, it isn't just one issue and I think that's really important. It is a question of human rights, it's a question of environmental policy. It's a question of the British government's Export Credit Guarantee Department's involvement, which is responsible for something like 95% of the bilateral debt owed by developing countries to Britain. There are the issues of Kurdistan, the issue of a nation. Although the dam is single issue it's not a single-issue campaign. The way the movement is working is by not focusing directly on one single issue but by seeing the whole way in which capitalism works, the way in which corporate structures work, the way in which they affect a whole range of
issues. And that's our strength, our strength is in our diversity
What's wonderful as well is the fact that we're now linking up with campaigns in the Kurdish region, and we're also working with people on the Narmada dam in India and that's fantastic. There is also growing opposition in Turkey amongst Turkish environmentalists.
I think the Ilisu Dam Campaign is perhaps the way in which campaigning will go. We act as a clearinghouse for information. People come to us and say, where's this, what's that, what's happening here?, and we work with that. We can't do this in a sort of colonial fashion as it's wrong and it doesn't work. We say, we have a basic structure here, enjoy."
Taken from a longer interview with Mark Thomas. Ilisu Dam Campaign
, Box 210, 266 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 7DL, Britain.
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