Magazine Issue 12: Water / Engineering the Ebb and Flow

Dam projects are all about controlling a flow – they are a wielding of power over water. Not only the power to generate electricity, store water and 'control' floods, but the exercise of power by technocrats, big business, nation states, the wealthy and the powerful over nature and local communities. Kate Geary outlines the case for this below, followed by an extract from Arundhati Roy's eloquent description of the insanity behind the Narmada Dam in India

"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." C S Lewis.

Those who promote dams often do so by downplaying or just ignoring the existing uses and users of undammed rivers. When the Soviet Union embarked on one of the biggest dam-building programmes in the world, Joseph Stalin remarked: "Water which is allowed to enter the sea is wasted."

In fact, undammed rivers do not flow 'wasted' to the sea, but provide an essential source of life for lands, fish, forests, farms and the people who depend upon them. For example, traditional indigenous irrigation schemes, using rivers, streams and groundwater sources, still account for three-quarters of irrigated land in Nepal and about half the irrigated land in the Philippines. But such water users and uses simply do not fit with the dominant 'development' ideology. By ignoring the many uses and values of undammed rivers, wasted river ideologues are justifying not human use of rivers, but the expropriation of rivers from one set of users to another.

Dams have long been used to assert control not only over nature but over people and nations for the benefit of the powerful. Early last century, British colonialists used dams in their colonies to bolster British industrial growth, by converting peasant farms growing crops for local consumption into vast irrigated tracts growing cash crops for export. In 1902, for example, the British dammed the Nile at Low Aswan for cotton plantations to feed the Lancashire mills.

Over 60 million people – by conservative estimates – have been displaced from their lands and homes by dams. Throughout this process, dams have assisted the powerful and wealthy to enclose the common land, water and forests of the politically weak. Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in India, where 40 per cent of all those who have been displaced by dams are adivasis or tribal peoples, though they make up less than 6 per cent of the Indian population.

In Turkey today, the same process is occurring – but for adivasis read Kurds. The Turkish state has long denied the Kurdish people their ethnic and cultural identity and for the past 16 years has waged a war against Kurdish guerillas, which has seen three million people displaced and 30,000 killed. Dams are another weapon in the Turkish state's arsenal: what better way to dispossess and crush a people than to flood their lands and cultural sites? The Ataturk dam, built by the Turkish state during the 1980s, displaced some 60,000 Kurds. Inscribed on the dam's centrepiece are the words of the modern Turkish state's founder, Kemal Ataturk, 'Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene' – 'Lucky is the one who is a Turk'.

The latest dam planned for the Kurdish regions of Turkey is the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River. The 'New' Labour government wants to support UK construction firm Balfour Beatty to build the dam, with a $200 million export credit (see Corporate Watch issue 10). The dam will affect up to 74,000 people, the majority of them Kurdish. The Ilisu project is not merely about generating electricity, but about control – over the lands and people of the Kurdish region. It is also about geopolitical control over the Tigris river which flows downstream to Syria and Iraq. Turkey has long threatened to use dams for political control over its troublesome downstream neighbours. The site manager of Ataturk dam told an American journalist, "We can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq for up to eight months without the same water overflowing our dams, in order to regulate their political behaviour".

Critics of the Ilisu Dam project warn that the dam could serve to exacerbate conflict and human rights abuses in the region. Other dams have a history of sparking conflict, for example that between the dominant and oppressed ethnic groups in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh. Here, the Kaptai dam displaced one sixth of the ethnic Chakma population. The resulting pressure over land sparked off a bloody conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts between Buddhist Chakma and Muslim Bengali settlers.

There are today many dams in the world which are the subject of fierce debate and opposition – in Narmada (India), the Three Gorges (China), the Nam Theun II (Laos), and the Itoiz (Spain) to name but a few.

In each case a favourite question of dam proponents to their critics is, 'what is your alternative to the dam?'

As Patrick McCully writes, "If the question is turned from 'what are the alternatives to dams' to 'how can we enable people to obtain adequate and equitable supplies of water and energy far into the future, reduce the destructiveness of floods, and protect our watershed from degradation?' then it can be properly answered."