A Trip to Ani

ATTENTION!!! This blog has closed down and I will no longer be posting on it. Turkeyetc has moved to: turkeyetc.wordpress.com. This same post appears on the new blog, along with a slidshow of photos. Enjoy.

The ruined Church of the Redeemer at Ani.

“I think this must be Russian,” said a Turkish university student as we looked at the inscriptions on the ruined Church of the Redeemer at Ani. For a moment I was stunned.

Ani was built 1,000 years ago as the capital of an Armenian kingdom that stretched over much of what is now eastern Turkey. Today shepherds graze their sheep here in the shadow of the crumbling monuments.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. The large introductory sign at the entrance is an unpleasant piece of historical distortion that makes no mention of the Armenians. Nor did a Turkish guidebook that we brought with us.

“It’s not Russian,” I said, “it’s Armenian… The Armenians built this city.” She looked again with mild surprise at the inscriptions.

“Really?”

As striking as the dilapidation and decay of Ani is this sense of estrangement between the people who shared this land for centuries. When we visited on a late afternoon in April, there were only a handful of other sightseers. There are no bus services, so you either hire a car or take a taxi from Kars, about 30 miles away.

The ruined city is bounded on three sides by a gorge through which flows the Arpacay river, and in the distance watchtowers mark the modern-day Armenian border.

The Turkish biology students who had got a lift with me from Kars were excited to see from atop the walls what appeared to be an Armenian village in the distance. It was perhaps five miles away, but to visit we would have to travel several hundred, via Georgia or Iran. The Turkish border has been closed since 1993, when Ankara broke off ties with Yerevan after the latter went to war with Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan.

Turks and Armenians have periodically fought over this land for centuries. The Seljuks captured Ani in 1064, selling it to the Kurdish Shaddadid dynasty eight years later, who then lost it to the Georgians in around 1200.

Devastated during the Mongol invasions, the city entered a slow decline and was abandoned by the middle of 18th Century. Its death predates the events that are the main cause of bitterness between Turks and Armenians: the systematic murder and deportation between 1915 and 1918 of the entire Armenian population of eastern Turkey, during which time as many as 1.5m Armenians died.
In 1920, Turkey fought Armenia again, seizing Kars and Alexandropol (present day Gyumri, in Armenia). After around two months of fighting they signed a peace treaty that fixed the present border.
Ani’s misfortune is to be stuck on the wrong side of that border. Decades of neglect, looting, and vandalism have edged it closer to oblivion. In 2010 the Global Heritage Fund ranked it as one of 12 sites worldwide most at risk of irreversible destruction.
But the current Turkish government has apparently recognized the value of looking after the country’s rich and decaying wealth of Christian monuments - or at least the diplomatic and PR benefits of doing so. Last year, the Turkish Culture Ministry announced a project in conjunction with the World Monuments Fund to begin repairing the main cathedral and the Church of the Redeemer.
Will it come soon enough? The Church of the Redeemer was cloven clean down the middle during a storm in the 1950s. The cross section cut reveals the remarkable engineering of the building. Its walls are thin comparative to the huge, airy space they enclose, like a bubble frozen in stone. It seems miraculous that what is left of the huge drum and dome has stood for half a century in this state.
On the road back to Kars we fiddled with the radio and stumbled on an Armenian station. It was the voice of an elderly woman, soothing and measured as if telling a bedside story, and interspersed with short peals of classical music. Engrossed and mystified, we sat listening for 20 minutes or so until her voice faded into static.

The fight for Istanbul's dwindling fish stocks

This blog is moving to Wordpress. The website is still under construction, but is already online. In due course, I will stop posting on this site. You can see the new blog here.

I have a piece out on Eurasianet about the surge in illegal trawling around Istanbul, which has caused tension between fishermen and environmentalists that erupted into violence in January.

Due to decades of pollution, habitat destruction, and overfishing, many formerly common food species have all but disappeared from Istanbul's waters.

This in turn has given rise to a vicious cycle with fisherman desperate to make ends meet catching large numbers of fish that have not yet reached spawning age, further depleting stocks already at risk of commercial extinction.

Some fishermen have teamed up with ecologists and scientists to push for tougher laws regulating the fishing industry in order protect its long term future. But many heavily indebted fishermen are unwilling to accept short term pain for long term gain.

When I began researching this story, I was looking to do a piece more generally on the complex environmental threats facing both the Black Sea and Marmara Sea, but discovered this particularly interesting issue after I started interviewing.

From my article:

In late January, Ahmet Aslan, head of a fisheries union on the European side of Istanbul, was sitting in a teahouse near his home when a man entered, asked him to step outside, and challenged him over his opposition to illegal trawling. He then pulled out a pistol and shot him in the face. Aslan lost his left eye. 

He has said the attack was a threat to campaigners from a cartel of illegal fishermen, whom he accuses of jeopardizing the future of the industry for the sake of short-term profit. 

“Ahmet Aslan’s case was the first, but, unfortunately, I think we will be seeing more,” said Defne Koryürek, another campaigner against illegal trawling. “There are no fish, there are lots of fishermen, and they are under tremendous pressure.” 

She estimates there may be more than 300 trawlers operating illicitly in the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmara, with the practice increasing as much as fivefold since September 2011, when the Turkish government upped the minimum catch size for bluefish, a staple of Istanbul fishermen. The government increased the size restriction on bluefish from 14 centimeters to 20 centimeters, cutting into fishermen’s already narrow profit margins. 

But the revised catch-size is not enough for the scientists, environmentalists and small-scale fishing unions who campaigned for the move. The restriction, they say, will not protect the bluefish from commercial extinction, since it only spawns when it is 24 centimeters long. 

Were that to happen, the bluefish would join a long list of formerly abundant species that have all but disappeared from Istanbul’s waters, including turbot, sole, swordfish, bluefin tuna, lobster, and langoustine. 

Kenan Kedikli, head of a small fishermen’s co-operative in Bostancı, says a vicious cycle has set in with some fishermen responding to dwindling stocks by fishing in ever more damaging ways. “When I was young, if you brought an undersize fish into the market, people would shout at you and heckle you,” he recounted. “But overfishing has destroyed this healthy culture.”

You can read the whole story here.

In the end, I did not have space to go into much detail about the other very serious threats facing Turkey's seas. Vast quantities of domestic and industrial waste flow into the Black Sea and on into the Marmara from the big rivers of Eastern Europe and Russia: the Danube, Dneister, and Dneiper.

Intense marine traffic also adds to the pollution, and exotic species are transported from the other side of the world in the ballast tanks of vessels, which has had a devastating effect in the past. The semi-enclosed nature of the Marmara and Black Sea makes them especially vulnerable to these kinds of anthropogenic activities.

Turkey seems serious about doing its share to combat this problem. A large part of the responsibility falls on municipalities, who manage sewage treatment and disposal. In particular, Kocaeli, at the eastern end of the Marmara Sea, has done much to curb the discharge of industrial pollution from the many factories in that region.

Istanbul too has achieved impressive results in reducing pollution. The municipality sent me this very detailed breakdown of its efforts to increase sewage processing, almost none of which I was able to include in the story. I'm posting it here (in Turkish) because it's a useful resource for anyone else interested in this topic.

Saving the songs of Turkey's Kurds

I've been away for the past month in a village on the Aras River in Igdir Province, volunteering for a wildlife NGO and trying to improve my Turkish. Internet access was blissfully nonexistent, and I didn't get a chance to post about a story I wrote before I went away about the Kurdish singing tradition known as dengbej. You can read my article for Eurasianet here.

Dengbej is an oral tradition in which a vast canon of stories, legends and historical events have been passed down from singer to singer for generations, a kind of cultural transmission now increasingly rare due to the influence of modern media and recording techniques. 

In March I spent several days visiting Diyarbakir's 'Dengbej Evi', an old house with a traditional courtyard that has been set up by the city's municipality as a place where the mainly elderly singers gather and perform. 

Often illiterate and from poor backgrounds, dengbej are capable of astounding feats of memory. Most singers and enthusiasts I spoke to recall diwans (recitals held in homes), where a single dengbej would perform through the night, plucking songs from his head one after another.

The subject that predominates is, inevitably, love: young lovers, doomed lovers, happy lovers, jilted lovers, jealous lovers, and all the rest. After love - and sometimes as a result of it - comes bloodshed, before ancient and painfully recent. Many of the songs tell of old family feuds, warring agas and doomed rebellions. They have been passed down sometimes for centuries in the memories of singers without once being committed to paper, making dengbej a crucial but fragile vessel by which Kurds' sense of their history and identity has been transmitted.

Despite the past attempts of the Turkish state to suppress it, and the ongoing corrosive impact of mass media, dengbej remains alive today. Often singers will compose new ballads about the current and recent struggles of Kurds in Turkey, singing of assassinated or imprisoned journalists, or sneaking modern political references into old songs to elicit a laugh.

But it's hard to see that in an age in which music can so easily be recorded and replayed, dengbej singers will retain their elephantine memories. On the other hand, the songs are now reaching a wider audience than ever before, with recent performances being held in Istanbul and other areas of the country far from the remote southeastern villages that were its heartland.

In that spirit, here's a song by perhaps the most revered of recent dengbej singers, Sakiro. Now, who'll  supply some subtitles?

Recent work...

Selda Hepkeskin practices at a shooting range in Florya, Istanbul.

I’ve recently neglected to post stories on this blog, so just to show you that I have been doing something, here are a few of my recent articles.

Last Friday an article of mine for the Christian Science Monitor was published, examining Turkey’s first wildlife corridor, the ecological crisis facing the country, and ecologists' efforts to raise awareness on the issue.

I also recently did a dispatch for CSM about Ala magazine, Turkey’s ‘Vogue of the Veiled’, which you can read here.

I never linked to my piece for Eurasianet.org looking at Turkey’s urban regeneration schemes and their possible impact on crime in the city.

Last month I wrote an article for The Times about a charity that is telling battered women to arm themselves with guns as a last resort to fend off their murderous/violent husbands. Ironically, the charity is called Sefkat Dernegi, ‘Compassion Association’.

The story got cut right down due to layout/space issues, so I’m posting it unedited here:

Raising her handgun, Selda Hepkeskin pumps five rounds into a target, each time inching closer to the red heart on the stencilled torso of a man.
With Turkey facing deep sexual inequalities and a spate of vicious killings by jilted husbands and ex-lovers, women are trying to level the playing field.
"For me it's an adrenalin thing," said Ms Hepkeskin, 31. "There's a general perception that only men can use guns, but for a woman it gives you the feeling you can achieve anything a man can."
Now one charity has provoked controversy by vowing to give battered women firearms lessons to help them protect against their former partners.
 "As long as the situation is this bad, women need to learn to protect themselves," said Hayrettin Bulan, director of Sefkat-der, which hopes to begin offering shooting lessons for battered women at practice ranges around Istanbul next month.
Since Sefkat-der published its advice in November more than 3,000 women have called its hotlines expressing interest, he said.
Last year, the Turkish Justice Ministry revealed that murders of women increased by 1,400 per cent over seven years during the past decade, with 953 slain in the first seven months of 2009 alone.
"This is a last resort, and it has created hope for women under threat," he told the Times in his Istanbul office plastered with dozens of press cuttings of rapes, murders, and abuses of women.
Public anger on the issue has been spurred by a string of recent cases in which victims have been killed after seeking official protection.
Last year, police in Istanbul repeatedly ignored pleas for help from 41-year-old Müzeyyan Yanik, who was divorcing her abusive husband.
When officers finally got round to visiting her home in October, she had been dead since July – shot four times in the head by her former spouse.
While some blame the conservative influence of the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party, which has governed Turkey since 2002, others see it is a sign that a hitherto ignored problem is finally being brought to light.
"We know that violence against women has been a longstanding bleeding wound of the society," said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year.
"It is being reflected by the media as a growing issue when it is simply the hidden and unspoken truths being uncovered."
Since 2006, the government has trained 40,000 police officers, 50,000 health officials, and 250 judges and prosecutors on how to handle domestic violence cases.
It also consulted women's NGOs earlier this month over the drafting of a law including possible electronic tagging and compulsory anger management courses for convicted wife-beaters.
But one problem, according to Mr Bulan, is Turkey's high level of gun ownership.
"In Turkey, men learn how to use weapons when they are doing military service, but women do not," he said.
"It's considered normal for jewellers or rich businessmen to carry a gun. It’s also normal to have a gun in case a burglar breaks into your home."
Sefkat-der's plans have attracted widespread criticism. "In this country there is law enforcement," wrote columnist Sure Pazarci in the daily Takvim newspaper. "We don’t live in the Middle Ages, this is the year 2012."
But a growing number of women are no longer content to merely wait for the state to help them.
At the shooting range where Ms Hepkeskin practices there are now 1,000 women members where only four years ago there were virtually none, according to owner Abdullah Dolu.
"10 years ago it would have been extremely unusual to see a woman learning to use a handgun, but in the past three or four years it's become normal," he said.
Ms Hepkeskin has several female friends who have guns for their own security, but for her it's just about the feeling of power: "It makes me feel equal to men."

I've previously written about the same issue here.

Additionally, I never put up stories from a reporting trip to Hatay I made in December for The Times, where I did pieces on the Free Syrian Army and the cross border humanitarian operations being run by activists there.

Here is one of my reports. It was based mainly on Skype interviews conducted with activists and FSA members based in Idlib province, bordering Turkey, as well as with an FSA commander in Antakya.

The ambush had been going well. Twenty fighters from the Free Syrian Army, armed with rifles and home-made bombs, had stopped a military convoy heading to raid the village of Khan Shekhon.
Then they ran out of bullets. Fleeing, they had no choice but to leave a comrade, 25-year-old Muhammad Kataini, wounded in the arm and leg, to a fate worse than death. “They captured him,” recalled Musa, one of the fighters. “We tried to go back for him, but we couldn’t get him. If we had more ammunition we could have saved him.”
Poorly armed, isolated and living as fugitives in remote corners of Syria, the rebels are mounting a desperate insurgency, though one that even they admit has no chance of toppling the Assad regime unaided.
A senior commander told The Times that a Libya-style intervention with targeted bombing and a buffer zone might be needed to prevent the country sliding into civil war.
“If the international community does not do something to help Syria it will become another Somalia. It will not be stable for decades,” said Captain Ayham al-Kurdi, who is charged with co-ordinating Free Army operations in the western city of Hama.
Speaking in Antakya, Turkey, near where the Free Army’s exiled leaders co-ordinate operations from a refugee camp, Captain al-Kurdi claimed that they had more than 10,000 fighters, almost all army deserters. The figure cannot be independently verified, but even if it is true, the rebels are outgunned by Syria’s 300,000-strong regular army and a sprawling police state adept at instilling terror in its populace.
Nonetheless, in areas such as Daraa, Idlib, Homs and Hama, they appear to be mounting increasingly deadly attacks against the military and security forces. Yesterday, there were reports that rebels shot dead eight soldiers travelling in a military convoy in Hama province after government troops destroyed a civilian car.
At least 25 people were reported killed around the country, after a surge in violence on Tuesday that left 38 dead.
Since peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations began in March against President Assad and his family, who have ruled Syria for more than 40 years, more than 5,000 people have been killed.
In Idlib, where rebel fighters are supported by extensive smuggling networks from neighbouring Turkey, they have carved out fragile pockets of territory. “We are surrounded by Syrian army troops, we have less than ten square kilometres, and any safe area we’re in can be invaded at any time,” said Alaa, 29, a taxi driver turned activist, who regularly ferries injured civilians and rebels to secret makeshift field hospitals.
“Every day there are wounded and martyrs, and every day I do this. It is my duty as a Syrian,” he said in a Skype interview with The Times.
Alaa is a wanted man whose home has been raided five times since the start of the uprising, although he has done nothing more than treat the injured and relay reports of regime outrages to the outside world.
While he and many other rebels and dissidents clamour for outside intervention, others fear that it could merely fuel a conflict already heading for civil war, pitting the country’s disenfranchised Sunni Muslim majority against the minority Alawite sect whose members make up the regime’s backbone.
But Captain al-Kurdi says there is a greater risk in doing nothing. “Yes, there’s a fear of it turning into a sectarian conflict,” he said. “In fact the regime is trying to provoke this by arming Alawite villages and raiding Sunni ones. But if the international community does not act, then it will not just be soldiers picking up arms, but ordinary people, and that is the danger.” The hope on the horizon, he said, was that the army would collapse under mass defections once outside powers have created a safe zone for deserters.
“When the uprising started, maybe 50 per cent of the people in the army believed the regime’s lies, but now I believe that 90 per cent want to desert,” said Musa, 25. He deserted from the security forces 40 days ago and fought in the ambush outside Khan Shekhon, in Idlib province, last week.
Musa and his comrades had been sent to Deraa at the start of the uprising and told they were fighting Islamist terrorists. What he witnessed was a terror campaign waged by the Government on its own people.
“Our duty was to raid houses and arrest wanted people. I saw them rape women in public, without shame,” he told The Times from inside Syria.
“There was one woman with her children. When we came into the house, she begged us not to rape her in front of them. We just walked out the house, her words hurt so much. Even if I had no weapons we would keep doing this, to defend our land and our dignity from this Nazi regime.”

I also wrote about Ibrahim Othman, a prominent opposition activist who set up a network of secret mobile medical centres inside Damascus, and was killed trying to flee to Turkey:

As founder of Damascus Doctors, a network of secret medical clinics that treated injured protesters, Ibrahim Othman was a hero of the nine-month uprising against President Assad’s rule in Syria — it also made him one of the country’s most-wanted men.
As the 26-year-old doctor tried to flee into Turkey on Saturday he was shot dead by government forces, fellow activists told The Times. A video posted on the internet appeared to show his body and what was claimed to be his passport. A fellow activist said that security forces near the border village of Khirbet al-Joz opened fire on the minibus carrying Dr Othman and other dissidents.
After being forced from his hospital job for treating demonstrators earlier this year, Dr Othman helped to establish secret medical facilities where injured protesters could receive treatment. In an interview with CNN in July, he said he knew it put his life at risk.
“It’s illegal, but this is the only way to treat injured demonstrators . . . they are risking their life too,” he said.
According to the Avaaz media network, 18,600 people have been injured since demonstrations began in Syria in March, and the UN estimates that 5,000 people have been killed. The Government is accused of arresting or killing injured demonstrators and threatening hospital staff who treat them. Doctors and activists who spoke to The Times said that growing intimidation of doctors meant there were fewer able to treat the injured, and that it was getting harder to send medical supplies and people over the border.
“We opened ten days ago and in that time two people we work with have been killed, another arrested, another injured,” said Ahmed al-Jisri from Antakya in Turkey where the supply of medical aid to Syria is co-ordinated.
From a basement office, dissidents send bloodbags, bandages, stitching thread, antibiotics and other basic medical supplies to cities including Homs, Hama, Latakia, Idlib and Damascus.
Abu Hamza, a doctor from Hama who set up a secret medical clinic in Syria before he fled to Antakya in October, said police would raid the wards of the private hospital where he had worked as they searched for wounded protesters. He left after security forces raided his home and told his wife they would kill him when they found him.
“We had so much pressure, and so many wounded people, we couldn’t treat them all,” he said. “People inside Syria supplied us with medical equipment, but it was nowhere near enough.” The wounds of the injured mark them out as protesters and liable for arrest. Abdullah, a 26-year-old activist from Hama, was blinded after security forces fired a rocket propelled grenade into the apartment. He spent 15 days with shrapnel in his eyeball as fellow activists helped him flee to Turkey.
Friends and colleagues of Dr Othman paid tribute to him. “I’ve never seen such determination under fire,” wrote one on a Facebook page set up in his memory. “This hero devoted his life to the oath he took. He saved lives, then left us with a wound that won’t heal.”

On the frontline with Turkey's ecologists

Emrah Coban, science co-ordinator for wildlife charity Kuzeydoga, uses  a radio aerial it retrieve data from tagged wolves in the Sarikamis forest.

If you get depressed following ecological issues in Turkey, a trip to Kars might cheer you up. Inspiring things are happening in this remote, snowy corner of the country.

I recently went there to write about nature NGO Kuzeydoga and the creation of Turkey’s first ‘wildlife corridor’: an ambitious plan to link the isolated Sarikamis Forest with larger wildernesses bordering the Caucasus.

As I’ve written before, Turkey’s ecological situation is at once awful and fascinating: extraordinary biological wealth threatened by grandiose development plans, with virtually no-one knowing or caring.

But in Kars, a tiny community of ecologists have carved out a series of surprising local victories. I’ve become fascinated by their work, and by the reasons behind their success.

Turkish civil society movements of all kinds operate within a constrained space. Whatever field they are working in, Kuzeydoga’s example might offer valuable insights.

Februarys in Kars are very cold, partly why I wanted to go there this time of the year. Kuzeydoga’s founder Cagan Sekercioglu often criticizes Turkish conservationists for spending too much time in big cities, and for being unwilling to live in the sticks, where their presence is needed. But one of the distinctive things about Kuzeydoga, to hear him tell it, is that its entire operation is based in Kars year-round.

The plan was to go wolf tracking, and I had visions of dogged conservationists ploughing through drifts of snow on remote forest tracks. It wasn't quite like that, though not entirely different either.

The snow and the cold were certainly there. One morning the temperature sunk to -26C, and the diesel froze in the fuel lines of the Toyota Land Cruiser. It took an hour to flush out. We had hoped to check camera traps around the forest, but there was too much snow, and as it turned out, wolf-tracking is a less romantic business than its name suggests.

Kuzeydoga have fitted GPS collars with mobile phone chips to two wolves, ‘Kuzey’ and ‘Doga’, an old one-eyed male and another younger male. Once a week, the ecologists go to the top of a hill overlooking the forest, wave an aerial across the horizon until they pick up the signals, then download the data, telling them where the wolves have been for the past week.

There is a ski resort near Kars with lifts up to the summit of a big hill that serves this purpose well. When we downloaded the data, the wolves themselves were several miles away and well out of sight.

This is the first time anyone has tracked wolves in Turkey, and the information gleaned from Kuzey and Doga over the past four months has been key to convincing the government to create the wildlife corridor.

Since October the younger wolf ‘Doga’ has ranged across an area 13 times larger than the national park itself, demonstrating that there is not nearly enough protected habitat to support the wolf population.

By monitoring the camera traps, collecting and identifying animal faeces from the forest, and dissecting dead wolves, they have gained even more alarming insights.

Part of the problem with conservation in Turkey is that so little research has been done that its difficult to assess how much danger threatened species are facing.

According to one estimate, there are a total of 7,000 wolves left in Turkey, but this is a blind guess, according to Kuzeydoga’s chief science officer Emrah Coban.

In Sarikamis, considered a stronghold for wolves, there may only be around 25 remaining. In the past year alone seven have died as a result of human contact (shot, killed by dogs, hit by cars).

There are a greater number of bears (around 50, they believe) and because these hibernate during winter and generally stick to the woods fewer are killed by people. As few as eight Eurasian Lynxes may remain.

Just as worrying is the extent to which the wolves appear to rely on domestic livestock for their survival. In a healthy forest, prey species will outnumber predators by a ratio of 10:1 to 100:1. In Sarikamis the figure is as closer to 1:1, with roe deer hunted virtually to extinction and wild boar scarce.

In a healthy environment, wolves fatten in the winter, when the snow gives them an advantage against their prey. But in Sarikamis they get thinner, and Sekercioglu speculates that this is because during the winter, livestock are kept safely in sheds, depriving them of what is perhaps their primary food source.

Villagers living close to the Sarikamis Forest discuss a presentation about Kuzeydoga's work.

So predator-human conflict around Sarikamis is intense. This became very clear when I visited villages with Kuzeydoga as they gave powerpoint presentations aimed at convincing locals not to shoot wolves, and explaining the corridor project and the benefits of the forest.

Particularly in villages whose inhabitants kept sheep rather than cows, the hostility to wolves went bone deep. Photos showing Kuzeydoga volunteers releasing orphaned wolves into the wild evinced gasps of disapproval.

Some of the reactions to the corridor were even more extreme. “This is an Armenian plot,” muttered one farmer when shown a map of the projected route. Another stormed out of the room declaring that it was the first step in a government scheme to rob them of their grazing land.

But in all five villages we visited, I left with the feeling that something had been achieved, no matter how small it might be.

Mainly, there was a sense that people were impressed by what the ecologists were doing, even if some remained baffled by their motivations.

It was the third time Kuzeydoga had visited the villages. The first two times had been spent surveying residents about their views on the forest, its wildlife, and how to deal with wolves. This time they presented the survey results, as well as mapped data from the tracked wolves. They also gave practical information on a little-known government compensation scheme for those who had lost livestock to predators.

They encouraged people to protect their animals with electric fences, which some of the farmers apparently never knew existed. By far the popular element in the presentation were the videos showing the fences' deterrent effects  on various animals, which were met with gales of laughter. Some discussed the possibility of getting funding from an agricultural bank in order to do an electric fence pilot scheme.

Business cards were handed out, and the day after visiting one village, its mukhtar called to say they had found a wounded bird and thought it was a bittern: would they come to pick it up? They did, and took it to Kafkas University’s veterinary faculty (it was in fact a red-necked grebe).

A map showing the projected corridor route (in blue), linking the Sarikamis-Allahuekbar National Park with the Ardahan Posof Wildlife Reserve, which adjoins forests in Georgia. Courtesy of Kuzeydoga.

I tend to get skeptical when NGOs talk about ‘building awareness’, which seems to me a pretty nebulous concept. But the Kuzeydoga team have a strategy that seems to be working well.

Whether dealing with government ministers or impoverished shepherds, they take care not to come across as misty-eyed environmentalists. They present solid research, gathered over years. They zero in on areas of common interest, offer straightforward suggestions, and give practical advice on how to implement them.

They are also not encumbered by the intense ideological enmity that large sections of Turkey’s NGO community, environmental and otherwise, bear towards the government.

From speaking to Kuzeydoga’s staff, it was apparent that they were not all fans of the AKP, but were still able to drop any ideological baggage they may carry for the sake of their work.

As Sekercioglu points out in the previous post (paraphrasing a documentary): “There is no socialist air, there is no Islamist air, there is no nationalist air, there is only air. And if you breathe air, that makes you part of the environment and if you are concerned about clean air, I would consider you an environmentalist!”

The results of this approach are most apparent in Kuzeydoga’s work on the corridor. The Turkish government’s environmental credentials may be miserable, but one thing it is good at is reforestation. Soil erosion is a problem that has scared successive governments, and in 2009 alone 45,000 hectares of woodland were planted. Turkey's forest cover is actually increasing.

“We said to the ministry: You are planting these trees anyway, so if you plant them where they provide ecological connections, you will help the wildlife as well,’” explains Sekercioglu.

It was in 2008 that Kuzeydoga first went to what was then the Ministry of Environment and Forests to present them with the corridor scheme. For three years nothing happened, until the project fell under the eye of a high-ranking minister. He he liked it, and it got the green light.

It was the same at nearby Lake Kuyucuk. Having secured its protection, Kuzeydoga addressed the issue of a disused road that bisected the lake, causing drainage and environmental problems.

They came up with an elegant solution: cut either end off the road and add the displaced soil onto the centre section, turning the remains of the road into a nesting island for birds.

When they presented the idea to the governor of Kars on a Friday in March 2009, he was so taken with it that he sent the bulldozers in on the Monday.

“Just like that, the governor gave us two excavators, one bulldozer and two trucks, for two months. They worked around the clock and the government paid for all of it,” recalls Sekercioglu. Now, at least 200 birds nest or roost on the island, safe from humans, livestock, and predators.

“This was so exciting because it was a major environmental construction project. In the US, just getting the authorization for this would take years.”

A Common Kingfisher at wetlands in Igdir, near the Armenian border.

But it’s a sad fact of biodiversity conservation everywhere that while victories are never final, losses almost always are.

While it’s impressive what Kuzeydoga have achieved with only three paid employees covering an area the size of Armenia, it's also clear that they have picked their battles carefully, and the fragility of their gains is painfully apparent.

“It’s partly to do with Turkey’s centralization of power,” explains Sekercioglu. “If you convince the right person, you can do a lot of good very fast. Of course it also works the other way: a lot of bad is done very fast.”

Will the wildlife corridor really materialize? Will it come in time to save the wolves, lynxes and other wildlife that would benefit from it? It will surely be 15 years at least before the saplings provide adequate cover, and who’s to say that in the meantime the government will not decide to build a dam or a road to cut through it?

Nonetheless, there’s an exciting synergy to Kuzeydoga's work. The charity’s headquarters in Kars have become a stopping place for a variety of people interested or inspired by their work.

Other Turkish ecologists are said to be preparing plans for wildlife corridors and bird-nesting islands. And in Kars, American Cat Jaffee is launching Balyolu, an ecotourism venture based around the region’s traditional beekeeping industry and designed to benefit local women.

“It is like turning around a very big ship,” says Sekercioglu. “It will happen slowly but we have to keep pushing.”

Two rescued wolf cubs at Kafkas University's veterinary faculty, Kars. Three cubs were taken by local farmers who discovered their den and hoped to raise them as guard dogs. All three were released into the wild at five months old. One was killed by a car in the past week, another was likely shot. Photograph copyright Caroyln Drake.

Cagan Sekercioglu: "We have no choice but to be optimistic"

A red fox in the snowbound fields close to the Sarikamis Forest near Kars.

I've just written a story for the Christian Science Monitor (not out yet) about the creation of Turkey's first ever 'wildlife corridor', a hugely significant conservation project for the country. It will link the isolated Sarikamis Forest near Kars with larger forests in the Caucasus and Black Sea region.

I sent some questions to Cagan Sekercioglu, a conservation biologist at the University of Utah and founder of KuzeyDoga, the wildlife NGO that has been the driving force behind the corridor.

Having exchanged emails with Dr Sekercioglu in the past, I had a hunch his answers would be fairly comprehensive. In fact he sent a 2000+ word response that is more than double the length of the article I was writing. It's fascinating for anyone who is interested in these issues, so I'm posting it in full.

Later this week I plan to put something up about my recent trip to Kars for the CSM piece. In the meantime, here is the Q&A with Dr Sekercioglu:


How will the creation of this corridor aid the survival of wildlife in the region?

Turkey’s first wildlife corridor is the biggest landscape-scale active conservation project ever undertaken in the country. By active, I mean the creation of new habitat and habitat linkages through reforestation. There are some national parks in Turkey that are bigger in area, but they were existing habitats that were simply declared protected rather than extensive new habitat being created and linked. The area of the corridor, 23,500 hectares, is bigger than the 22,900 hectare Sarikamis-Allahuekber National Park it is connecting! This is very rare in global corridor projects. In fact, the wildlife corridor, whose status is “Protected Forest”, was a national park, it would be Turkey’s 15th (out of 40) biggest national park. A third of this area will be protected by the Ministry of Forestry and Water Works. By connecting the isolated Sarikamis-Allahuekber National Park and other isolated forest fragments to the extensive Black Sea-Caucasus forests, not only will the corridor link the isolated populations of mammals, especially large carnivores such as wolves, brown bears, and lynx that require very large areas, but it will also provide additional habitat through reforestation.

Does its creation have a broader significance for the Turkish environmental movement?

It has great significance. The Turkish environmental movement has to mature into a constructive, creative movement, with an emphasis on solutions. This is very difficult to do in the current, anti-environmental, make-money-at-all-costs atmosphere in Turkey. However, we need to do this in order to move beyond a movement whose general public perception is anti-everything.
We need to propose solutions and make use of conservation opportunities that can inspire the general public and the decision-makers. Our focus as KuzeyDoga is regional, landscape-scale conservation. In Lake Kuyucuk of Kars, we created Turkey’s first bird nesting island in 2009, by convincing the former Kars governor to provide us with trucks, bulldozers and excavators so that we could convert the old road bisecting the lake into an island. We finished in only 2 months and the approximately 1 hectare island we created was colonized by breeding birds within a week. In fall 2011, we counted more than 200 breeding and roosting sites on it, as it is a safe haven from cattle and sheep that graze the shoreline of the lake, as well as from dogs, foxes, and people. Turkey’s first island created for conservation inspired other Turkish conservationists to imagine similar projects and I know of at least two other conservation island projects that have been proposed as a result. Turkey’s first wildlife corridor is the next step in our landscape conservation vision. We believe and hope that it will inspire other conservationists to propose more wildlife corridors, so that we can cover Turkey in a corridor network.

What inspired you to create Kuzeydoga? 

I am an ecologist, ornithologist, and conservation biologist. My long-term work in northeastern (kuzeydogu) Turkey was inspired by a 2001 Harvard-Stanford-St Petersburg butterfly expedition during which we found 7 cryptic species new to science, even thought Turkish butterflies were thought to be pretty well-known. I fell in love with eastern Turkey, which had always fascinated me, and I vowed to come back. In 2003, I decided to start working in Kars, as it is located on a major bird migration flyway, but there was no bird banding or systematic bird monitoring in eastern Turkey. Initially, most of the work was supported by Christensen Fund of California, whose office was located a 10 minute bike ride from my office at Stanford University. After a pilot bird banding season in Kars, I found the perfect location for eastern Turkey’s first bird banding station in the wetlands of the Aras River near Yukari Ciyrikli village, Tuzluca, Igdir. Soon, I realized the need for community-based conservation, ecological research and biodiversity monitoring in all the “Serhat” provinces of Kars, Igdir, Ardahan and Agri and filed the application to found KuzeyDoga in fall 2007. In time, our projects expanded to other groups besides birds, especially keystone mammal species such as wolves, bears and lynx.

Was there any particular moment when you realized the seriousness of the threat facing Turkish biodiversity?

It was a gradual process but the 2001 butterfly expedition was probably the turning point. We had detailed information on the good locations for the group of butterflies we were looking for, mostly from a detailed book published in 1995. However, about half of the good localities were gone, as key butterfly food plants were grazed away, mostly by sheep. Considering that we found at least (research still ongoing) seven butterfly species new to science in the other localities, I realized that some unknown butterfly species of Turkey may have been only living at the destroyed localities, and may have gone extinct in the past a few years, before ever being discovered. That was a horrifying thought.

Why is it that environmental issues garner so little interest in Turkey?

Part of it is the mistaken belief that environmental issues do not have direct relevance to the daily lives of people, many of whom are focused on survival. However, with increasing education, outreach and environmental stories, as well as people’s own experience, people are starting to realize that environmental health equals human health. The other problem is, like people in general, most people in Turkey have very short-time horizons and short attention spans, and mostly worry about the next week or next month. There is also a fatalistic aspect, embodied in our saying “After I am gone, I don’t care if Noah’s flood destroys the world”. I also think the fact that Turkey did not go through the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods is a factor. A lot of the interest in natural history and environment in Europe and related cultures originated during and after the Renaissance, helped by the myriad new species brought back to Europe from the colonies, which Turkey did not have. Therefore, natural history, natural history museums, and related hobbies such as birdwatching are not part of the culture in Turkey as they are in places like the UK, Holland, Sweden, Germany etc. If the general public is not interested in biodiversity, has little access to good natural history information, and does not know about Turkey’s rich natural heritage, then they will not prioritize conserving it.

How are you trying to change that?

Environmental education, communication, and public outreach are critical. That’s why KuzeyDoga works hard to communicate its findings and the importance of Turkey’s biodiversity constantly. We also work very hard to constantly do public outreach and communication, especially with the local newspapers and journalists in the region. We probably average one different news story and/or press release every week and some of these stories end up in a dozen papers. It is critical to inform the public and we also use social media very effectively, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs and our website, www.kuzeydoga.org.

What are the shortcomings of the Turkish environmental movement?

Unfortunately, weak public support has left most NGOs understaffed and cripplingly dependent on international funding. Excluding support staff, we estimated in our Biological Conservation (2011) paper that around 50 full-time conservation professionals with adequate training and experience are employed in Turkey’s conservation NGOs; i.e. fewer than one in a million. Most major environmental organizations are based in big cities, far from the rural areas where their year-around presence is most needed. Conservation projects are often conducted remotely and
part-time, reducing local grassroots support, weakening the credibility of the ‘‘city environmentalists’’ in the eyes of the rural population, and making it difficult to quickly counter novel threats. Furthermore, Turkish environmental organizations often prioritize competition for limited funding over effective collaboration. These problems, combined with a lack of coordination, have made it difficult for the Turkish environmental movement to be widely accepted by the general public and to achieve widespread success. Consequently, the overall consensus of Turkey’s conservationists is that they largely failed in their mission (Oruc, 2011). The increasing availability of funds from the European Union may help Turkey’s
conservation movement, but this funding has also resulted in an explosion in the number of ‘‘environmental’’ organizations and consultants whose sole mission is writing projects to receive
funding, not achieving meaningful conservation.

Another problem is that conservation and environment in Turkey are often extremely politicized, often as a “leftist” cause and lumped with other “leftist” causes. That makes no sense because everybody wants to live in a healthy environment. Is there anything more “nationalistic” then wanting to protect and conserve Turkey’s beautiful landscapes, habitats and biodiversity for future generations?

To paraphrase a speaker in the Sundance documentary “A Fierce Green Fire” on the history of the environmental movement, “There is no socialist air, there is no Islamist air, there is no nationalist air, there is air. And if you breathe air, that makes you part of the environment and if you are concerned about clean air, I would consider you an environmentalist!”. You can say the same thing about water, soil, forests, and biodiversity.

Turkey’s environmentalists need to communicate the message that every human being, regardless of political leanings, deserves to live in a healthy environment. It is a basic human right.

What is Kuzeydoga trying to do differently?

We are one of most active locally-based environmental NGOs, many of which are located in big cities in Turkey. First, we are located at the heart of our work, in the small city of Kars, within 30-60 minutes drive of most of our key sites (the farthest are 2 hours away). We are not stuck in a big city like Izmir or Ankara, where you are away from a lot of the conservation action and you cannot respond as fast. In Istanbul, sometimes even driving home from work takes over 2 hours! But we can get out of Kars in literally under 5 minutes, which means we can spend a lot more time focused on both biodiversity research and locally-based conservation and do not have to fly to places to do our conservation work. Our ability to get out of the city and access the beautiful places we are trying to save is also a constant source of inspiration and daily reminder of the real places, organisms, and local people we are working for. Because we spend a lot of time in the field and in villages, we have very strong relationships with local people and have a lot of credibility with them because we do not come a few times a year, tell them what to do and go back to the big city. We live in Kars and Igdir just like they do, and after seeing us constantly working at Kuyucuk lake, Aras wetlands and Sarikamis forests, and other field sites, we slowly gain their respect and support. This has also helped change the minds of many people who used to think we had ulterior motives like money.

The creation of the wildlife is a positive step by the Turkish government. Is their attitude becoming more enlightened? Does it give grounds for wider optimism?

Sadly, I do not think so, if the 2012 Yale Environmental Performance Index is any indication. Turkey dropped substantially, from 77th place among 163 countries in 2010 to 109th place among 132 countries in 2012. Even worse, in biodiversity and habitat conservation, we are now behind all but  11 countries, ranking in the lowest 8% of them, countries like Eritrea, Haiti, Moldovia, Libya and Iraq.

That being said, there is increasing realization of the importance of conservation, and the government’s support for KuzeyDoga’s conservation firsts, such as Turkey’s first bird nesting island in Lake Kuyucuk and Turkey’s first wildlife corridor gives me hope. It is like turning around a very big ship. It will happen slowly but we have to keep pushing. I have to keep thinking about how USA and European countries dealt with similar problems but slowly turned things around. At the Sundance Festival in Utah this year, I watched the documentary “A Fierce Green Fire”, the history of the environmental movement. Dam building in the USA in the 1950s was done in a similar mindset to Turkey now, but environmentalists kept fighting and changed things. Let’s hope we can change things faster in Turkey because we do not have the luxury of another 50 years. The next decade will be very critical for the future of biodiversity in Turkey. We have no choice but to be optimistic.

Bezirganbahce: the reality of Turkey's mass housing schemes

Last week I rode the train for about an hour from central Istanbul to the end of the line, to Bezirganbahce, a cluster of pastel-coloured tower blocks on the fringe of the city.

I was there to do a story examining the social effects of the massive urban renewal program that the government is enacting in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey.

I was inspired in part by the film Ekumenopolis (mentioned in this previous post), and also by an interest in Istanbul’s peculiarly low crime rates.

It always surprises people who do not live here when I tell them that it is relatively safe. What impressed me deeply when I first came to Istanbul was that you can pass for miles through the metropolis and not see any of the signs of poverty and desperation so evident elsewhere in the developing world - and often the developed world too. (Istanbul has its exceptions, of course: Sultangazi, for one).

Although the quality and quantity of the comparative data is not great, what I was able to find suggests that Istanbul indeed has a lower crime rate than most European cities.

The street life makes an interesting contrast with that of London. On the one hand, the state is far more visible and pervasive. But most striking is the fact that communities appear to own their streets in a way they often do not in London.

Residents I spoke to in places such as Ayvansaray, an historic but poor neighbourhood beneath the Byzantine city walls, confirmed that there is what some described as a kind of ‘self-rule’: everyone knows each other, problems are handled in a collective way, there is trust between neighbours.

Like Sulukule, Tarlabasi, Ayazma, and other generally poor communities, people in Ayvansaray are battling eviction. Their neighbourhood will soon be redeveloped into luxury apartments. Bezirganbahce is the kind of place they might end up.

As you walk up the hill from the Halkali train station, the impression is not a bad one. Out here the air is clean and the scrubby fields stretching away create a feeling of space that is a pleasant change to the crush of the city.

Entering the housing project, we could hear the din of children playing in the local school. There’s a medical clinic too and a little row of shops: baker, greengrocer etc. The buildings are a series of widely-spaced, identikit tower blocks with landscaped walkways, verges and playgrounds.

We spoke to residents who had come from Ayazma as well as those who had moved here through choice. There were things that people liked. The Kurdish family who gave us a lavish breakfast said they could not complain about the comfort of their apartment. Others mentioned the fresh air and open space.

But no one I spoke to said they could ever imagine this place feeling like a community. Even the owner of the local bakery, a former taxi driver who was now pursuing his lifelong dream, said this place would never feel like his old neighbourhood in Bagcilar.

It was surprisingly difficult to find people to talk to. In spite of the landscaped public spaces, everyone seemed to be rushing somewhere.

When we first arrived, my translator walked up to a passerby and asked if he knew the family we had organized to meet. We told him the name and he looked at us as if we were crazy. ‘A needle in a haystack,’ he said (or the Turkish equivalent of it).

We approached one young man who had a cut on his face and his arm in a cast and asked him what life is like here. “Ask Recep Tayyip,” he replied as he walked off.

Cihan Baysal, a human rights activist and lawyer who knows the neighbourhood well, told me that when the families moved here in 2007, the Kurdish and Turkish teenagers set up rival gangs and started to fight one another. The authorities responded by giving over six tower blocks to police officers and their families.

There is little to do here for teenage kids, said Baysal and others. In Ayazma, they never had much cause to stray far from home, but here they have taken to roaming round other neighbourhoods, seeing the wealth of the city that is denied them. There is no work for the parents either, and the fathers are commuting three or four hours to find anything that pays.

Osman, the patriarch of the family who gave us breakfast, was due to leave only a few days later to take up a construction job in Northern Iraq. In Ayazma, he said, he had been able to get by in tough times by doing odd jobs: someone always had something that needed doing. Here there was nothing, and his family is financially crippled by the monthly instalments due on their new home.

Fatma, the wife of Osman, described Bezirganbahce as ‘an open air prison’. One unnervingly confident police officer who lived here with his family said that security was difficult in the neighbourhood because people ‘lived in closed boxes, no one knows what anyone else is doing’.

As we left, two young men planted themselves firmly in front of us. The elder of the two asked us for a few lira, but his body language said he wouldn't take no for an answer. The exchange was in that uneasy halfway house between begging and mugging.

We gave them some money, but seeing I was foreign they tried to get more. It was the first time in two years in Istanbul that I had been in that kind of situation. As I automatically looked around to see if anybody else was coming, it struck me how unhealthy was the anonymity and emptiness of this place. One of the most comforting things in Istanbul is the incessant street life, the people standing at their shops, sitting in the teahouses, talking, everyone knowing everyone else.

The boys said they were from Erzincan and had come here looking for work, had been unable to find any, and were now homeless. One said he had a child back home and they were looking to get the money to return. I wasn’t sure if they really were from Erzincan.

It might be a stretch to say that a random encounter such as this is emblematic of anything much. But generally speaking, what is so depressing about the situation is that the mistakes being made by Turkey are both predictable and avoidable. Mass housing policies in which people are stuck in tower blocks far from any economic centres or opportunities have been proven to fail in European and American cities from the 1950s onwards. The evidence is in the Paris 2005 riots, or the ones in London last summer.

The future of the city as envisioned by one interviewee, Yves Cabannes, a former UN advisor on forced evictions, is of a glitzy, gentrified core ringed by ghettoes. Not many people seem to appreciate what a rare and precious thing it is that - to some degree at least - Istanbul is an exception to this familiar pattern.

The whole experience put me in mind of a passage in a book I read recently, Secret Tibet, by Fosco Maraini. The correspondence to what I've been discussing is not perfect, but the relationship should be clear; nor is the idea by any means original, but here it is too beautifully expressed (or rather, translated from the Italian) not to quote.

The writer spoke Tibetan and travelled around the country during the 1930s and 40s. The following passage was prompted by his reflections on the happiness he believed he saw in the people in what was at that time an essentially medieval, theocratic society:

“Happiness does not necessarily depend on social structure or system of government as our contemporaries seem to think. To me it seems to be primarily a question of equilibrium between the world by which man is surrounded and the world which he carries in his heart. We live in an age of terrifying disequilibriums and should be equally unhappy under kings, presidents, Popes or tribunes of the people, whether organized in republics or empires, soviets or theocracies. Our science offers us one picture of the universe; our traditional religion another. Physics and chemistry have advanced a thousand years ahead of the social sciences and the education of the will… Ideals and standards are in a state of continual flux; professional standards and ideals, sexual standards, class ambitions, the kind of life that people aim for at different ages – all important elements in a stable society – are subjected to constant criticism and revision; everything is changing, becoming, perpetually fluid. New equilibriums unknown to us are perhaps on the way, in which future generations may perhaps find greater peace. But we are caught up in the grinding of the gears. Some of us succeed in extricating ourselves, but the majority are crushed.”