As the stream below us babbles, the conversation shifts to how beautiful Akifiye is. Half the village has moved away, looking for jobs in the humid coastal cities to the south of us. But every summer the population swells as the community comes back together to enjoy the cool mountain breeze and upland forests.
BTC KP 1,683 – 1,870 KM – YEŞILOVA, TURKEY
The feudal system was breaking up by itself. A class of newly enriched was coming to the fore, most of them seeking to gain possession of as much of the fertile soil as possible. They succeeded by all sorts of means in wresting the land from the poor. The landholdings of the rich steadily increased when they began to make use of the brigands as a source of pressure on the poor who were fighting to defend their rights in a life-and-death struggle for the land.8
Yashar Kemal, They Burn the Thistles, 1955
The cliffs and valleys of the Taurus Mountains have long provided refuge for populations fleeing, and then resisting, successive conquerors and oppressors. In the 1920s, as many of the Ottoman social structures dissolved and the Turkish Republic was established, outlaws roamed through the mountains, receiving support, provisions and shelter from villagers. The role these brigands played in local conflicts over land and water is evoked best in Yashar Kemal’s epic tales of harsh social change and bitter battles between the peasants and the greedy aghas, or landlords, who covet their land.
The most famous bandit of all, İnce – or Slim – Memed, redistributed feudal land, chased aghas new and old out of their mansions and evaded scores of police sent to track him down. ‘Every mountain villager had heard of Memed and loved him. People who knew where he was hiding would never tell.’9
İnce Memed was a fictional character. Yet all over the Taurus and the Çukurova – the plain that stretches from the mountains to the sea – Memed is still remembered as if he had actually stalked this land alongside his fellow villagers: Lame Ali, Big Osman, Yellow Ümmet, Mother Huru. Nor is it surprising that people dream of İnce Memed when conflicts over land continue today.
We arrive in Yeşilova, a village nestled in a deep valley between the mountains. The men are sitting at roadside tables, drinking tea as they play the card game, pişti. They need little prompting from us to talk about the pipeline. ‘Our fields were not reinstated properly, many stones were left lying near the surface. This makes it difficult to plough . . . The compensation was terrible . . . They won’t let us build on our own land.’ Hasan, a thickset man with a large white moustache, starts swearing: ‘They’ll see. I’ll fuck their pipeline. I’ll fix it properly.’ Hasan, we discover, only has a small plot of land, on which he had planned to build a summer cottage. ‘In summer months, it becomes too hot down here in the valley, and many of us move higher up into the mountains, as it’s expensive to get to the sea.’ But now his land, and that of other villagers, is too close to the pipeline, and BTC Co. will not let him build there. ‘The military patrol regularly. When they see us constructing, they tell us to stop. The soldiers treat us badly, even though it’s our land they’re walking on. They won’t even let us pitch our tents.’
BTC Co. rented a forty-metre-wide ‘construction corridor’ from the thousands of individual farmers across whose land the pipeline was to run. Within this ‘corridor’ the pipe was buried, and the land was theoretically returned to its former state and handed back to the farmers, together with compensation for any crops lost during two years of building work. However, on the return of the land, the company and the farmers signed ‘Reinstatement Papers’, in which BTC Co. retained various rights over the ‘corridor’ for the full lifespan of the pipeline – forty-three years. From Sangachal in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, villagers have been forbidden from building anything within this forty-metre strip for the next four decades. Hasan is not happy: ‘They only rented this land from me while they were laying the pipeline. Who are they to tell me what I can do with it now that they have finished? They can’t just impose rules like that!’ Sitting in the roadside café with Mehmet Ali, we have clearly found another example of the ‘forbidden zone’ – like the ACG oilfields off shore the coast of Baku, or the control room at the heart of Sangachal.
In Kemal’s novel, They Burn the Thistles, İnce Memed struggles with the realisation that, having liberated his village from the oppression of Abdi Agha, Abdi’s place has been taken by Bald Hamza Agha. ‘Abdi went and Hamza came.’10 Like his predecessor, Hamza proclaims that he will develop the land and improve the villages, but he turns out to be even tougher and meaner than Abdi.
It feels like the oil companies have entered folklore as the new aghas, using the army to patrol the land and bully the farmers. We juggle with the phrase: ‘Now Hamza may have gone but BP Agha has come’. Furthermore, just like the aghas, the companies and their various contractors say time and again that they are trying to improve the lot of the communities along the pipeline; that many of the villagers do not know what is best for them. With the notable exception of Şükran in Ankara, all the spokespeople that we have talked to have, in all three countries, described villagers as ‘self-interested’, ‘obsessed with the irrelevant’, ‘short-termist’ and ‘over-demanding’ – and, comes the constant refrain, ‘they always want more’.11 Supposedly, the communities have not learned to appreciate ‘progress’, and what is needed for ‘progress’ to take place.
Others join in the conversation, and the game of pişti is put on hold. ‘BOTAŞ said they would donate a library. But the ‘books’ they brought were just magazines.’ ‘When BTC came to get us to sign the Reinstatement Papers, we were so angry with them that we wanted to beat them up at the coffee house. They ran away so fast, none of us could have signed even if we’d wanted to!’ Hasan jokes that he can strike back: ‘They don’t know who they’re dealing with – I am Hasan of Mardin – I trained Apo’. He uses the Kurdish nickname, ‘Apo’, for Abdullah Öcalan, the head of the PKK.
16 DON’T SLEEP – SAVE YOUR SEA
İncirlik, Turkey
In the early morning we drive down from the Taurus into the Çukurova. Watered by the Ceyhan and Seyhan rivers, this great alluvial plain is part of what has become known as the Fertile Crescent, which stretches along the Euphrates through Syria and Mesopotamia and was one of the birthplaces of agriculture. Today it is Turkey’s breadbasket – or, more accurately, its orange, wheat, tomato and corn-basket. The farms of the Çukurova export to the Middle East, Western Europe and Russia. The watermelons stacked outside Turkish and Kurdish corner stores in Haringey and Dalston originate in these fields, carried along dusty roads in tractor-drawn carts, on the first stage of their journey to north London. As we gaze at the passing fields, Yashar Kemal’s description comes to mind:
The rich earth yields a crop three times a year. Each plant is huge. It is twice, three times, five times larger than in other soils. Even the colours of the flowers, of the brilliant green grasses, of the trees are different. The greens are crystal-clear, the yellows pure yellow like amber. The reds blaze like flickering flames, and the blues are a thousand times bluer than elsewhere.1
Unsurprisingly, the Çukurova has long been fought over because of its potential for industrialised agriculture. In contrast to the smallholdings in the Taurus Mountains or the cattle pastures of Ardahan, the scale and fertility of this land meant that it could give a strong return on invested capital. From the early nineteenth century, Armenian landowners and Egyptian labourers transformed the plain with irrigation schemes and cotton plantations.2 By the 1870s, much of the Çukurova was in the vast Mercimek Estate, owned by Sultan Abdulhamid II. But in 1909, pressured by spiralling debts to French investment banks, such as Société Générale de L’Empire Ottoman,3 the sultan ceded Mercimek to his creditors on a seventy-five-year lease. The new French landlords attempted to mechanise agricultural production in the face of stiff resistance from local peasants and the nomadic Turkomen. A decade later, in 1919, after Atatürk’s declaration of Turkish independence, the French Army occupied south-eastern
Anatolia. The fertile plain was one of their explicit targets for annexation, state forces being used to protect assets acquired by a private bank. They were a mirror of the British forces occupying the Caucasus to control the Baku–Batumi Railway and the oilfields on the Caspian shore.
After the withdrawal of French troops in 1922, and the reassertion of Turkish control over the area, the push to industrialise agriculture continued as part of Atatürk’s drive for ‘modernity’. The cotton pickers of the Çukurova fed mills across the new state, such as the kombinat at Kayseri, and were celebrated in Hikmet’s poetry. After World War II, mechanisation accelerated using imported US equipment and migrant labour from the mountains. Production became focused on export markets. Rich landlords continued to eject peasants from the plain, and thereby expand their holdings. The decades of battles over land stretching back to the 1920s were the backdrop for Kemal’s tales of İnce Memed, published in 1955. Several landowners rode the rising world price of cotton, and accumulated capital that provided the foundation of today’s Çukurova Group – one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, involved in everything from construction to banking and oil drilling.4
Largely through Kemal’s writings, the fertile plain has gained a special place in the imagination of the Turkish public. Şükran had told us in Ankara that when she first visited the village of Gölovası in 2002, then the proposed site for the new BP terminal, she had thought: ‘We can’t do this here, it’s too beautiful. I love the Çukurova.’
As Mehmet Ali drives us across the Çukurova on the E90 highway, a massive grey military plane dips out of the sky immediately to our right. It descends sharply across the busy road, before thudding onto a runway and bouncing along the tarmac. Behind the tall barbed-wire fence of the airbase, it is just possible to make out control towers and several identical fat-bellied planes standing on the hectares of concrete.
Outside the perimeter fence, fields of green lettuce are ready to harvest. Along the verges, cows search for grass amid the rubbish. Young women with babies walk down the middle of the road with their hands outstretched, begging for change. Two herds of goats pass a Shell garage, and the goatherds try to stop their animals from invading the lettuce fields. We are entering the village of İncirlik, whose name translates as ‘fig orchard’.
Turkish soldiers patrolling the gates or standing in the stocky green watchtowers stare as our car loops around the airbase. Thick pine trees obscure much of the view, but the strong red of a Turkish flag is visible. A break in the conifers reveals blocks of pastel-coloured flats, alongside larger yellow detached houses with red roofs and blue benches outside. A blonde woman suns herself on a balcony.
The base’s character becomes clearer after we pass the mosque of İncirlik, with its tall white minarets. The main road through the village, Atatürk Caddesi, is lined with shops targeting an obvious clientele: Freedom Furniture, Big Johnny’s Barber, Alex & Joe’s Hollywood Shop and Blade Tattoo Parlor.
İncirlik’s primary ‘base unit’ is the United States Air Force 39th Air Base Wing. Five thousand US airmen and women work here, flying, refuelling and reloading the planes that feed the Western militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Officially, İncirlik is not a US air base, but a NATO air base. Consequently it also holds several hundred British and Turkish personnel.
By the end of World War II, the Turkish Republic – which had remained neutral for four years of conflict – felt increasingly under pressure from the Soviet Union. Stalin made it clear that he wished to regain the province of Kars. That borderland, with Ardahan at its heart, had been returned to the Ottomans under the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Responding to overtures from the US, Turkey joined the Marshall Plan, and US aid brought new tractors to areas such as the Çukurova.5 In 1950, Turkish troops were sent to the Korean War; two years later, Turkey joined NATO. Soon the US Army Corps of Engineers were constructing the runways at İncirlik. It was to be a staging post for spying missions by American U2 planes into Soviet airspace over the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian. Enabling the expansion of US airpower, İncirlik changed the US Air Force’s presence in Europe and Asia. Past empires, like those of the Tsars, the Ottomans and the British, were built on control and surveillance over roads, railways and shipping routes. Today the U2 planes have been replaced by satellites, like those overseen by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at Fort Hood in Texas – control comes from the air and from space.
BTC KP 1,768 – 1,955 KM – GÖLOVASI, TURKEY
‘We’re here! We’ve made it!’ We are filled with excitement as Mehmet Ali drives towards a range of low hills – all that remains between us and the Mediterranean. Seven large white storage tanks are visible on the hillside, marking the end of the BTC pipeline: the Ceyhan Terminal. They look out of place in the lush countryside, like upturned toy buckets that a giant child left behind at the seaside. They are similar to the tanks we saw 1,768 kilometres to the north-east, in Sangachal. Each barrel of crude stored here has passed through the sister tanks on the Caspian shore, and has taken ten days to cross the Caucasus mountains and the Anatolian plateau to this warm sea.
The turn-off for the Terminal is not obvious. A decaying sign standing in a field announces that we are approaching the ‘eyhan Marine Terminal’. Plants obscure the ‘C’; the letter ‘T’ has disappeared from the ‘BTC’ logo. A plastic bus shelter nearby is endorsed with a bold slogan: ‘Given to you as a present by Isken’ – Isken being the coal-fired power station whose smoke stack we can also spot over the hillside.
Turning onto the access road, we notice the difference immediately: pristine tarmac replaces the pot-holed, bumpy surface we’ve been driving along. As we get to the crest of the hill, a series of dirty grey tanks appear behind the sparkling white ones. The grey tanks hold Iraqi oil, pumped through the older Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline.
The road forks. Straight on, behind fortified fences, is the terminal itself. An armoured Jandarma jeep overtakes us, patrolling the site perimeter. A sharp right turn back onto a bumpy road takes us into the upper part of the village of Gölovası, whose residents have found themselves neighbours to an international oil terminal.
Red, green and white houses peer from behind the fig trees and cacti lining the road. Roosters crow while teenage boys and girls in blue school uniforms walk down the hill. Stopping to ask for directions, we are spotted by a stout man with a pen dangling from his shirt, hooked between the buttons. Tahsin Göregen, is chair of the local fishing cooperative. ‘The pipeline is pumping now. We are still fishing. But it will all end. I will guide you to the harbour, it’s only a short drive.’
As we leave the upper village, he explains that most of the 965 residents of Gölovası depend on fishing for their income. Although the traditional land of the village is very fertile, little is now owned by the farmers: their best fields were effectively purchased on a compulsory basis by BTC Co., and have become the site of the oil terminal.
‘The biggest problem is that BTC is stopping us from fishing, stopping us from doing our work. The fishing area gets smaller and the forbidden area is big.’ Tahsin explains that the sea off Gölovası is divided into a red zone and a green zone. The red zone is near the pier, and the fishing boats are not allowed to enter it. The green zone is larger, and surrounds the red. ‘We can enter it, but must not fish in it. To reach the open sea, we must pass through the green zone. So we have lost much of our fishing area.’
‘The restrictions are enforced by the BTC coastguard. But they hassle us even when we aren’t in the forbidden zone. The coastguard boats are always coming to check us, and fining us for technicalities. They are driving us bankrupt and sending many people to prison.’
We emerge from the dense trees of Lower Gölovası to a small sunlit harbour filled with fishing boats. The harbour entrance faces north into a bay dominated by the BTC terminal a few hundred metres along the shoreline. Two long piers project into the Mediterranean. Further offshore, tankers lie anchored, waiting to collect their
cargo. Sangachal gathered the oil from beneath the sea; at Ceyhan it is being pumped into ships that carry it across the waters.
The fishing boats putter back to the harbour in the morning sun, having hauled up nets cast the night before. Most boats are white, lined with gaudy green, red or blue stripes; on some, the decks and tiny cabins are painted brown or blue; all fly the Turkish crescent flag. At the quayside, families await each boat, passing breakfast to the fishermen and climbing on board to help with the catch. Gulls circle, waiting for scraps.
Invited on to a small blue boat, we jump from the quay and barely avoid a plunge in the water, to the amusement of those on board. Ahmet is a friend of Tahsin’s, and sits together with his wife and son, working their nets, dextrously untangling pink and rainbow-coloured shrimp: the large ones end up in a bucket, the little ones go back in the sea. It looks easy, so we try our hands at it.
Most of the shrimp have caught themselves repeatedly, and are wrapped up tight. Once released from the ropes that hold them, their first reaction is to slash with claws serrated and razor sharp. Mika smiles, finally pulling a shrimp free after a ten-minute battle, but is taken by surprise when the little creature jabs a nearby thumb. Unluckily for the shrimp, it falls on the wooden deck, not in the sea.
Ahmet laughs and holds out his hands: tough, but covered in small scars. ‘A shrimp fisherman’s hands,’ he says with a smile. ‘Our shrimp are the best in the Mediterranean. This is a very fertile stretch of sea, the shallow İskenderun Bay – the marine Çukurova.’
‘We take our bread from the sea. But we’ve had no peace since the BTC pier was built here. Now when I go out, I always have to worry if the coastguard will fine me.’ New restrictions have limited the amount he can work. It used to take thirty minutes to get to the fishing grounds, but now he needs ninety minutes to get beyond the Green Zone. His boat is too small to go far offshore. ‘When the pipeline was being built, they said the forbidden zone would be 400 metres. But now it’s a nautical mile. How can you equate 400 metres with 1,850 metres? They never mentioned that there would be a limiting zone this size.’ Ahmet is finding it impossible to fish, and friends are saying that they will leave and go elsewhere. ‘Some people have already left, just in the last year. I’ve worked here as a fisherman since I was a child. I’m forty-two now and won’t be able to do anything else.’
The Oil Road Page 31