The Turkish government is going ahead with two highly controversial projects that could lead to environmental and social catastrophes at a time when its own people have not yet overcome the trauma and material damage suffered during last year's earthquakes.

The site of one of the projects, planned to be Turkey's first nuclear plant, is even close to an earthquake fault-line. The other scheme - a dam to be built in the south by a British company - will not only wipe out scores of Kurdish cities and villages but is also likely to lead to war between Turkey and its Arab neighbours, Iraq and Syria. Justifying - as Ankara does - such ecological disasters as these on economic grounds is cynical enough in itself, but the benefits claimed for the project are themselves dubious, to say the least.

The plan to site a reactor at Akkuya on the Mediterranean coast has come under attack not just from anti-nuclear campaigners, but from other critics who argue the plan does not make economic sense for Turkey. Greenpeace, the environmentalist group, argues that the site at Akkuyu is 20km away from an earthquake fault-line in the Mediterranean that has not been explored by official Turkish geologists.

But there is also the widely-supported argument that the plant, which is to be financed by foreign borrowing, is a luxury that Turkey cannot afford when it is trying to bring its public finances under control with the help of a $4 billion standby loan from the International Monetary Fund.

There are three western consortia competing for the contract to build the plant, including one led by Westinghouse of the US, which is seen as the leading contender with a $3.3 billion proposal to build a 1,218 MW reactor. A $2.4 billion bid from a Franco-German consortium led by Seimens-Framatome is expected to face financing problems, given the German government's commitment to close down its own nuclear industry. The third, led by AECL of Canada, which has built nuclear power facilities in Pakistan, does not possess the geopolitical clout enjoyed by its US and European Union rivals.

A meeting between Gerhard Schroder, the German Chancellor, and heads of German power companies agreed on February 4 to give a working group until the end of the month to reach agreement on decommissioning of Germany's own 19 nuclear power plants. The cynical Germans can hardly wait to off-load on Turkey a technology they are eager to get rid of on grounds of safety and economy. And Ankara is willing to acquire it and use it on a site close to an earthquake fault-line.

The government does not even bother to deny the closeness of the site to the fault-line but says that it can cope with the problem, arguing that only nuclear power can generate the levels of electricity the country needs economically. The energy minister, during a radio interview on January 26, said: "We urgently need electricity on economic terms. Like Japan, we have no oil or gas and we need cheap electricity. Like Japan we can deal with the earthquake."

According to the energy ministry, the nuclear plant will also diversify Turkey's energy supply. But nuclear power will account for less than five percent of electricity generation even if two reactors are built, instead of the single one planned. And critics counter that Turkey - far from needing additional supplies - will suffer from over-capacity if it realises all its planned non-nuclear projects. They add that when all the extra costs, such as nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning, are taken into account, nuclear generated electricity will cost nine cents per kWh, compared with 4.2 cents for a gas-fired plant. Teas, the state-owned electricity utility rejects the nine cents figure as too high but admits that the "real costs are higher than the announced costs".

But Ankara is as unfazed by criticism of the nuclear plant project as it is by the campaign against its other controversial scheme, the Ilisu dam which is to be constructed on the Tigris river, 40 miles upstream of the Syria-Iraq border, in the heart of the Kurdish populated area. It will produce hydro-electricity and will be used for irrigation.

The reservoir will flood 52 villages and 15 towns, including Hasankeyf, a Kurdish town of 5,500 people and the only town in Anatolia which has survived since the Middle Ages, which is officially listed as being a protected archeological site by the Turkish government. The British government has offered to finance the project to the tune of ú200 million to help a British company, Balfour Beatty, to win the contract to build it - a move that has provoked anger among British and international environmental and political activists. Apart from the humanitarian and environmental problems, the construction of the dam will cause, Ankara is expected to use it to blackmail both Iraq and Syria, simply by shutting off water, and causing a regional war.

Tony Juniper, of Friends of the Earth, a vocal and active environmental group, is convinced that the project could lead to war. "We have to stop this project before the British government is party to fermenting war in the Middle East, destroying part of the homelands of the Kurdish people and major environmental destruction", he says.

But Britain, whose undeclared war on Iraq is costing it ú1 million a day, will not feel squeamish about pushing Ankara to war with Baghdad, and the Turkish government is not exactly renowned for its concern for the safety and well-being of Kurdish communities. The projects are not likely to be aborted by uncoordinated projects by angry activists. The US and EU countries that have effective leverage over the Turkish government are bidding for the contracts to build the projects. They clearly put their own business interests before the lives of Turkish citizens and the environmental protection of their country.

Muslimedia: February 16-29, 2000