444 Resisting Publics
it provide for other forms of articulation between spatial copresence and
discursive arenas of debate?
ith the lifting of emergency rule and the relative easing of repres-W
sion in the cities of the province, numerous urban threats and issues have
been diagnosed and collectively exposed by organized groups in Tunceli:
from the lack of adapted devices for handicapped people to a general
social (and political) degeneration marked by prostitution, alcoholism
and drug addiction; and from the economic dependency of women to the
forgetting of native tongues and local history. Each of these was translated
into specific collective actions to reclaim space. Here I will focus on one
of these issues: the inhabitants’ campaign to halt the building of dams in
Turkey.
ith the funding of a Turkish-Euro-American consortium, the W
Turkish state began the construction of eight dams and hydroelectric
power plants in the province, in the late 1990s, six of them within the
national park itself.^47 These dams were to furnish a little less than 1% of
the national electricity supply. Some local construction companies were
involved, but the dams do not offer any middle or long-term perspec-
tive of development (through irrigation for example) for the province. To
carry out this project, nearly sixty villages would be flooded, with a total
of eighty-four villages evacuated. Parts of the roads between the districts
and the provincial centers would also probably be swamped, which would
reinforce the districts’ isolation.
ow was this dam project framed as an issue motivating collec-H
tive action? Tunceli émigrés living in major Turkish cities initiated the
debate in 1999, later joined by some organizations in Tunceli. At first, they
identified the dam construction as a new and barely veiled attempt by
the state to silence Tunceli and its rebellious identity. In recent years, the
campaign has grown into a broader environmentalist movement, increas-
ing its resonance beyond Tunceli and far-left circles. It is both discussed
within diverse institutionalized public arenas (in courtrooms, in the
Turkish Parliament, in the media) and articulated on different scales and
in various places, through the migrants’ associations themselves but also
through their involvement within different broader environmental plat-
forms. The movement has come to address the broad public as “the people
of Munzur,” a category that embraces the people of Tunceli as well as any