TURKEY - Deforestation is a burning issue in Turkey. While the media point to "irresponsible tourists who don't extinguish campfires properly," there are other reasons for man-made forest fires in western Turkey. In the coastal areas, the vast majority of fires are set or ordered by the so-called "land Mafia" who build holiday villages, service areas, hotels and other forms of development that bring "money as sweet as honey."
The land Mafia also erects villas and luxury houses in the non-tourist areas of big cities. They often gain title to the land by "convincing" the previous owner to sell at gunpoint. Ugly estates and "dwarf skyscrapers" rise everywhere.
During the past 15 years, deforestation in the eastern Kurdish half of Turkey has mainly been caused by security forces burning down the forests to deprive PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party) guerrillas of cover. Tens of thousands of hectares of forests have been burned, mostly by units of the Turkish Army and by ultranationalist anti-Kurdish Special Operation Teams.
Since 1990, more than 3,000 Kurdish villages in the southeast have been evacuated, bombarded and torched by Turkish security forces. The Turkish media issue fake condemnations of the "carelessly caused" forest fires in the west but remain completely silent on the far more sinister scorched earth policy in the southeast, which has left no stable ecosystem in the region.
Some alternative periodicals have tried to raise an outcry on this issue. One of these, the Kurdish daily Ozgur Ulke, was bombed and subsequently shut down.
- Umit Ozturk/Green Pepper
Arsonists Torch Turkey