Turkey's olive growers protest Eurogold development project

April, 2007

Value Based Learning

The account that follows describes the struggle between olive growers in Turkey and Eurogold, a French based conglomerate. It is is based on an article in the Sierra Magazine that asks what human rights have to do with environmental protection.

One November day in 1996, a line of logging trucks rumbled into an old olive-growing region of Turkey, near the ancient Pillars of Pergamum. The government-paid loggers had come to clear land for a new gold-mining project sponsored by the French-based conglomerate Eurogold. But they were able to fell only about 2,500 trees before a small group of incensed olive growers got in their way. The stand-off lasted for months, to the increasing annoyance of Eurogold and the Turkish government. Early this April, out rolled the logging trucks and in rolled a line of tanks.

The confrontation had been years in the making. When Eurogold first proposed the mine in 1993, the farmers had been willing to listen. But after preliminary drilling rendered their water undrinkable for four months, they ended negotiations and started protesting. Backed by environmental and human-rights groups in Turkey, Germany, and the United States, the farmers filed a legal appeal and then began to familiarize themselves with cyanide heap-leaching, Eurogold's planned mining technique.

Eurogold, meanwhile, had launched a public-relations campaign designed to convince the farmers that their concerns were backward and outdated. At a public meeting in Ankara, Turkey's capital, one company representative even went so far as to claim-falsely-that "an influential group in the United States called the Sierra Club" had recently endorsed the use of cyanide in gold mining. But the farmers quickly rebuffed this and other misleading assertions at meetings of their own, to which they invited the 300,000 people who live near the mine site, next to the old Asia Minor city now called Bergama. They pointed out, for instance, that Eurogold's "leakproof" tailings pond would in fact be situated on an active fault line. When the olive growers organized a referendum on the mine last year, nine of ten eligible voters in the immediate vicinity turned out. Not one voted in favor of the project.

The farmers were prepared, then, when the tanks descended on Bergama. They immediately countered with a peaceful demonstration that involved 10,000 people and 1,000 tractors. At this point, if the Turkish government had used force to repress citizens exercising their basic civil rights, it would have compromised its claim to democracy. Within days, Turkey's highest administrative court had declared the mine unconstitutional, shutting it down completely.

Given Eurogold's financial resources and the Turkish government's desperation to attract foreign investment, the farmers will probably have further battles to fight. But the court's watershed decision has international implications. The judges ruled that Eurogold's mine violates the provision of Turkey's recently amended constitution that protects every Turk's fundamental right to a healthy, intact environment. They set a precedent, in other words, for regarding pollution not as a matter to be debated among technicians but as an issue of basic human rights.

Excerpted from 'A Planet Unfree: What do human rights have to do with environmental protection?'  by Aaron Sacks. Retrieved 4/2007 from http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199711/humanrights.asp