Governance of the Ilisu Dam Project

Ilisu is a small village on the River Tigris in the Turkish province of Southeastern Anatolia, close to the boarders of Syria and Iraq. This village has become eponymous for the Ilisu Dam, a hydropower project with a targeted capacity of 1,200 megawatts. At a planned height of 136 meters, the dam would create a reservoir lake with a surface area of more than 300 km2, triggering the displacement of 55 65,000 people. During a field visit to the reservoir area, Ludwig W. Fliesser uncovered that villagers from the affected region had been expropriated without adequate compensation. This turned out to be the last scandal before the official export credit agencies of Austria, Ge