A government-backed mining project has provoked fierce opposition in a village traditionally known for its support of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). For the past two years, local residents and environmentalists have organised protests in Kirazlıyayla, in north-western Turkey, at the construction of a zinc, lead and copper processing facility. Protest leaders, many of whom are local women, have been detained and prosecuted.
Emine Toy, 69, a Kirazlıyayla-born farmer, told Inside Turkey that construction work has harmed crops and grazing land. “They’re going to poison us,” she said. “They just turned a blind eye to our pleas to not build the mine in our village, despite knowing full well the harm it would do. I used to go out to the fields every other day, but I no longer can.”
Toy said that one reason villagers are angry is because the company in charge, Meyra Mining, failed to consult with them before it began work two years ago. Although mining has been carried out in the area for years, material used to be taken away to be processed elsewhere. The construction of the new processing facility, which is still under way, means that mining activity and village life have become more closely intertwined than ever before. Chief among the villagers’ complaints is that the construction site hinders their access to the local cemetery, and that the work disrupts farming.
“They completely destroyed the greenery here, Toy said. “We tried to protect it but we don’t have anything to leave our children any more.” Inside Turkey has been shown photographs from before and after work began that appear to show damage to the village landscape, including of a pond, previously used by villagers for irrigation and to water their animals, that has now dried up.
“We can’t even visit the dead,” said another farmer, 68 year-old Mesude Eren. “They might as well bury us there if we can’t even visit graveyards.”
According to Toy, the company has not been responsive to their concerns.
“Meyra Mining gathered us all in the city square coffee house [last year] and told us ‘We will build that mine no matter what you do,’” she said. Officials from Meyra told the villagers that their project had obtained all the necessary government permits to continue.
In 2019, villagers held their first protest against the construction project. Protests continued, and in May 2020, local women tried to prevent the construction of a cesspool by blocking the roads.
“We saw both gendarmerie and police because of this mine, we laid down on the ground in front of bulldozers, they trampled my husband while detaining him,” Toy said. Twelve women who were detained during protests are still subject to ongoing legal proceedings.
In previous elections, the AKP has received as much as 90% of the vote in Kirazlıyayla, which has a population of little more than a hundred people, but the dispute has made some villagers angry with their local leaders.
“They all know how to ask for votes during election time but none of them would hear us out when we said we didn’t want the mine,” Toy said.
A majority of the residents of Kirazlıyayla have attended protests in the past two years, and opposition to the mine has transformed the lives of the village women who participated. Like many Turkish villages, public space in Kirazlıyayla was traditionally dominated by men. That has now changed, said Toy.
“We would rarely ever step foot out of the house before, let alone sit on the village square,” Toy said. Now, local women have made the central square the main site for their protests, where they display banners and chant slogans such as “stop the devastation in Kirazlıyayla” and “we don’t want mines in our village”.
Sevim Obuz, a 57 year-old farmer, told Inside Turkey that villagers’ requests to meet with government officials have so far gone largely unanswered. The mayor of Yenişehir, the municipality in which Kirazlıyayla is located, visited in July last year.
“He left and never came back after we told him to stand up for us,” Obuz said. In March this year, a group of village women visited Ankara, asking to meet government officials. They were refused.
Villagers have voted for AKP candidates in every election since the party won power nationally in 2003 but now, claims Obuz, “no votes for AKP will come out of Kirazlıyayla”. The most recent elections were in 2019, before protests began, when 96 out of 106 eligible residents voted for the AKP.
Obuz told Inside Turkey that she had now lost faith in officials.
“Everyone from the elected village leader to the prosecutor, to the district governor is with the AKP,” she said. “Everyone we tried to talk to shut the door on us. Nobody stood behind us.”
“There won’t be a village for our children or grandchildren to come back to after the mine,” she said. “We have walnuts, artichokes and cherries on our fields, but they won’t be there for long.”
Legislation concerning forestry practices and construction in green spaces has been modified to favour private corporations at the expense of local inhabitants in recent years, according to Şafak Erdem, an environmental campaigner in Yenişehir.
“In recent years, the population has shrunk in villages that risk disappearing under the pressure of mining and energy projects,” Erdem said. “Kirazlıyayla is just one of those villages. Locals find themselves in conflict with institutions that should be supporting them.”
Erdem said that the mining project in Kirazlıyayla was approved by Turkey’s environment and urbanisation ministry, despite being in violation of regulations.
When asked by Inside Turkey to comment on the claims in this story, Meyra’s CEO, Sümeyra Eşgün, denied that the company’s operations were causing environmental harm.
Eşgün said that no chemicals or cyanide that constitute poison were produced in the mining activities in the area, adding that all waste was contained in leak-proof compartments that were proven to protect living creatures and farmland.
The official claimed that the project’s only environmental side effect was its occupation of 15 hectares of forest land, where some 3,000 trees were cut down, but that the harm would be reversed following the facility’s decade-long operation period.
“The project area will become a forest again after rehabilitation work that will be carried out following the facility’s 10-year-long operations. It will become apparent that the facility has no harm on the environment or human health once it becomes active, and everyone will see that it doesn’t have negative or irreversible effects,” Eşgün said.
Meyra Mining reported in all their petitions for an environmental impact assessment clearing that the operations wouldn’t release any floatation that would harm the earth, water or living creatures for years to come.
According to Ertuğrul Aksoy, an academic at Uludağ University’s agriculture school, the company later expanded its plans, producing a new report that he said contained conflicting figures.
“The amount of required water and chemicals are reported conflictingly in the report,” Aksoy said. “Information is lacking concerning its negative impact on the people of Kirazlıyayla, and their farming and animal breeding activity.”
The enrichment of lead, zinc and copper in the floatation facility will require an annual 1,200 tonnes of chemicals, Aksoy said, adding that the transportation of the substances creates risk not just for local water supplies, farmland and living creatures, but also for nearby Yenişehir and Iznik.
When asked, Meyra declined to provide a response to these claims. Construction work at Kirazlıyayla continues.