Sakarya residents stand in opposition to controversial cable car project

Ferhat Yaşar / DUVAR

Residents of the Sapanca district of the Western Anatolian province of Sakarya have spent two and a half months protesting a cable car project slated to be built in the area on the grounds that the project will result in the cutting of 3000 trees and will harm the ecological balance of the nearby Lake Sapanca. 

The tender for the project was awarded to a cable car company based in the city of Bursa last year by the Sakarya municipality, with which it signed a 25-year revenue sharing agreement. The cable car is to be built over land that has been designated as an earthquake assembly area, and residents have occupied the construction site day and night in order to halt the project. 

According to Kırkpinar Environment and Nature Sports Club President Husamettin Koçlu, local residents have been opposed to the cable car project from the beginning: 

“We are not in favor of a cable car being built, it will be a massacre of nature. A cable car is not appropriate for this region, and this region has no need for one. On the side below and on the way up within an area of 9,600 square meters and on the top of the hill in an area covering around 60,000 square meters, thousands of trees between the ages of five and 80 will be cut down, and beyond that an area of 800,000 square meters will be zoned for development,” Koçlu said. 

According to industrial engineer Salim Aydın, the project is illegal as a license and environmental impact report was never obtained, and that this constitutes a crime on the behalf of the municipality: 

“This a rent-seeking project. It is out of the question that this is a project that will benefit the people here,” Aydın said, also emphasizing that thousands of trees were slated to be cut down, including bay laurel trees that were being used for medical purposes. Aydın claimed that Sakarya's mayor said that he didn't think many trees were going to be cut down for the project. 

“As the neighborhood, we have been and will be bothered [by the project]. There was a basketball court that our children played on, and they forcibly took it from us. The neighborhood never got the news. One person entered the tender and they said go and do it. They made the decision without approval from a single resident. We are against this, they are going to destroy our trees and green spaces,” said resident Fatma Tıknaz. 

Tıknaz added that hundreds of police came at 6 a.m. one morning and attacked demonstrators who had been camped out at the site for two and a half months in tents. 

“Sakarya's fertile agricultural land is being destroyed by the Northern Marmara Highway and our land is being stripped away. Organized industrial sites are creating irreversible environmental destruction. Lake Sapanca, which is a fundamental source of water for the Marmara region, is getting drier every day due to climate change, and is becoming polluted by profit-generating projects,” said the Northern Forests Defense activist group in a statement.