Referring to one of the most significant natural beauties of Turkey, the Ayder Plateau of northeastern province Rize, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said, "We have polluted Ayder" as if his government had not already turned all green spaces into a zone of construction for their proponents.
The reactionary mindset under the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has a proven record of destroying the environment in favour of mega of the en construction projects, has set its new target: Turkey’s one of the most beautiful natural wonders: the Ayder Plateau of Rize.
Speaking about the urban transformation of the Ayder Plateau, Erdoğan stated that Ayder will be zoned for construction under the AKP government.
Expressing that the AKP will turn the Ayder into an urban transformation area, Erdoğan did not forget to cite the Long Lake (Uzungöl) as an example. The Long Lake, located in Black Sea coast province Trabzon, was also one of the natural beauties of Turkey’s Black Sea Region before becoming a zone of construction due to the collaboration between the AKP government and the capitalists, particularly the Gulf capital.
Erdoğan and his government, as part of the plan to hand over the natural structure of the Black Sea to hydroelectric power plants (HES), highways and overbuilding zones, had previously introduced a highway project called the "Green Road", planning to consolidate the plateaus in Rize to make the region a trade center, while this move had been widely protested by the citizens.
The Long Lake was another natural area that suffered from aggressive construction projects of the AKP government. In the last images of the Long Lake taken by a helicopter, it is seen that almost all natural ecological structure has been lost due to excessive construction and overbuilding. The before and after images of the Long Lake can be seen below:
Issuing a statement to soL news portal as a response to Erdoğan, the Fırtına-Initiative (an initiative formed by the volunteers against the AKP’s ‘Green Road’ project) member Birkan Yüksel said, "Erdoğan’s statement is a death warrant for the Ayder Plateau."
Stating that there are no examples that can be considered positive in the projects carried out on the regional plateaus, Yüksel noted that AKP has been pushing the Black Sea into an irreversible catastrophe with its construction policies under the guise of urban transformation.
Under the guise of “urban transformation”, AKP has been handing over the natural beauties of the Black sea coast to the Gulf capital for years despite the massive public protests.
