SIVAS AND YOZGAT: COMPLACENCY IN CENTRAL ANATOLIA

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C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ANKARA 002083

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/03/2018

TAGS: OSCE, PGOV, TU

SUBJECT: SIVAS AND YOZGAT: COMPLACENCY IN CENTRAL ANATOLIA

Classified By: POL Counselor Daniel O'Grady, for reasons 1.4 (b,d)

1. (C) Summary: The ruling AKP party remains confident that

it will win the provinces of Central Anatolia in 2009 local

elections. This is an area that is conservative and

religious by nature and AKP's administration there is largely

seen as successful. The provinces of Sivas and Yozgat

exemplify the region. Still, the AKP administration of both

provinces, accustomed to years of economic stability and

growth, appears unprepared for a possible economic downturn,

offering a slim -- but tantalizing -- chance to the

opposition. End summary.

2. (SBU) We visited Sivas and Yozgat on 25-26 November in the

lead-up to local elections in March 2009. They are the

capitals of two rural provinces due east of Ankara, and are

largely representative of conservative inner Anatolia: both

provinces voted overwhelmingly for AKP in the past two

elections; in the previous two general elections, they sent

to parliament representatives from an assortment of parties

representing the center, nationalist, and religious right.

Sivas is a bustling city of roughly 300,000 people; Yozgat is

a smaller town of 74,000. Sivas has a long and varied

history. It is as a former Armenian and Seljuk capital and

served as an Ottoman administrative center after being taken

from the wreckage of Tamerlane's Empire in 1408. In 1919, a

congress held in Sivas, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decided

to oppose foreign occupation, to break away from the Sultan's

government in Istanbul, and to found what would become the

Turkish Republic. Both Sivas and Yozgat are largely

agricultural: because their economies are based on basic

necessities, such as wheat, cotton, sugar beets, and wool,

they may be better able to weather an economic downturn than

other provinces, but economic worries still will dominate the

pre-election political debate of the coming months.

ALL THAT GLITTERS...

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3. (C) The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) holds

the mayor's office of both Sivas and Yozgat. Both mayors

were brimming with confidence about the good they'd brought

>
to their towns and about their prospects in the coming

elections. Sami Aydin, the mayor of Sivas, showed us a book

of photographs depicting Sivas before and after his term:

broken, uneven sidewalks had been replaced with neat, broad,

colored cement walkways; the main intersection in town (in

front of the building where Ataturk convened the republic's

nascent government) went from ugly, blasted wasteland, to a

repaved, orderly square complete with fountain; the filthy,

garbage-filled ditches next to the downtown area are now the

Aksu project, a series of beautiful canals full of sparkling

blue water.

4. (C) He also boasted of replacing asbestos-laden water

pipes, beginning the construction of a waste water

purification plant, and bringing natural gas to supplant

air-polluting coal. Aydin claimed that the money to fund

these projects comes in part from EU grants, but also from

better resource management. He claimed that the new pipes

cut water loss from 60 to 20 percent, for instance, and that

the city actually saved money by retiring old buses that

required constant costly maintenance, replacing them with

new, more reliable buses. The result is that Sivas is no

longer losing people to emigration and has actually started

attracting new residents in the past year.

5. (C) Yusuf Baser, the mayor of Yozgat, is equally proud of

his achievements: "Because Yozgat's license plates carry the

number 66, I promised 66 development projects. We have

completed 65 of them." Among these projects are paved roads

("the first asphalt these people have seen"),a new town

square, a solid waste disposal system and purification plant,

a renovated Ottoman villa turned museum, a microcredit

project to allow women to open handicraft stores,

tourist-friendly thermal spas, and incentives for added

investment in the local sugar beet processing and metallurgy

plants, to name but a few. Both men are confident that AKP

will retain the mayoralties of their cities, predicting 50

percent support at the polls, and neither thought that the

global economic crisis would reach as far as their towns.

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6. (C) AKP provincial chairmen in both cities were equally

optimistic. They accepted that this would be AKP's toughest

election yet, but were certain of victory. Zeki Kilic, the

AKP chairman in Sivas said AKP's election strategy would

emphasize confidence, trust, sincerity, and provision of

services. The people could see the development AKP had

brought to the city over the past six years; this, coupled

with the trust and sincerity with which AKP works would carry

the day. The chairman in Yozgat, Zekeriya Avsar, echoed

similar themes, saying that explaining and showing AKP's

previous development successes would convince voters to once

again vote for AKP. When asked what AKP would do if the

looming economic crisis were to hit Turkey, he responded that

the people who lead well in prosperity would be trusted by

the voters to lead well in hardship.

...MAY NOT BE GOLD

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7. (C) Opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leaders in

both cities paint a far gloomier picture. They claim that

the AKP's alleged economic successes are entirely cosmetic,

and may actually be harmful, rather than beneficial. Bulent

Renda Deniz, the CHP provincial chairman in Sivas, pointed to

the Aksu project as a perfect example of this seeming

contradiction. Although people deserve to have a clean,

attractive city center, more important to them is having work

with which to support their families. Projects like Aksu,

repaving sidewalks, and planting trees do not provide

long-term work for the citizens of Sivas and do not bring

outside investment. They only give jobs to the owners of the

construction companies and materials suppliers, who are not

from Sivas. He alleges further that the improvements are

concentrated only along the few major streets in Sivas; "just

fifty meters" from these streets, the pipes are still made of

asbestos, the roads are still either unpaved or full of

potholes, and the buildings are decrepit. Deniz also

questioned where the funds for such projects come from. He

suspects Sivas is deeply in debt, but as the budget is not

available for review, he cannot prove it.

8. (C) CHP members in Yozgat made similar allegations about

the city beautification projects there. The CHP provincial

chairman, Ali Keven, claimed that these surface investments

are part of a "beggar strategy" for elections. AKP keeps

Yozgat looking good for outsiders, but generates no new jobs;

it then provides the jobless with fundamental needs, such as

coal, health services, and food, forcing the masses to vote

for AKP, lest a new administration curtail the benefits upon

which they have come to depend. He noted that 20 percent of

the population is poor, and that three quarters of the

farmers in the area could not afford to use fertilizer in

their fields this year; these people will be dependent on

government handouts, and will vote for AKP to ensure that

handouts continue. Both men said CHP's electoral strategy

would emphasize transparency and accountability in governance

as a way to curb extravagance and corruption. A separate

conversation with the Vice Rector of Sivas's Cumhuriyet

University seems to support CHP claims: he said that though

roughly half of the students at the university are from

Sivas, most leave after graduation because they cannot find

work at home, despite the fact that engineering and

agriculture are two of the school's strongest departments.

8. (C) COMMENT: CHP criticisms are not entirely misplaced.

The projects in Sivas are, indeed, very attractive, but

nothing mayor Aydin mentioned or that we saw in Sivas

appeared to offer any significant job creation or investment

opportunities. Mayor Baser's programs appear to have more

potential. How AKP will fare in March's local elections may

depend on how vulnerable Turkey's economy proves to be to the

global economic crisis. Under normal circumstances,

provinces like Sivas and Yozgat should be safe bets for AKP

at the polls. But neither province's mayor nor provincial

AKP chairman could elucidate a definite strategy for

weathering a deep crisis. If the economy were to enter rapid

decline soon, AKP could have difficulty repeating its

landslide electoral success.

Visit Ankara's Classified Web Site at

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http://www.intelink.sgov.gov/wiki/Portal:Turk ey

JEFFREY

SIVAS AND YOZGAT: COMPLACENCY IN CENTRAL ANATOLIA

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