The Spanish director Iciar Bollain strikes the audience succinctly at heart and conscience with her excellent 2010 film ‘Even the Rain’, which tells the stories of the colonisation of Latin America in the 15th-16th century and the struggle of the Bolivian people against the global corporations which try to privatise their water supply in 2000 simultaneously. Bollain’s film strikingly points out to one of the most recent controversies in Turkey: the Turkish people’s organised struggle against the privatisation of energy and water supply in particular. The so-called ‘Platform for No to the Marketization of Water’ which has been established in November 2008 to protest against the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul in March 2009 was organised by the collaboration of World Water Forum and the Greater Municipality of Istanbul. The main idea behind the initial protests was to oppose against the conception of water as a ‘commodity’ by the World Water Forum and its sponsor, United Nations[1] and the collaboration of public organisations such as local governments and OECD and private companies for ‘determination of the value of water through market mechanisms’. Within the course of past 3 years, the Platform organised numerous demonstrations in various parts of Turkey such as Hopa, Saklıkent, Fındıklı and İkizdere where the Small-Scale Hydroelectric Plants (HES) are constructed and where the right to use the river basins has been granted to multi-national energy companies for 49 years. Indeed, the Statutory Decree numbered 648, which has been issued right after the 12 June 2011 general elections, abolished all natural protection areas (SIT) and put their declaration under the control of a government controlled committee instead of the independent Council for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage.
