Reaction Grows As Yalova Municipality Clears 180 Trees To Build Road

The Yalova Municipality, run by the Republican People's Party (CHP), is now at the center of a debate swirling across Turkey for having cut down some 180 trees on Thursday in order to construct a new traffic intersection in Tonami Square.

According to several media outlets, the area, owned by the Yalova Special Provincial Administration, was full of cedar and plane trees and other greenery. Starting on Thursday morning, municipality workers appeared on the site and started cutting down trees. Saying they had special permission from the municipality, their work drew a strong reaction from residents and passers-by. Locals also told the press that there are already several roads near the green area.

Some CHP deputies reacted to the incident by posting tweets on their official Twitter accounts. CHP İstanbul deputy Melda Onur strongly denounced Yalova Mayor Vefa Salman, saying it was impossible to justify the cutting down of those trees.

“How can we defend this massacre while we are trying to protect Validebağ, Gezi and Yırca's olive trees? When are you going to take those trees into consideration? Are they not important just because the CHP cut them down? Are you going to eat those trees for breakfast, Mr. Mayor? God damn you all!” Onur said in subsequent tweets.

Last Friday, the Kolin Group construction company sent bulldozers to fell all the trees in the village of Yırca in Manisa province, which locals say was home to about 6,000 olive trees, in order to build a thermal power plant. In a similar incident early on Oct. 25 excavators entered İstanbul's Altunizade neighborhood with the protection of police officers to raze an area near the entrance of Validebağ Grove, a first-degree protected green space, and construct a mosque in its place. Both cases drew strong reactions from deputies, nongovernmental organizations and the public.

CHP İstanbul deputy Aykut Erdoğdu also expressed his displeasure with the Yalova Municipality's decision to cut down the trees, saying: “Cutting all those trees in order to build an intersection is just unacceptable. It does not matter who does it. We have to find a way to allow for development without endangering nature,” Erdoğdu said in his tweets.

Speaking to the local press following the reactions, Mayor Salman said they were obliged to cut down the trees as Turkey does not possess the technical know-how to remove and replant trees that are 30 meters tall.

Some officials from the Yalova Municipality at the scene got into an argument with locals, saying traffic congestion was a major problem and thus an alternative road is needed, several local media outlets reported. Officials also claimed that the trees were not cut down but merely removed, but pictures from the area clearly prove that hundreds of trees were cut down.

Tuncay Opçin, the publishing manager for the magazine Chronicle, also reacted to the destruction of the trees in several posts on his Twitter account on Friday morning. “What the Yalova mayor did is nothing but vandalism. You cannot defend cutting [the trees down] by promising to plant new trees,” Opçin tweeted. “We are no different from each other when it comes to barbarism,” Opçin said in another tweet.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)