Yırca Village Ecstatic At Kolin Decision To Relocate Proposed Power Plant

The residents of Yırca village were overjoyed on Wednesday when a Turkish construction and contracting company which previously uprooted over 6,000 olive trees in their village in order to construct a power plant announced a change in the site of the construction to one 15 kilometers away.

The Kolin Group, which was heavily criticized in November when it uprooted over 6,000 olive trees in Yırca to prepare for the construction of a power plant in the area, announced that the new sites determined for the proposed construction of a power plant are somewhere in between Türkpiyale and Kayrakaltı, nearly 15 kilometers away from Yırca.

The company has said that the documents for licensing applications and the change of address had been submitted to the authorities. The statement made by the company, which was criticized for unnecessarily uprooting thousands of olive trees, said the new site had no olive trees on it and that the nearest olive tree grove is three kilometers away.

Kolin was accused of ripping out the olive trees before the judicial process regarding the suitability of the area was completed. The company began removing the trees after an alleged tipoff that the Council of State would render a decision stating that the land was unsuitable for construction in its current state. Indeed, in December, the Council of State's decision of a stay of execution against the urgent expropriation of olive groves was in favor of the villagers, who were staunchly against the construction of the power plant in their village and had taken the issue to court. A Council of State ruling calling for the construction to be halted had reportedly been leaked to the Kolin Group before the trees were cut down.

The 6th Chamber of the Council of State had earlier issued a temporary stay of execution on a Cabinet decision to urgently expropriate 388,000 square meters of olive groves in favor of the construction of the Soma Kolin coal power plant. The council further discussed the objection of the villagers to the expropriation and annulled it on Thursday.

Mustafa Akın, the head of the village, expressed his pleasure at the company's decision and hailed it as a judicial victory: “We knew we were right from the beginning. The company only had the expropriation decree in its hands and we had the laws in our hands; we had the Olive Law [and] the Soil Protection Act. We always said that the laws were above a Cabinet decree.”

Akın continued: “We wanted the company to wait for the judicial process to come to an end. What happened to our olive groves happened. We are pleased about the result, but it is a bittersweet happiness. It will take 15 to 20 years for those trees to grow again.” (Cihan/Today’s Zaman)