The Kurds regard the city as their cultural heartland. Turkey sees it as an emblem of resistance. When Hasankeyf and surrounding settlements are drowned by the dam, some 20,000 Kurds will be forced from their homes and moved into model villages in which they can be monitored and controlled. Our government, which went to war in the spring to stop ethnic cleansing, is, in the winter, underwriting it. It is not hard to see why.
British companies see the country's defence sector as a massive potential market.
The Labour government's involvement in the Ilisu dam may be the biggest corruption scandal in western Europe, but you could be forgiven for having missed it. The decision was, it seems, to have been announced on Christmas Eve, but when the Hamilton verdict broke, the government seized its chance. The headline on the press release it distributed indicated only that Stephen Byers, the secretary of state for trade and industry, had released reports about the dam. A story which should have been at the top of the bulletins was either missed or excluded altogether. The Labour government, in other words, has successfully hidden its own corruption behind a tale of Tory sleaze.