Environmental and ecologists groups and organisations are promoting a Global Action Day on Saturday, 28 April, to draw attention to the situation of Amed's 7 thousand year old borough of Sur and to the 12 thousand year old Hasankeyf.

The action will take place in 20 different countries. Different initiatives have been organised in various cities around the world, from Germany to Russia, from Iran to Iraq and the US. Many cities in Turkey also have planned actions.

Some of the actions are as follows:

Seyir Hill in Hasankeyf-Batman: at 12pm Hasankeyf organisations will make a press conference. At 3.30pm at the premises of the Petrol-İş Union, the Yilmaz Güney Film Festival will present the film by Ali Ergül, on the resistance fight by the people of Hasankeyf.

In Sur, at the Ulu mosque in Sur, after the press conference, visit to the boroughs of Alipaşa ve Lalebey and then music and poetry performances and documentary screening.

A press conference will be held in Istanbul, in front of Taksim Galatasaray High School. The same press release will be read at the Bergama Cultural Centre in Izmir.

Simultaneous actions are also planned in Van, Antalya and Ankara.

Social media will also be active on Saturday: actions and hashtags will be launched from the Sur Platform twitter account.

The destruction of Sur

In Sur people have been living for 7 thousand years. From 2007, Sur has been highly well organized both socially and politically with different structures having been set up to deliver more democracy and women's emancipation.

When the AKP launched its unilateral war against the Kurdish people in 2015, it began by attacking Sur and committing crimes against humanity.

Thousands of houses were destroyed and thousands of people were forced to leave.  Reminiscent of the civil war in the 90s, these crimes were documented in the February 2017 report of the UN Human Rights Committee.

Last March in Paris, the International People’s Tribunal heard from witnesses how Sur was bombed and destroyed by the Turkish State, how people were burned alive and how hundreds of civilians could not be rescued as police and security forces didn’t allow the wounded to be reached and helped.

Hasankeyf: 12 thousand years of history under water

Hasankeyf is Batman's 12-thousand-year-old city, which will be flooded by the Ilısu Dam. In the name of “progress” like it happened to another historic jewel, Zeugma, Hasankeyf will soon not exist.

The site has a unique history closely interwoven with the Euphrates river, and it’s to many extents even reacher than Ephesus, Troy and Cappadocia. Furthermore, Hasankeyf fulfilled 9 of the 10 UNESCO’s criteria. Yet UNESCO said nothing against the destruction of the important historical site.

The Ilisu Dam project means that 80,000 people will have their houses destroyed and will be forced to resettle in another area, in houses built by TOKI (Governmental Mass Housing A