KEBABBLE Turkey's odd man of the sea
By Fazile Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - Spending his life sailing the turquoise coves, inlets and
bays off Marmaris on the Mediterranean coast in the southwest of Turkey to
clear them of marine debris, Imdat Avci is a one-man environmental movement.
Once a careless defiler of the natural world, a traumatic experience in Imdat's
thirties converted him into an eco-warrior. Now scours the highways and
waterways of Turkey's Aegean coast tirelessly fighting inefficiency,
ingratitude and cruelty.
We meet on his 12-meter motorboat Ozgur (Freedom) in Marmaris Harbor. My
first impression - helped along by the abundant moustache - was that of a
sergeant major of the Windsor Davies mold, all bombast and bravado. He bossed
and browbeat the boat's crew - his wife, two children and two nurse
friends - as they swabbed the already spotless deck, made tea and generously
supplied breakfast.
He also, however, tolerated the general tomfoolery of his crew as they gently
ribbed him for additional orders. Having read about him before arriving, I knew
this was a man of independent spirit, but
was surprised to hear how young he was when it manifested.
"When I was 14, my dad beat me so I stole a hundred lira from my mother's purse
and left," said Imdat. "I hitched a lift with a lorry driver who took me to
Erzurum, where I meant to stay but was swindled out of my money. I walked for
three days to Artvin, [where] I stayed for three months before paying my way to
Bursa. After three or four years here as a washer I had enough money to move to
Istanbul."
He lived for the next 10 years in the Queen of Cities working as a runner, an
extra and a lighting man for films and advertisements.
He was happy, single and working in an exciting industry. But Turkey was a very
different place in the 1980s and his socialist leanings made him a target of
the police. With the help of a film director he fled their clutches to Marmaris
and discovered the town which has now been his home for nearly three decades.
With typical panache, he managed to talk his way onto one of the few tourist
boats as a chef.
It was during the course of this new career that he underwent an epiphany.
After cooking for a group of German tourists, he gathered all the rubbish
together - plastic and glass bottles, cans and food waste - and dumped them
overboard into the sea. Angry villagers from Karacasogut saw him from the shore
and rowed out to the yacht to protest.
"They came swarming over the sides of the boat like pirates," Imdat said. "We
rowed [but] they were angry about my littering and I was defiant about what I'd
done - so they beat me up. Of course they were right but I was too ignorant at
the time to think about my actions or their consequences."
After this incident he went into self-imposed exile on Cennet (Heaven) Island
just off the coast of Marmaris. He denies that was humiliated at being beaten
up or unwilling to face ridicule from harbor workers. Still, his exile smacks
of a desire for redemption. For three months he lived like a castaway on the
island in a shack he built, with just a car battery providing power for a
reading light and radio.
He had no food or water and bartered wood from the island for vital supplies as
he undertook the marathon task of cleaning the island of litter. It had never
been done before and he labored day and night using a wheelbarrow where it was
feasible and his hands where it was not. At the end of the three months, Cennet
Island was clean and Imdat was a changed man.
His choice of reading material, Jack London's Call of the Wild with its
strong themes of man and nature, may have played a key role in his
reincarnation as an eco-warrior. He had decided to sacrifice his own life to
the natural world and to do what he could, at the expense of his own material
gain, to honor and help the environment.
The challenges have mounted since the beginning of the 1990s. In 1991, a
corporation of Russian and Ukrainian businessmen shipped six dolphins and four
seals from a Soviet aquarium to Marmaris to put on a show for tourists. But
Imdat's friend, the English owner of the marina bar Scorpio, heard many
complaints about the animals' health and voiced these to Imdat. In what was to
set a pattern of protest, Imdat first started quietly by organizing a petition.
But this provoked no response from the local council, who had supported the
businessmen in their venture. Never shy of accepting a challenge, he took
himself down to the ticket office. "I had bought some chain and was getting
ready to chain myself to the railing when some Russians ran up and tried to
[beat] me. I left, but knew something had to be done. The animals were sick
with fungus, and stressed by the unfamiliar sea water and marina noise."
He went back to his boat and chained himself to a bed there, declaring the
start of his first of many hunger strikes. "By the third or fourth day I was
weak and becoming delirious. I was only drinking water or tea and smoking
cigarettes," he said. "The police came to try and take me away but tourists
stopped them. They even had candle-lit vigils to support me."
A day or two later Lale Ataman, the woman governor of Mugla, intervened and
sent the Russians and their sickly sea mammals home.
Imdat had made a discovery which would inspire the rest of his life as a
campaigner and environmentalist. If reasonable measures and approaches to the
authorities did not work, extreme measures that attracted the media might. Not
only was this a useful tool, but it must have appealed to his ego as well -
along with most environmentalists he covets some desire for recognition.
Marmaris was struck by a fierce forest fire in 1994 which raged through
surrounding forests threatening villages and wildlife. The inferno attracted
the attention of the national press and a pack of journalists descended on the
town to provide coverage.
Imdat was pleased to see them arrive, but less pleased with their behavior. Nor
was he impressed by the actions of the Cev-Der Marmaris, a local environmental
protection league. On the second day of their visit, Cev-Der gathered the
journalists and took them out for a boat trip in the bay. Imdat pleaded with
the organizing committee to go and help with the fire rather than day tripping.
After being ignored by both, he was inspired to denounce the offenders to the
rest of the world.
He wrote three boards in English, Turkish and German and placed them outside
his boat, naming and shaming those he believed had made a gross error in
judgment, and demanding their resignation. He also announced to the fascinated
reporters who had assembled that if they did not resign in 10 days he would cut
off a finger in protest.
He chuckles wryly and tells me, "it was the little finger of my right hand
which as you can see is a little crippled anyway". Cev-Der appealed to him to
be reasonable or at least negotiable in his demands, but he remained adamant
even when the president of the group offered to sacrifice himself. Imdat, an
"all-or-nothing" man, was unmoved.
On the ninth day the whole group resigned under the weight of public pressure.
There is little room for error in Imdat's world and he has no patience with the
inefficiency of others. He does not regret forcing Marmaris' environmental
group to disband as he does not believe in tailoring his judgments to suit
other people.
"They were using the environment to garner popularity and kudos for themselves,
not because they actually cared," Imdat said.
His campaigns continued throughout the 1990s. In 1996, he hit the headlines
again when a dead dolphin washed up on the beach of Yalcinada. The corpse was
polluting and stinking up the beach but no one would take responsibility for
removing it. Imdat went himself, dragged the large animal onto his boat and
sailed into the Netsel Marina in Marmaris. The council wanted nothing to do
with him or his dolphin. Frustrated at their total lack of interest, he poured
petrol over himself and threatened to self immolate.
The police were called and he was taken to the police station, with the
attentions of the press and public again saving him from prosecution. The
barrage of publicity that results from his extreme actions has also now finally
won him the cooperation of the council. When he goes out on his rubbish
clearing trips, the council sends a lorry to take away the results for
recycling.
Imdat is a forceful individual with tremendous charisma, but he lacks the
modern virtue of being a team player. He is very much what the Turks call tek
tabanca (a single gun firing).
Though he has done inestimable good work by planting thousands of trees,
single-handedly cycling and cleaning over eighty kilometers of roadsides, and
making countless trips to clean the coastal bays round Marmaris, he has little
long-range perspective on how his experiences might be harnessed to a larger
movement.
His experience and drive could be used to educate hundreds, if not thousands,
of schoolchildren in his hometown, but he does not visit local schools to talk
about what he does or why it's important. By his account, Turks are the worst
litterbugs of all the nationalities and he believes it will take generations of
education to change this.
He has led a hard and largely thankless life, with the path he has chosen
impoverishing him and his family. It is only with a stipend from the generous
Marmaris Chamber of Commerce and free healthcare from the Ahu Hetman hospital
that he and his children can afford to live at all. On a recent two-week trip
at sea cleaning rubbish, the fuel for his boat was donated by the German
Tan-Tur Holiday Company and the food by the Ahu-Hetman hospital.
If he was less stubborn and opinionated he may have had a better life, but his
message would have been diluted.
He is pessimistic about the future of the Marmaris area and the world: "I don't
believe in technology, it will bring the destruction of the world. Look at
Marmaris, nature was in balance here for hundreds of years, but in the last 25
it's grown out of all recognition. There are too many buildings, too much
destruction of the natural world."
He is tireless when it comes to helping the environment and refuses to give up.
"My actions may seem over the top, but if I don't commit myself body and soul
no one takes any notice," he said. "I'm not tired of what I do though, I live
for it and get pleasure from it."
Imdat still retains the creativity needed to think up eye-opening campaigns -
this year he has posters on his boat announcing he will not accept certain
Turkish celebrities on board due to their views on life and the environment -
but he is no longer a young man.
In the moments when he stops talking, I catch glimpses of the man behind the
public persona and see him as he really is - passionate and driven but aging, a
battle scarred veteran of too many campaigns.
Fazile Zahir is of Turkish descent, born and brought up in London. She
moved to Turkey in 2005 and has been writing full time since then.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
