The Refugee Project evolved out of the work of the Ilisu Dam Campaign, which was formed in 1999 to oppose any British government financial support for a British company to build the proposed Ilisu Dam in south-eastern Turkey. If built, the dam would affect 78,000 people, the majority of them Kurdish, and heighten the risk of water wars with downstream countries.
The Ilisu Dam Campaign, a coalition of human rights and environmental organisations and Kurdish refugees in Britain, argued that £200 million of British taxpayers' money should not support the British construction firm, Balfour Beatty, contracted by the Turkish government to build the dam. As a result of its campaign, Balfour Beatty withdrew from the dam project in November 2001.
Those active in the Ilisu Dam Campaign believed it was important to continue linking the wider impacts of British investment and policies to debates about refugees and asylum seekers. It joined with other refugee, human rights and environmental campaigners, academics and politicians to hold a public seminar in December 2002 entitled "How UK Foreign Investment Creates Asylum Seekers". Speakers from several asylum communities told their stories about why they had been forced to flee from their countries.
The Refugee Project support organisations:
Afghan Association of London, Asylum Rights Campaign, Baku-Ceyhan Campaign, Banner Theatre, Barbed Wire Britain, Campaign Against Arms Trade, Campaign Against Criminalising Communities, Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, Campaign to Close Campsfield, Colombia Solidarity Campaign, Committee to Defend Asylum Seekers, The Corner House, Creative Exchange: The Network for Culture and Development, Defenders of the Environment and Ecology of Panjab, Exiled Writers Ink, Friends of the Earth, Halkevi Community Centre, Ilisu Dam Campaign, Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees in the UK, Institute of Race Relations, Kurdish Human Rights Project, Kurdistan Solidarity Committee and Peace in Kurdistan, Mayakovsky's Circus Theatre Company, Mines and Communities Website, National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, Panjaab Watch, Refugees and Asylum-seekers and the Media Project, Somali Community Centre, Tamil Action Committee, War on Want, World Development Movement, World University Service (UK)/Education Action International.
Click here for further information on the above organisations