A Brief Statement about Turkish Contractors Working Abroad

"Kendi çalışması için bana ulaşan Berington Üniversitesi Profesörü Noah Coburn'nun isteği üzerine  kaleme alınan iki yazıdan birincisi."

30.01.2016

Turkish companies have a large scale and variety of construction related contracts in near geography including all ex-soviet countries, Africa, Balkans and Arabic countries. In short term, aim of Turkish construction sector is expending this area to South America. This is a huge success for national construction sector. You cannot find similar Turkish economic success in another field of world economy. Actually this is almost “weird” because, even in construction related fields we have nothing to compare with the success of Turkish Contractors. For example, I can recommend you to look ENR (Engineering News-Record) lists (www.enr.com). There is a list named Top 250 International Contractors. 43 Companies of top 250 contractors are Turkish. If you look to another list named Top International Design Firms, you can see that among top 225 companies, number of Turkish firms is only 6. This is a nice example of the unbalanced situation. In general we are still behind as documentation and academic researches. Our knowledge only depends on individual experiences. This is a crucial disadvantage. Turkish people from workers to managers have a strange nature: they all focused to finish the job early. Safety and quality are usually not our first concern. If there is no serious authority which dictates quality and safety norms, schedule and any kind of procedures, contractors are still producing them but they are all fake and not applicable. These problems exist even in projects which have billion dollars of contract value.

The question is “With this critical disadvantage, how are they managing to be leading contractors in this geography?” In my opinion, the answer is “pragmatism”. If you dictate a quality and safety system and force to obey necessary procedures, Turkish companies are perfect applicators. They are all expert of solving problems in countries which have no strict rules, law and procedures.

Construction business has some unique characteristics. Products of this sector are projects such as dams, roads, buildings etc… We always have to modify our manpower, budget, logistics and materials depend on that unique one product for every individual projects. Our manufacturing location is temporary, not stable like a factory. Our daily basis problems are usually particular for that moment and usually are not predictable. Due to these reasons, in construction business, “pragmatism” is usually able be a rival to “scheduling”.

Other advantage of Turkish people and companies is cooperation skills with foreign companies. Although Turkish companies are not the best to create their own schedule and procedures, they are highly flexible and cooperative to work with procedures which are dictated by others. Because of this reason American-Turkish or European-Turkish joint-venture approaches are highly beneficial in this geography.  Turkish contractors, which work with American or European consultant companies, are also good solutions for same conditions.

Following specialty is maybe the best side of these companies: The ability to use foreign workforce efficiently. I am on this business for 5 years. In this short term, I’ve worked with Afghans, Russians, Hindu, Pakistani, Nepalese, Africans, Vietnamese, Middle Asians, Kurds and Arabs. In this period of time, I haven’t seen a company who works with these people much harmoniously than Turks. I am not sure about the reason of that. I guess it can be related with combination of communication and organization skills of Turkish people. Turkish society has been militarist and they ruled extremely wide multi-cultural empire for centuries.  It may create a habit of setting organization. But that empire also had an extremely huge bureaucracy. How and why we lost this ability with the passing time? The answer is still mysterious for me.

For the future, aims are so high, but also there are mortal dangers on the way. If we fail to create our brands, procedures, norms, academic researches and own technology in this business, in long term, it will be impossible to stand on foot for Turkish companies against recent rising competitors. China has lots of advantages and also they have cheap workforce. Usually they don’t need to use foreign workers. Their progress is much stable and balanced in subject of academic researches. We almost already lost gulf area to Chinese contractors. If we won’t take necessary precautions, same will occur soon in mentioned geography. 

Haldun ZIK

A Turkish Civil Engineer in Afghanistan

"Kendi çalışması için bana ulaşan Berington Üniversitesi Profesörü Noah Coburn'nun isteği üzerine kaleme alınan iki yazıdan ikincisi."

30.01.2016

I born and raised in Ankara. I am a son of typical Turkish mid-class family. Mother is a teacher and father is a forest engineer. Both of them were working for government. I studied civil engineering in Istanbul Technical University. I like my profession but also I deeply interested in history and politics. During my last year in school I started to look for a job related with statical analyses of historical monuments. The aim was to combine my interests and profession. But I failed to find a company in Turkey working on that subject. What I found was not professional enough.

After graduation, I started my career in 2011 in Yuksel Insaat which is one of oldest construction companies in Turkey.  Owner of the company is Sazak Family. Origin of this family is Sazak Village in Eskişehir Province. Family politically has ties with Nationalist Movement Party. Ex-boss Süleyman Servet Sazak is now a powerful candidate for leadership of the party. His father Gün Sazak was in cabinet as a minister before 1980 coup d’etat and he had been killed by left-wing activists, right before the coup.

I’ve been assigned to projects in Afghanistan. Except the word “war”, I know nothing about Afganistan. For my first experience, I thought it will be perfect to work in a good named company like Yuksel and projects which US Army is employer of. Yuksel was a “business partner” of US Army for construction contracts since the beginning of “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan and also in Iraq before that. In Afghanistan, Yuksel Construction had several projects in military bases and all of them were US Army Projects. Mine was in Bagram Military Airfield. It was the main logistic center of the operation like it was in previous Russian invasion in 80’s. The area around the base was full of mine fields remained from Russian time. Therefore we had to wait mine guys to clear the area before to start every project.

For a construction company, there is only one way to sign a contract with US Army: To create a strong profile. This profile has to include successfully finished American Army projects. If your company is new in US Army projects, you have to start as a sub-contractor (That’s also not easy). This is what Yuksel did before. I know that they worked as a sub-contractor under American firms like CH2M or Flour then they become a contractor by themselves.  

I see some similarities between mentalities of Turkish and American societies. For Turkish people, if there is a way to not to obey rules, they just not obey them but they also create their “so called” rules. This is especially true for people who work in construction business. This reminds me the western frontier of early American history. In time, American people succeeded to create a system and procedures. Anyway, when you make a discussion with an American, if he is educated or not, he easily understands this kind of mentality. Other nationalities, for example northern Europeans were so different behavior. Only Mediterranean people like Italians and Spanish people have similar behavior like Turks. This can be another advantage for Turkish companies for working with Americans. 

Turkish people have one more characteristic that I never saw in another human kind: Almost every Turk (strangely) thinks that he knows the right way to do anything in every subject. If you ask a Turk working in military base, you can be sure he can try to explain to how Americans should rule their military base better. A Turk will not say “I don’t have an idea” easily.

I had been there for 1 year from September 2011 to September 2012. Vacation frequency was 15 days for every 3 mounts. It was a hard challenge for me. When I got there it was my first experience abroad (except my 2 mounts of practice in Moscow in 2007). At my first night in my container-room I tried hard to sleep because of heavy artillery fires and fighter planes which are bombing mountains circled all around Bagram. Probably later these sounds never stop in that year but after a while I started not to hear them.

I guess I need to mention about several memorable incidents. First one happened before my arrival. We lost an engineer in camp because of rocket fire from outside. He was a local Afghan engineer and his position was construction manager.  All personnel have told good things about him all the time. Until that time, usually our company did not care enough to safety and security precautions. After the incident all personnel including even project manager started to fill sand bags with their hands to cover up our living containers. If we did that before, our guy would be still alive. Just before I reached there or right after that, lots of personnel resigned due to awful mood of this catastrophe.

I saw Turkish flag painted on some containers of workers. They trying to say to the enemy kilometers away: We are Muslims and don’t shoot us. Probably they don’t know that Taliban rockets were very primitive and it was impossible to aim anywhere inside base. Actually most of them were falling outside of 3km diameter base because this reason but of course, not all of them. Two different times, I heard voice of rocket whistle passing very close and the blasts impacts.

We were following tightly Afghanistan related news from Turkish channels. Yes we were in war in there but violence was not always taking place in Turkish news. If it takes we have to inform our family that we are ok and try to convince them Afghanistan is actually not Afghanistan.

Afghanistan memories are not always catastrophic. We saw army vehicle overturned in front of us and we helped GI’s to get out once.  And also once we saw some Special Forces guys playing snowball with each other after arrival from outside operation. We joined them.

Sometimes we got our meals in army dfac’s (dining facility). We enjoyed in there. It was buffet meal and countless type of food was in service at the same time. In our own dining facility service was only “table h’ate”.

During the period I was there, a conflict between US and Pakistan rose. Pakistan closed Afghanistan border and cut our supply lines. Including our project materials, everything stuck in Karachi port. US Army markets (Their names were “PX”. I have no idea where the word came from and I know that also it is a very old phrase.) in base were became empty. There were only protein dusts in shelfs. Sometimes, if we were bored enough we were going to PX anyway to spent time. (Drive time is 30min approx.) One day we got some breaking news. Somebody told me that loads of chocolates arrived to PX. We had to act quickly. We did our best to get some before run out and we succeeded. I guess it was the best time of my Afghan life. Before Pakistani government blocked the border, all PX products were coming from US. Especially American chips were delicious. After we got over the hard times all products started to come from Turkey. That was also not bad. No complains.

Alcohol and sex were strictly forbidden in the base. We were not always successful obeying this kind of rules. One of our colleagues had a romantic relationship with a military lady. The problem is somehow her husband, who was also a ranked soldier in Afghanistan, figured out and sent a threating mail to our management. We helped to our guy getting lost from there. Sometimes American army was doing spontaneous searches in our camp to find forbidden materials like second cell phone, camera, computer, pornographic material, alcohol etc… There is a danger to get in to the black list and fired out of base immediately, if they find anything in that search.

We faced a mutiny of Pakistani workers. A Turkish master started to argue with a Pakistani worker. It quickly converted to a fight. All Pakistani guys immediately attacked to that Turkish guy and beat him and the engineer who tried to protect him. No penalty was given to those guys so this time Turkish workers became very angry. They would almost attack to our project manager. We engineers hardly avoid them and made them calm. But in my opinion our management couldn’t manage this crisis right. We shall immediately fire all personnel related with this incident without looking who is right or not. This is a general rule for construction yards to provide safety and continuity of work.

You already heard Koran burning incident. It was a critical crisis.  Afghans outside the base and US Army immediately cut our life supply. We worried about our stock of food and fuel. Our meals decreased three to only one in every day. I want to add to here an official correspondence that I personally wrote in the name of our project manager. I cannot put the original document. I think otherwise it can be a problem if I publish it without permission.

“ Subject: Riot Due to a Rumor

Dear Sir/Ma’am,

                We, Yuksel, would like to inform the Government regarding a rumor that a Koran was burned inside the Base. The rumor was happened to be spread by some of the local workers who work on the night shift for some other company/companies while they were leaving the Base early in the morning. Because of this rumor, there has been a riot outside the ECP since this morning which was happened to be started by the local people as much as we have been informed so far.

                Although the ECP has been closed since the riot was started, most of our local workers entered into the Base early in the morning before the ECP closure. However, they have not been working yet and they are willing to leave the Base because they are afraid of the threats by the local people while they were entering into the Base this morning in order not to work due to this rumor.

                All of our local workers who entered into the Base this morning have been waiting in the resting/dining facilities located at our LSA and no work has been performed both at the project sites and Yuksel's off-base facilities due to this issue.

                We strongly need the Government's help and cooperation regarding this issue to be solved and the ECP is opened as soon as possible. Your urgent response will be greatly appreciated as always. ”

Like I said before, except rocket attacks, there were no security related problems inside the base. But outside you cannot be sure about anything. Most probably weapons are useless to protect our guys. Money is the most trustful ally for us. We were trying to buy our security from neighborhood tribes. Next letter can help to imagine what’s going on in there:

“Subject: Road Blockade of Off-Base Facility 

Dear Sir/Ma’am,

                We, Yuksel, would like to inform the Government regarding a serious problem on the way to our Off-Base Camp. As you know, we have an off-base camp facility at the north-east of ECP#3. We have 2 concrete batch-plants, a crusher, and a warehouse facility with accommodation units. This camp is very important for daily concrete production for our ongoing projects in the Base. Furthermore, we have a very large area in that compound in order to store all kind of construction materials. There are 75 LN and TCN labor for these activities. We have daily transportation from this off-base camp to inside the Base which is very critical for our construction activities………….

                …….Unfortunately, a local civilian, introduces himself as a villager, and puts a barrier at the beginning of that road going to our off-base camp yesterday, 11th February. We have tried to illustrate the location of the barrier at the attached two satellite photos (Attachment#1). According to him, he is the owner of the land and anybody cannot use the road anymore. Actually not only Yuksel, but also 3 more contractors who have facilities outside have been using this road for 5 years. We could not persuade this person to open the road again.

                We strongly need your support and help in order to open this road and start logistic support of our projects inside the base. Your urgent response will be greatly appreciated.”

As Turkish employees’ profiles, people usually are going there because they feel that they have to. Usually an unlucky career experience was happened before in Turkey, some of them were owner of a bankrupted construction company. Therefore they have to pay their depts. When I was in there I feel lucky about that. I don’t have that pressure on me. I can resign any time I want. Finally I hanged on in there longer than usual and at the end the reason of my resignation was not related with this kind of issues. I think I got what I want and I figured out that if I change my job I would double my salary so I did.

After I quit my job, I had been transferred to Kabul first to get on a plane. We had a whole day before our flight. My friend and I decided to see Kabul one last time. We got out. We started to walk in streets like a tourist (actually for that moment, we are one). But there is a strange atmosphere people were looking to us in a very strange way. We didn’t understand why. We were worried and went back to our camp. After I arrived to Turkey I saw in television that a huge violence broke out in Kabul. Lots of people died. It was the same day that Benghazi Attack occurred. We were right to worry about our lives and at that moment I didn’t know that the city of Benghazi will be much familiar to me in near future.

Haldun ZIK