Hydroelectric power plant construction began again in the Zilan Valley, in Erciş district of Van province.

Natural life was heavily damaged due to HPP projects and dams built in North Kurdistan. Thousands of endemic plants and animal species in the valleys have already disappeared, agriculture and animal husbandry have come to an end. Hundreds of villages and hamlets are long under water. Thousands of people were forced to migrate.

The Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP), which was launched in 2014 in the region of Zilan (Geliyê Zilan) in Erçis, was stopped by a Council of State decision in 2015 upon the objection of the villagers.

Despite this, taking advantage of this period of coronavirus pandemic, construction work was restarted while all attention was elsewhere. Hundreds of workers are working day and night to speed up works.

In the massacre of the Zilan Valley on 13 July 1930, 15,000 people were killed according to official sources and 50,000 according to unofficial sources. After the massacre, 45 villages were burned down and destroyed. The state forcibly took the land from the villagers in the region of Zilan, thousands of people were exiled.

The massacre of Zilan Valley was a in fact a cleansing operation, and is described by the great writer Yasar Kemal in his his novel Deniz Küstü ("The Sea-Crossed Fisherman"). Indeed the Zilan Valley Massacre was one of the final campaigns to stop Kurdish independence. The secret mission was referred to as "cleaning up."

Kyrgyz / Uzbek people were brought from Afghanistan and Central Asia and resettled in these lands.