Sarah Glynn
The anniversary, on Tuesday, of last year’s devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has generated a plethora of reports on the current situation. They make predictably grim reading. Turkey’s official death toll was 53,537, and with the Turkish government clearly culpable for the scale of the casualties – both through lack of preparedness and overriding of regulations, and through a response that prioritised partisan politics over efficiency – it would have been naïve to expect a balanced and equitable recovery. Although Turkey’s general and presidential elections were held little more than three months after the earthquake exposed the devastating depths of government corruption, the opposition alliance failed to overcome government propaganda and media control to persuade voters that they would be any better, so the same people are still in charge.
In their summary of the situation one year on, the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects comments, “the government sees the whole country as a field of profit, and gives it away to three or five construction companies”. And they conclude, “As long as the system works the same way, new criminals will be produced to replace the few that have been punished. The main thing is that there is a chain of responsibility here and it extends to the highest level of society.”
The situation is compounded by a lack of transparency. Özgür Karabat, the deputy chair of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has pointed out major discrepancies between the spending figures given by different government ministers. He has also accused the government of diverting money collected in aid and taxes that was supposed to help the earthquake victims.
Delayed homes and strained lives
One of the promises the government made before the May elections was for comprehensive rebuilding of the lost homes. The initial headline was that all would be rebuilt within a year, but – as the Guardian explains – that promise was soon rolled back to 319,000 homes within a year and a further 331,000 the following year, and by last week the numbers had been reduced to 75,000 completed by the beginning of April rising to 200,000 at the end of this year. Meanwhile, “A spokesperson for the Turkish presidency said in late January that ‘the construction of a total of 307,000 houses has started. The delivery of a total of 46,000 houses … has started gradually.’”
Of the three million people who have lost their homes, around 690,000 are in temporary camps made from shipping containers. Others are occupying tents or ad hoc shelters, or using damaged buildings. The huge demand for rented homes has pushed up rents for everyone, at a time when inflation generally has left families struggling for survival, and many earthquake survivors have also lost their source of livelihood.
Alongside all the trauma of death and injuries, lost homes and broken communities, daily life remains very difficult. Many people had to leave their home region, but even in the worst-hit province, Hatay, the government claims that ¾ of the nearly 600,000 people who left have now returned. There are difficulties accessing healthcare and finding sufficient schoolteachers. Women have acquired more caring responsibilities, and in the cramped and ill-equipped temporary accommodation and with households beset by economic and other worries, they are at increased risk of domestic abuse. A study of young children in Hatay has recorded serious food insecurity and instances of stunted growth. Uncertainty and lack of control over their future adds to the pressure on all the affected families.
Large amounts of rubble and unsafe structures still remain, and there have been many problems with the clearance of collapsed buildings. Heavy metals and toxic chemicals have been allowed to pollute the land and groundwater, and people have been subjected to clouds of asbestos dust.
The missing
Bodies were removed along with the rubble, and other bodies were buried without identification or the taking of DNA samples. There are also accounts of people disappearing after being seen alive. Many families do not know what has happened to their lost relations. They have no grave to grieve at, and every piece of news can bring new hope or renewed despair. There is no record of the number of people missing, and an opposition motion for an investigative commission for those missing was voted down by the ruling parties.
In a heart-wrenching interview, published by Bianet, three Hatay residents described their quest to find evidence of the fate of their families in the face of authorities that accept their paperwork and then do nothing. Selahattin Kılınç explained, “We’ve searched the rubble three times, not even a single bone was found… Where have our children gone? Isn’t it possible to find a single bone in rubble that has been searched three times? We rescued 8-10 people from there. A white minibus came and took about 14-15 people. Where are the people who were taken to the hospitals?.. I mean, can people disappear in a hospital? But unfortunately, they do.” He had been told that DNA analysis for Hatay had been delayed.
Suna Öztürk explained that volunteer miners had been prevented from entering the wreckage of the building where her daughter and grandchildren lived, and that the rubble had been removed without being properly searched. “They poured the wreckage of the Renaissance Residence into a hidden place, and we found it too. I will go to the place where that wreckage is, and I will hold a press conference there. If we still don’t get any response, I will continue searching. If nothing else, we’ll go to parliament and pour gasoline over ourselves. Find my child! I want even a fraction of them, even a strand of hair.”
Families of the missing have organised themselves into an association. Their secretary general, Sema Güleç is looking for her son. She explained to Yeni Özgür Politika, “While I was looking for my son in Güleryüz Apartment, it turned out that the last floor of the building he lived in had fallen on Merve Apartment. Eyewitnesses said that my son was taken out alive. He was wrapped in a blanket, put in a white car, and sent to the hospital. He had no visible injuries; he was just unconscious. We learned about this 10-15 days later when eyewitnesses reached us on social media.” She has been to hospitals, cemeteries, and morgues, but there has been no DNA match. Others have similar stories.
Profiting from disaster
As with other disasters in neoliberal economies, the destruction has been exploited to give more opportunities for private profit. The Chamber of Engineers and Architects has pointed out that proposed mines and power plants that had been unable to obtain satisfactory Environmental Impact Assessments before the earthquake, were put into construction during the post-earthquake emergency, when these assessments were not required. And they observe that a new law that makes it easier for the state to appropriate private property will be used to demolish valuable areas of the city to make them available for development. People living in areas designated under this law live in limbo, waiting for their homes to be bought from them.
Top-down profit-driven redevelopment does not make for good places to live, nor help to rebuild community structures. Often people are forced to stay far from the city centres, and good agricultural land is buried under concrete. There is no input from local people, and tendering processes take place behind closed doors.
For survivors who can afford to buy their new home, the government will provide a grant of 750,000 Turkish Lira (23,000 Euros) and a loan of the same amount, to be paid off in twenty years. People who previously owned their home may be unable to afford to buy, or find themselves encumbered by debt.
Impunity
As predicted, despite the well-publicised arrests of some developers and contractors, public authorities and elected representatives have so far been left untouched. Human Rights Watch has drawn attention to Turkey’s legal obligation to ensure that public officials are held accountable, pointing out that, “not a single public official, elected mayor, or city council member has yet faced trial for their role in approving numerous construction projects that fell far short of safe building standards or for failing to take measures to protect people living in buildings known to have structural problems in a region with a high risk of seismic activity.” This puts Turkey in breach (yet again) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires that signatories have a regulatory framework to protect against foreseeable risk to life, and that that framework be enforced.
Human Rights Watch notes that there has been a long-standing problem in Turkey’s response to earthquakes, and that they were found culpable by the European Court of Human Rights for their failure to hold authorities accountable after the Marmara earthquake of 1999. The European Court has also repeatedly criticised Turkey’s rule that prosecutions of public officials require prior permission from the relevant authorities.
Although Human Rights Watch didn’t mention it, responsibility goes right to the top, with the granting of amnesties for buildings that did not comply with regulations. This has been done nine times since 2002. The 2018 amnesty allowed buildings to be legalised merely on the declaration of their owners.
Erdoğan Akdoğdu of the Progressive Lawyers’ Association talked to Bianet about rottenness within the judicial system, commenting “Can there be “independent judiciary” in an environment where the Minister of Justice expresses his views on every matter?” He noted that people close to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) were quickly released from detention; and he complained that collapsed buildings had not been properly investigated, giving as examples lack of soil analysis and insufficient samples taken of the reinforcement.
The BBC reported on the work done by one grieving mother and grandmother to find the reason for the collapse of the building that killed her family. “I tried to find as much evidence as I could at the place where I lost my child,” she explained. “It shouldn’t have been my responsibility. But it seems that had I not done it, we wouldn’t have found anything.” Her evidence was vital in showing alterations carried out in violation of building regulations, especially the conversion of the ground floor into a large open café. The designer of the café and the original engineer of the building now await trial, while, elsewhere, many claims have been closed due to insufficient evidence. The BBC observes that “The local authorities are still to be questioned”.
Politics and elections
Huge numbers of people died unnecessarily because the government was more concerned with preserving its political image than the lives of its citizens; and the lure of short-term gain – financial and political – ensures that the lessons from a year ago will not be acted on. Little has been done for Istanbul, which sits on a fault line that has a two in three chance of causing an even more devastating earthquake before the end of the decade; and the gruesome reminder of the dangers of seismic activity did not prevent President Erdoğan from inaugurating the country’s first nuclear power plant as part of his self-promotion before last May’s election.
Politically, Turkey is such a divided country that views on the government’s response to the earthquake depend almost entirely on what party people support. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that “The Ankara Institute [a Turkish think tank] has conducted an analysis of how Erdoğan’s supporters and opponents view his crisis management: 96 percent of opposition voters said it was bad, while 90 percent of his supporters were satisfied. … That was also the case in the earthquake region.”
At the anniversary commemoration in Hatay’s destroyed city of Antakya, the government’s Health Minister was booed throughout his speech, and the CHP mayor, who has been renominated for the forthcoming local elections, was forced to leave the event with calls for his resignation. The pro-Kurdish, leftist DEM Party and the Turkish Workers’ Party held their own separate commemoration.
With local elections coming up at the end of March, everything can be seen as an opportunity to win votes. On Sunday, two days before the anniversary, when President Erdoğan visited Hatay to launch the mayoral campaign for the AKP, he made it quite clear to the suffering survivors why they should vote him: “If the central and local administrations do not work hand in hand, if they are not in solidarity, nothing will come to the city. Has anything come to Hatay? At the moment, Hatay feels neglected and sad.” The leader of the CHP, Özgür Özel, commented to journalists, “Is this a threat to earthquake victims?”, and Erdoğan’s comment was firmly condemned by the co-chair of the DEM Party. Bianet journalists found local people saddened by these threatening words, but afraid to speak on camera. Bülent Danışoğlu points out in Bianet that Erdoğan’s words were a very deliberate statement by a man who has repeatedly made clear that “he won’t acknowledge any other administrator in the country besides himself”.
Last Sunday, the DEM Party confirmed that they would be standing candidates right across the country – including in Istanbul – and putting forward their own political vision, not taking a tactical position for or against other parties. At the last local election, they (as the HDP) had not stood candidates in the western cities and had advised their supporters to vote tactically for the CHP to defeat the AKP. The CHP mayors of Istanbul and Ankara gained their positions on the Kurdish vote, but did nothing to acknowledge this or to make life easier for their Kurdish supporters. As the Green Left, the DEM Party supported the CHP’s Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for president, only to discover afterwards that he had made a secret deal with anti-Kurdish fascist, Ümit Özdağ. As the DEM Party spokesperson said, referencing the pun on the party’s name, which means “time” in Kurdish, “Now, DEM has come for Istanbul”. The full list of DEM mayoral candidates was announced yesterday, after a process of primary elections and public meetings designed to strengthen party democracy.
Turkey in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
As Turkey gears up for their own local elections, it seems that they have failed in their attempt to influence coalition negotiations following the local elections in Kirkuk, across the Iraqi border. They had hoped to engineer the exclusion of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), but last Sunday the PUK reached an agreement with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) to work together to ensure the choice of a Kurdish governor for the province.
At the same time, Turkey has been reinforcing their links with the KDP, but threatening further action against the PUK, which they accuse of working with organisations that Turkey equates with the PKK. These organisations include the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), alongside whom PUK peshmerga have been combating the threat of ISIS sleeper cells.
A Turkish military delegation, led by the defence minister, has had meetings with leaders in Bagdad and Erbil, generating speculation over plans for further military operations. Jabar Yawar, a former secretary of the Peshmerga Ministry in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, told Voice of America, “Turkey plans to launch a major operation against PKK forces inside Turkey, the Kurdistan Region, Qandil and the Sinjar areas of Mosul in the spring. They want Iraq and the Kurdistan Region to help them and to participate in the operation. All the meetings with the parties are aimed at convincing them to participate in the fighting and the operations against the PKK. They [Turkey] want their troops to be protected. They are trying to use the Peshmerga for the fighting. They have not been able to destroy the [PKK] guerrillas.” This plan has been denied by the spokesperson of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
War fears in North and East Syria
In the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, too, fears of further fighting intensified as the United States retaliated for the drone strike by a pro-Iranian militia that killed three US servicemen in Jordan on 28 January. On 2 February, American bombs targeted 85 sites in Iraq and Syria, killing at least sixteen people, including civilians. On the night of 4 to 5 February, a militia drone, fired from an area controlled by the Syrian Government, hit the training academy in the US base at Al-Omar oil field east of Deir ez-Zor. No Americans were hurt but six SDF soldiers were killed. Three nights later, the United States carried out a targeted assassination that killed a leader of the group widely believed to have carried out the Jordan attack. What happens next depends not only on the forces in Syria but on developments in Gaza, which have made the United States such a prominent and hated target.
For Öcalan’s freedom
This coming week sees another important anniversary. On Thursday, it will be a quarter of a century since Abdullah Öcalan was abducted in an international plot led by the CIA, and imprisoned in Turkey. The anniversary is being marked by long marches and conferences, all calling for Öcalan’s freedom. In Turkey, the Great Freedom March for the freedom of Abdullah Öcalan and a democratic solution to the Kurdish question has been traversing the snowy countryside to be given enthusiastic receptions in different Kurdish cities. And so the struggle goes on, raising its voice in an attempt to be heard above the tumult of today’s world politics.
*Sarah Glynn is a writer and activist – check her website and follow her on Twitter.
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