The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said on Saturday that it had filed a criminal complaint against the executives of Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) for narrowing down the bandwidth of social media platforms following two major earthquakes on Monday.
The internet outage in Turkey on Wednesday mainly affected Twitter, which was being used by many survivors and people helping rescue efforts to circulate and obtain news from the earthquake area.
Access to Twitter was restored after 12 hours, as the Turkish government faced huge national and international opposition and after the government officials held a meeting with Twitter’s board which they called “productive”. The officials in Turkey claimed the access to social media platforms were cut to combat disinformation.
The HDP filed the complaint to the Chief Prosecutor’s Office in the Turkish capital of Ankara, accusing the executives of the country’s telecommunications regulator of murder by omission, abuse of powers and preventing communication illegally.
The pro-Kurdish party with all its lawmakers and senior officials has pooled all resources to earthquake victims in the Kurdish-majority or Kurdish-populated 10 provinces in southern Turkey, damaged heavily by major earthquakes this week.
Following visits to those provinces, the party’s co-chair Mithat Sancar on Friday visited Etlik Hospital in Ankara, where around 800 earthquake victims have been receiving treatment.
Following a meeting with the chief physician of the hospital, Sancar said the scale of the disaster was enormous.
“We cannot see this as a natural disaster. The earthquake is a natural event, but what transforms it into social collapse and humanitarian tragedy is the methods used. It is the attitude of the state, those things it does and those things it does not,” Sancar said, after the visit.
The politician criticised the government for getting disturbed by comments about the large-scale destruction in earthquake areas, adding that the destruction was a result of the government’s public works policy, widespread corruption and lack of inspections.
“The reason for the high number of casualties is the fact that emergency interventions and rescue works were almost non-present in the first two, two-and-a-half days,” Sancar said about Turkey, where the death-toll hit 21,043 on Saturday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Pervin Buldan, the other co-chair of the HDP, visited Kahramanmaraş, Diyarbakır and Adıyaman provinces on Friday.
“We are passing through very difficult times but it is solidarity that keeps us going on. It is humanity. It is holding each other’s hands, touching people’s conscious,” Buldan said.
“The people were left alone to face their fate for two days,” Buldan said, criticising the Turkish government’s inability to organise rescue work in the first two days after the earthquake on Monday.
“We are passing a period in which we have both experiencing tremendous pain and tremendous rage. Many things could have been done in the face of this natural disaster. But what they chose to do was to declare a state of emergency and to block social media,” the politician continued.
The pro-Kurdish party is left with two district and four town municipalities, after the Turkish government removed elected HDP mayors from their seats following 2019 local elections.
Unable to use the massive resources of metropolitan municipalities in the south-east, the party has been trying to reach the victims by limited means.
The official Twitter account of the HDP is also regularly sharing posts of earthquake relief efforts. The party also called on people to take into account the statements made by the HDP’s official channels, warning them some have been trying to manipulate the situation.
Garo Paylan, a HDP lawmaker, on Saturday said that many have been buried in a rush without being recorded. The Turkish authorities on Wednesday announced that unidentified victims will be buried after 24 hours, after taking DNA samples. However, there are worries in the field that this work has not been properly done in practice.
Another HDP lawmaker, Gülistan Koçyiğit, visited the villages in earthquake hit Kahramanmaraş.
“Today we were in Kullar village of Maraş. Almost nothing is left from the village,” the politician said in a video.
“People are saying there are still corpses under the rubble and there is no work being done. They do not have tents, which are their most essential needs,” she said.
Tülay Hatimoğlluarı, a HDP lawmaker representing the southern province of Hatay, said that on the sixth day following the earthquake, people still needed search and rescue teams, adding that tent-cities needed to be rapidly built up.
A HDP delegation on Saturday visited the İslahiye district of Gaziantep province devastated by the earthquakes.
Saruhan Oluç, the deputy head of the HDP’s parliamentary group, said after the visit that the victims needed to rebuild their lives after the disaster.
“And seeing people, people’s organisations beside them comfort them enormously when rebuilding their lives,” Oluç said.
The politician said that there are still people alive under collapsed buildings, adding that many lives could have been saved if the Turkish authorities had intervened in time.
