“I write this as a journalist who was caught in the 7.7 magnitude earthquake in his sleep, and headed to the news desk within 10 minutes like all of my colleagues,” Mezopotamya Agency’s Sedat Yılmaz starts a recollection of the disaster response in Turkey’s southeastern Diyarbakır (Amed), the largest Kurdish-majority province where government appointed proxies resulted in fewer opportunities for a coordinated local response.
“The government has turned into an apparatus of security and force in Amed, it has pressured the civilian sphere, imprisoned people, disbanded municipal services, and was entirely non-present in the field. Against this, the people created a giant commune,” Yılmaz writes.
Following is a version of his article published on Mezopotamya, edited for clarity.
From the first moments of the earthquake, in all affected cities the state failed to deliver services to victims and survivors. Disaster response unit AFAD, the firefighters, search and rescue, ambulances and security forces were all in disarray. The lack of coordination became even more glaring as roads caved in and power, water, phone and Internet infrastructure all failed. Local bureaucrats were afraid to take initiative and failed to even organise construction machinery to intervene.
The twin earthquakes affected 15 million people in 11 provinces, while also revealing the collapse of this strictly centralised system where one man appoints all officials, from the chief surgeons to imams in the smallest mosque.
Within the hour, 84 NGOs in the Diyarbakır Platform for Solidarity and City Protection set to work to coordinate urgent needs including construction equipment, shelter, food and hygiene. Chambers of architects and engineers, trade unions under KESK, journalists, medical chambers knew that there would be no state mechanism that could aid in relief, based on past experience.
Chambers and unions in the platform contacted their organisations and ushered urgent coordination among branches in non-affected provinces. They also contacted the governorate and informed them of their efforts.
Within three hours, the platform started to provide three hot meals per day in eight spots throughout the city. In total, more than five million meals were handed out to affected citizens. They set up 76 emergency accommodation spots on the first day. By day five, there were 530 spots available.
On day two, having dealt with the urgent situation in the city, the platform sent out 150 expert architects, engineers and doctors to the affected areas. Day three saw 40 construction machines sent to five provinces, as well as relief packs full of food and supplies for hygiene and heating.
All the disbanded elements of public services, those who used to work in municipalities that now have government proxies running them, used whatever limited means they had to great conscience and responsibility, and continue this coordination to date.
The government has turned into an apparatus of security and force in Amed, it has pressured the civilian sphere, imprisoned people, disbanded municipal services, and was entirely non-present in the field. Against this, the people created a giant commune.
This commune, the Amed Experiment so to speak, stood on its own two feet without so much as a piece of straw from the state. It grew on the sentiment of the people.
Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu called this experiment “an example that should spread throughout Turkey”. The fuel for this mass mobilisation was the democratic paradigm itself.
In October, pro-government columnist Abdülkadir Selvi had written that the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the second-largest opposition bloc in the country that had won more than 100 municipalities in Kurdish-majority provinces, “continues its cultural hegemony in Diyarbakır with its politics, chamber of commerce, Amedspor, bar association and NGOs. They determine the narrative”. Selvi lamented that the “fight in the mountains”, i.e. Turkey’s war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) had been “won”, but the government could not establish cultural dominance.
This solidarity which is the cultural hegemony that Selvi laments still remains in place. Whereas the nation state offers security-minded policies, oppression and violence in its singular, slow and centralised governance, a democratic ideology that is also pluralistic, colourful and equality-minded can achieve a lot with no state involvement. It is time to direct our discussions towards this principle to find ways out for a societal reconstruction.
