Parliamentary records reveal that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has ruled the country for two decades, allowed more than three million construction amnesties to proceed with illegal and unsafe building projects since 2018.
As the death toll from the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria exceeds 45,000 and is expected to continue to rise, there is growing anger among the people who point to construction or “zoning” amnesties which are basically legal exemptions allowing construction projects to proceed without fulfilling the necessary safety requirements – in return for payment of a fee.
“They just go ahead and make the building. They don’t follow the code. They know that at some point some politicians – because they’re financing their political parties – they’ll grant them an amnesty. That’s a huge problem,” said Ajay Chibber, a former World Bank director for Turkey.
The latest amnesty was announced by the government in 2018, nearly 20 years after the previous deadly earthquake in Turkey, in 1999, which killed 18,000. Many have said that Turkey has failed in learning from past earthquake experience.
“People are bribing and paying off the requirements to construct a building. This is a systematic moral corruption,” said lawyer Bedia Büyükgebiz, who is investigating the construction of collapsed buildings.
Meral Danış Beştaş, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said that Erdoğan’s government has rejected most of the HDP’s attempts to raise the issue of earthquake safety, including 72 parliamentary questions, 18 motions for parliamentary research proposals and three motions for laws to prevent the granting of construction permits in areas with a high earthquake risk. The HDP was the only party to oppose the AKP’s 2018 construction amnesty.
As people started to accuse the government of corruption and neglect after the earthquake, arrest warrants were issued for building contractors, meant to distract attention from the bureaucrats who looked the other way as rules were flaunted, and the politicians, including Erdoğan himself, who granted the amnesties.
But while just over a dozen building contractors have been arrested, seventy-eight people have also been arrested to date for criticising the state’s response by spreading “provocative” social media posts about the earthquakes, which Erdoğan denounced as “people conducting negative campaigns for political interest”.
Speculation now reigns as to when the parliamentary and presidential elections will be held. There are three main options. They are currently set for 14 May, and according to the Constitution, the latest they can be held is 18 July. Although Erdoğan initially asked for a year in which to rebuild the destroyed regions and declared a three-month state of emergency, which some analysts could be used as the pretext for delaying the elections, many now believe he will opt for the earlier date.
