The large-scale destruction caused by Monday’s twin earthquakes in 10 provinces of Turkey is the result of political choices made, said Ajay Chibber, a former World Bank director for Turkey, told CNN international on Saturday.
“It’s like a bad movie [that’s] come back again,” said Chibber, who worked in Turkey in 1999, when Turkey’s northwest was hit by another devastating earthquake.
Chibber said that Turkey had failed in learning from past experience, pointing out to subsequent “construction amnesties” – essentially legal exemptions that, for a fee, allowed for projects without the necessary safety requirements- declared by the government.
“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,” the economist said.
According to preliminary inspections of Turkish authorities on more than 170,000 buildings, 24,921 of them are seriously damaged after the earthquake. So far almost 25 thousand people died and more than 80,000 people are injured in 12,141 buildings that collapsed.
Following 1999 earthquake, Turkey imposed one of the strongest codes for construction to prevent such a large scale disaster. However, the authorities neglected measures to impose those codes, as Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) pursued a policy of economic growth based on construction boom. Many newly constructed apartment buildings collapsed after the earthquake giving evidence of the weakness in enforcing building codes properly. Some newly constructed public buildings also collapsed after the earthquake, including those belonging to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority.
“There is an earthquake, but it need not be a disaster to this scale, unless it’s man-made. And the man-made part comes from the lack of a proper building code being enforced. There’s no reason these buildings should have collapsed that easily. Some of them were built only a year or two ago,” Chibber added, stressing that this is the result of choices made.
The last construction or zoning amnesty in Turkey was declared in 2018 just before the presidential elections the same year. Just a few days before Monday’s tremors, a new draft law for zoning amnesties was pending for approval in the Turkish parliament. According to one of Turkey’s leading geoscientists Celal Şengör “zoning amnesty in an earthquake country is murder.”
As part of the 2018 amnesty program, Turkish authorities acknowledged that more than half of all buildings in the country did not meet current standards. A report prepared by the Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation included homes built without permits, buildings that added extra floors or expanded balconies without authorisation among violations of the existing codes.
According to data shared by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality on Saturday, 3 million 152 thousand building received construction registry documents as a result of the amnesty.
The number of buildings in 10 provinces heavily destroyed by the Monday’s earthquakes that received permits due to the amnesty was almost 300,000, including 59,247 in Adana, 10,629 in Adıyaman, 14,719 in Diyarbakır, 40,224 in Gaziantep, 56,464 in Hatay, 39,058 in Kahramanmaraş, 4,897 in Kilis, 22,299 in Malatya, 21,107 in Osmaniye, and 25,521 in Şanlıurfa.
Following this weeks disaster, the Turkish population calls for an effective investigation into collapsed buildings. The Turkish prosecutors have started issuing arrest warrants for the contractors whose buildings collapsed and caused high number of casualties. However, experts say that such contractors could only be punished, if samples from those buildings are collected before the wreckages are cleaned. Turkey’s Bar Associations on Thursday called on the Ministry of Justice to immediately start collecting evidence from collapsed buildings, adding that they are ready to help this tremendous work.
Many in Turkey also fear that the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ambitious plan to build new apartment buildings of earthquake victims in one year, can lead to further negligence in investigations related to the destruction of the earthquake.
Meanwhile, buildings where information on current building stocks have been kept have also been damaged in the earthquake. One of them is in Hatay, where lawyers are struggling to protect the existing laboratory tests results on buildings.
In İstanbul, where some 15 million await a similar high magnitude earthquake, the metropolitan municipality received thousands of applications from people demanding an inspection to learn their buildings’ safety. The municipality carries out those inspections without charge.
