Istanbul – In 1999, a major earthquake that claimed the lives of 18,000 people led to the rise to power of the current Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Now, 21 years into his mandate, the Turkish Islamist leader fears suffering the same future as his predecessors, after the great tremor this February, which caused the death of more than 55,000 people.
“There is no one from the government, no one! No one has come to help us, or to tell us how we have to get people out. We are doing it all ourselves, without knowing. No one is coming”, shouts, desperate, a resident of the city of Alexandretta, in the southeast of Turkey. It is Tuesday, February 7, 2023, the second day after the earthquake that claimed the lives of 55,000 people between northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey.
Around him, while the man talks, a row of what used to be buildings are now pure rubble, mountains of cement, sofas, mattresses, beams, concrete, iron and bulldozers. And inside, underneath everything -caught in between- people, neighbors. Alive, those around them believe, but also dead. “Back there, in the alleys of the neighborhood, the situation is much worse. Everything is destroyed there. There is nothing left standing”, says another neighbor, who joins the conversation.
The street, in those recent hours after the earthquake, is a coming and going of ambulances and police cars running in all directions like headless chickens. Some excavators unskillfully send mechanical screeches into the air as they attempt to dig through the rubble of collapsed buildings. A few hours have passed since the earthquake and the neighbors do not know -because no one has told them- that with these maneuvers they may be killing the people who, at that moment, are still alive in what used to be their homes.
“We need help immediately… this is a disaster,” says a neighbor to his colleague. Behind her, while they talk, a woman cries inconsolably. Two lumps, covered with the same dusty blanket, lie in front of her. “We took them out of the building about five hours ago. An elderly couple; she is her daughter. This is what I mean, see? No one comes to collect the bodies. They have been rotting in the sun for hours,” says the first man. “Where are you, Türkiye? Where are you? The people die, the people die. Türkiye!” the second one moaned.
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“Where is the State?”
In the mind of any Turk, the phrase ‘where are you, Turkey?’ reverberates like a painful echo from the recent past. The words are not exact, they do not match one by one, because history does not repeat itself, but rather rhymes. The original phrase, a cry that changed Turkey at the end of the previous century, is ‘devlet nerede’: where is the state?
The phrase was born in August 1999. Like this February, everything happened at dawn and, like this February, hundreds of thousands of people saw how their lives, their normality, changed forever. At three in the morning, an earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale struck the coastal city of Izmit, near Istanbul and located on the shores of the Marmara Sea.
Nearly 18,000 people perished in that earthquake, which opened the eyes of millions of Turks: for the first time, the citizens of the Anatolian country realized that their buildings and homes, often made with cheap materials and even beach sand instead made of concrete, they were not capable of withstanding a major earthquake.
Turkey, a country of 82 million inhabitants, is crossed by two very active tectonic faults that cross, one from the north and the other from the south, the entire Anatolian peninsula. The one in the south is the one that caused the earthquake this past February; the northern one is the one that caused the 1999 earthquake. This fault also crosses Istanbul, the great Turkish metropolis. Istanbul, like Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tehran and Quito, among others, is one of the great cities of the world that lives under the prophetic threat of a great earthquake in the near future.
Nothing went right after the 1999 earthquake in Izmit. The then coalition government, led by several parties that were fighting with each other, failed to respond and rescue the victims of the earthquake. Turkish television and newspapers thus repeated the same phrase over and over again: “Where is the State?”
Some, now, 24 years later, believe that the lessons of the past have not been learned. Many Turks, especially those opposed to the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, consider that his government’s response was once again late and deficient.
In many towns affected by the earthquake this February, for example, rescue teams and humanitarian aid did not arrive until a week after the tremor. Neighbors were forced to pull neighbors – alive, dead and dying – from under the rubble.
“Why do we have to live in this trauma? Why can’t the State guarantee our security? They let us die, really, it’s very scary ”, explains Zeynep, a resident of Istanbul who went 23 years ago to help those affected and who now wants to leave her city for fear of another great earthquake.
“They charge us specific taxes on the earthquake, but although this problem has been known for decades, nothing is done. Even new buildings have collapsed. How can that be?” continues Zeynep.
Earthquakes Shaking Politics
Two years and a few months after the 1999 earthquake, in 2002, Turkey experienced a radical change. For the first time in its history – the country was founded in 1923 by the secular and westernizing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – an Islamist candidate won the elections and was able to form a government. Its leader, a young Erdogan, promised to end the chaos and government corruption and promote a new package of laws that would guarantee minimum construction standards.
It was not enough, and the mistakes of the past returned. “It seemed evident that discontent with politicians would be temporary. As it also seems evident that all these bitterly complaining people had, at some point in their lives, paid bribes to local councils to avoid building codes, and would have considered it stupid not to do so.” They are the words of the Turkish Literature Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, written shortly after the 1999 earthquake.
Thus, as the years passed, the pain and the memory faded away, and many builders returned to building thinking more about how to save costs than about safety and legislation. In recent years, moreover, the Erdogan government promoted several rounds of construction amnesties: in exchange for a fine, an illegal building could be legalized without having to adapt to safety codes and standards. Many of the buildings destroyed in the earthquake this February in the southeast went through this amnesty.
“The builder is guilty, of course, of trying certain tricks to make more money. But what about the state? Does not have responsibility who has allowed this to happen? This is the situation in our country”, says Zeynep as he lets out a somewhat bitter laugh.
In less than three weeks Erdogan will face the closest elections in memory in his 21 years of government. According to the vast majority of polls, the Turkish president could lose his job to the main opposition candidate. Erdogan’s popularity, damaged by the serious inflationary crisis that Turkey is experiencing and the management of the earthquake, is at historic lows.
Zeynep is resigned. “I don’t know if anything would change too much if she wins the opposition. At some point they will forget about the mistakes of the past, we will return to the same. We are like a comedy, really, a comedy country. I have never wanted to, but sometimes it seems that the only solution is to leave.
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