Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been the target of public outcry over the authorities’ slow and ineffective response to the two major earthquakes that hit the country and Syria earlier this week. According to official data, more than 12,000 deaths have already been confirmed, but the estimate is that the number could exceed 20,000 fatalities.
However, the Turkish government has been criticized not only for its omissions since the tragedy occurred, but for what it failed to do before it. Experts, journalists and the opposition point out that negligence and corruption contributed to this high number of deaths.
In an interview with CNN, Mustafa Erdik, a professor of earthquake engineering at Istanbul’s Bogazici University, said he was impressed by the widespread destruction, which exposed “highly variable design and construction qualities.”
Erdik pointed out that the most common damage to building structures after an earthquake is partial collapses, and earthquakes in Turkey have caused a large number of total collapses. “Full meltdown is something you always try to avoid both in the standards and in the actual design,” he explained.
In a video posted after the earthquakes, Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kiliçdaroglu said the government’s corrupt relationship with construction companies, which would have prevented the enforcement and enforcement of stricter building standards, amplified the tragedy.
He cited a tax created by the government in 1999, after an earthquake that killed more than 17,000 people, with the aim of preventing this type of event from causing so many deaths and providing quick responses from the authorities, but whose collection would have been largely lost. down the drain of corruption.
“They [governo] consumed the ‘earthquake taxes’ with their gangs. Where is the money? That money was lost. People who have paid taxes to the State all their lives cannot see the State when they need it”, he shot.
In 2018, experts in the construction sector had also warned about the risks of an amnesty for irregular works implemented by the Turkish government, which injected billions of dollars in property taxes and registration fees into public coffers.
At the beginning of the following year, after the collapse of a residential building that had been illegally expanded killed 21 people, the president of the local Chamber of Civil Engineers, Cemal Gokce, warned in an interview with Reuters that the amnesty could transform Turkish cities, “ especially Istanbul, in cemeteries”.
In an article published on the website of the American magazine The Atlantic this Wednesday (8), Turkish journalist Ayşegül Sert recalled that, envious of “the skyscrapers of Qatar and Saudi Arabia”, Erdogan outlined the goal of a “New Turkey ”, with large infrastructure projects “to highlight the break with the past”.
“Favors, contracts and permits were granted to builders and companies close to the party [governista]in exchange for bribes and votes,” said Sert, noting that building regulations were ignored “to maximize profits” and several works were done “with cheap materials”.
“Now, the bridges are broken, the airports are closed and the roads have opened up as if meteors had fallen on them, preventing emergency aid from reaching desperate areas”, added the journalist, who regretted: “Turkey was a construction site. It became a cemetery.”
In 2011, one year after the great earthquake in Haiti, seismologists Nicholas Ambraseys and Roger Bilham published a study in the scientific journal Nature which demonstrated that earthquakes cause more damage and kill more in countries with rampant corruption.
Based on data from Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, they calculated that 83% of all deaths from building collapses in earthquakes over the previous 30 years had occurred in countries that were “abnormally corrupt” – that is, those considered most corrupt. corrupt than could be predicted from their per capita income.
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