First modification:
The quake has left more than 53,000 dead between the two nations and hundreds of thousands of people homeless and surviving in tent shelters and without access to basic conditions. The United Nations has made several calls for help to help rebuild the area, but the scale of the destruction is extremely high.
A month ago the lives of millions of Turks and Syrians changed forever. That day, February 6, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale and a subsequent aftershock of 7.5 in a border area between the two countries caused what to date is the largest natural disaster in history. in the zone.
More than 53,000 people (47,000 in Turkey and 6,000 in Syria) have died to date, 212,000 buildings have collapsed or are partially damaged, and more than two million people have been left homeless.
The disaster caused by the two earthquakes has no comparison to other episodes recorded in the area, despite being a place that regularly records plate movement. And its consequences will probably last for years. The survivors are now the ones that organizations like the United Nations are most concerned about, since their conditions are really bad.
The agency has warned that most of those affected continue to need accommodation a month after the fateful day and that investment is required to remove tens of thousands of tons of rubble and to clean up the cities in the face of possible sources of disease. The figures released by the UN are 397 million dollars needed to rebuild the affected area of Syria and more than 1,000 million to do the same in Turkey. The problem is that only 10% of that amount has been reached.
More than two million people displaced from their homes
Added to the pain experienced by the thousands of people who have had to lose family and friends is the loss of their home and the inability to provide them with a temporary one. It is estimated that of the two million people who have had to be relocated, one and a half million still live in tents and only 46,000 have received living containers. The rest do so in the homes of their relatives that have not been damaged.
The World Bank has calculated that the earthquake has caused some 34.2 billion dollars in direct physical damage, the equivalent of 4% of Turkey’s GDP in 2021. Something that will make the recovery and reconstruction costs much higher and the losses of the GDP associated with economic shocks also add to the cost of earthquakes.
The quake has worsened the situation of millions of people who were already living in poor conditions, both in Turkey and, especially, in Syria. The most affected regions of the latter nation are those controlled by the rebels and have been suffering for almost 12 years the consequences of a civil war that seems endless. Many of the affected buildings were already damaged previously.
For their part, on the Turkish side, millions of Syrian refugees were living poorly in the cities near the borders.
Real estate speculation and construction with poor materials seem to have been the perfect combination for so many buildings to collapse.
The earthquake has left up to 25% of the population homeless in some areas, a figure that has overwhelmed the authorities, harshly criticized for their slow and inefficient response.
The images that entire neighborhoods of cities like Diyarbakir or Adana present are still bleak. The efforts to rescue survivors in the first weeks have been followed by an enormous task of removing rubble and corpses, which a month later continue to appear among the jumbles of concrete and steel.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, against the ropes
In addition to the humanitarian drama, the earthquakes have shaken Turkey’s politics and, especially, its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Criticism of what happened has focused on the figure of the president, who has been in power uninterruptedly since 2003, but who in less than three months is facing elections where the polls give him a strong disadvantage.
Criticism of Erdogan and his party — Justice and Development Party, AKP for its acronym in Turkish — occurs for two reasons. The first is the slow response of the authorities to the disaster and the lack of aid to the millions of people affected. The second revolves around the responsibility of the Government for not having foreseen that the buildings in an area with a high seismic risk would be equipped with the relevant security measures.
Those affected point out that during the first 24 hours after the earthquake, barely 4,000 soldiers were mobilized in the disaster areas, instead of the 50,000 that Erdogan promised. A more than insufficient amount to assist a region that has some 13.5 million people.
In addition, he has taken the opportunity to politicize the situation, stating that the criticisms are “attempts to spread disinformation” and offering condolences only to the cities where his party governs. A situation that, added to the inflationary and economic crisis and the loss of freedoms in recent years, has caused protests to spread throughout the country.
Something to keep in mind is that when Erdogan won the 2003 elections, he did so thanks to the criticism of the management that the previous government had in the Izmit earthquake of 1999, where the crisis was very poorly managed by the authorities and thousands of people. were affected for months by this natural disaster. Erdogan vowed to check all old buildings to prevent collapse and include earthquake-resistant construction methods in new homes. But it has been shown that this has not been fulfilled.
Many of the buildings collapsed on February 6 were less than 20 years old and were built during the Erdogan government’s real estate boom. The president encouraged massive construction in previously rural areas to win the vote of the working class in the provinces and rural areas, but these houses lacked any type of security measure.
The truth is that during the weeks after the earthquake, censorship has increased in Turkey and Erdogan has declared a state of emergency until a week before the parliamentary elections in May, which will be followed by the presidential elections on June 18, 2023. To avoid In what would be a historic election debacle, Erdogan has promised to rebuild hundreds of thousands of homes within a year, but as long as aid doesn’t arrive his credibility could suffer further setbacks until election dates arrive.
With AP, AFP and local media
#month #earthquake #Turkey #Syria #humanitarian #crisis #worsens