By Hannah Lucinda Smith & Richard Spencer, The Times
Across the swathe of southern Turkey that was annihilated in an earthquake a week ago, shell-shocked survivors and witnesses are united in grief and mounting fury.
Cities, town and villages have largely been left alone to deal with the country’s biggest natural disaster in centuries, and Turks of all ethnicities and political stripes are levelling blame at the top.
“There is nothing left of Turkey,” said Hurra Koca, as she waited for news of her aunt in Kahramanmaras last week. She was furious as she dismissed President Erdogan’s visits to the disaster zone, with his promise to build houses for more than one million people left homeless. “Tayyip Erdogan is just playing a game.”
Hopes of finding survivors are fading as rescue operations draw after the magnitude 7.8 quake and its string of powerful aftershocks. The true scale of this disaster is still emerging. The death toll stood at more than 33,000 across both Turkey and Syria on Sunday, with the UN warning it could rise to more than 50,000.
Turkey’s state disaster agency, Afad, has been barely present in the worst-hit places. Civilians, independent search-and-rescue teams and local councils across the country flocked to fill the vacuum, using bare hands and equipment brought by miners and local construction workers.
“For the first two days it was just civilians trying to rescue their families, and normal people who had come to help. There was no one else. Later a few Afad teams, police and soldiers arrived,” said Bulent Nihat, 18, a student originally from Azerbaijan who rushed to the devastated city of Antakya from Bolu, 400 miles away. He left the area yesterday to travel home by plane and bus. “It is not as they are showing it on the television. It is so much worse,” he said.
Afad was formerly under the control of the prime ministry, which was abolished in 2018 when Turkey adopted a new presidential system that handed Erdogan executive power. As in other state agencies, experienced high-level staff have been removed and replaced with ministers’ relatives and cronies. Ismail Palakoglu, Afad’s head of emergency response, was appointed from the Diyanet, the state religious agency.
Turkish television channels, most of which are pro-government, show endless footage of survivors being pulled from the rubble. There are still miraculous stories, almost seven days on, but it is now mostly the dead being recovered. Yesterday in Antakya, the IHH, a Turkish Muslim Brotherhood charity, arrived with television cameras at a rescue site where it was believed that five people could be alive. They left when it was confirmed that everyone was dead.
A Paris-based PR firm has sent out a press release promoting a company that is supporting Afad with AI technology for rescue operations, but on the ground there are few workers from the disaster agency to be seen.
“My sister lives in Romania and she organised aid that arrived in a few hours. So how could Afad not get here until the third day?” Akif Demirci, 22, a student who came to join the rescue effort in Antakya said. “We went to Samandag [near Antakya] and there were no teams. There is an Afad centre there but they came 80 hours later. The people are saying that they feel the state is not there for them.”
The earthquake has broken Turkey’s landscape and traumatised an already-troubled nation that had been preparing to celebrate its centenary this year. In Istanbul, a city of 16 million people, the grief has cast a grim pall. On the city’s public transport screens that usually play adverts show a black mourning notice and bank account numbers for donations to the municipality, which is run by the opposition and is sending aid to the south, including by ship to Hatay province.
Turkey’s state and private airlines, which are running continuous flights bringing local and international rescue and aid workers to the region’s nearest working airports, are now giving free seats on return flights for those trying to leave the disaster zone. Haunted volunteer rescue workers and families carrying meagre bags crowd silently through the aisles on flights that run every half hour, day and night. Seats are booked out for days in advance.
As survivors leave the area by any means possible, security in the worst-hit places is deteriorating. On Saturday German and Austrian rescue teams pulled out of Antakya due to armed looters in the town. Special forces police and soldiers have been deployed and gunfire has been heard in the city.
Israel said yesterday at was withdrawing its search and rescue team, which has recovered 19 survivors over six days.
A day after the quake, prison vans scrambled to evacuate rioting inmates from a prison near Kahramanmaras. On Wednesday there were riots in a jail on the outskirts of Antakya, as prisoners demanded to be released to find their families. Three inmates were killed and 12 injured before security forces brought the violence under control.
“My son is being imprisoned in a bus in handcuffs, because his prison fell down,” said a Kurdish woman, Dina Benila, 74, who lost her home in the city of Gaziantep.
In cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of people are staying in tents set up in sports stadiums and parks. Critics say Afad should be well-versed in responding to huge humanitarian crises, having provided emergency shelter for the waves of Syrian refugees on both sides of the border over the past ten years.
Sedat Cakmak, who was waiting for an aid delivery in Gaziantep, said: “I used to support the government but now I will vote on the basis of what I see around me.”
Erdogan came to power after a 1999 earthquake in the western city of Izmit which killed 17,000 people and helped to bring down an already teetering government. The region affected this time round is Erdogan’s heartland. Places like Kahramanmaras, Gaziantep and Sanliurfa are religiously and socially conservative, and have been re-fashioned by industrial, construction and population booms in the Erdogan era. Former villagers have left rural poverty for new apartment blocks in the towns and cities.
Ali Gezer, a farm labourer, and his wife Hatice, both 74, lost everything in the town of Pazarcik, population 30,000, which stood at the epicentre of the main quake. They were already poor, having been battered by runaway inflation partly created by Erdogan’s skewed fiscal policy. Yet they remained faithful to the party – and the man — they have consistently voted for over the past 20 years.
They were grateful for the 1,000 lira a month — about £44 — that the government began paying them as subsidy last summer, part of a welfare spending spree before elections scheduled for May 14 this year. They believe the news on government-connected propaganda channels, which report that the strength of the dollar and “manipulations of foreign-interest lobbies” are to blame for the economic crisis.
The Gezers left their flattened town for Gaziantep, where they are taking turns with a neighbouring family to take shelter and sleep in their car.
“How can anyone go to vote after this?” said Ali Gezer. “Ten municipalities have been destroyed. There are not even schools to vote in.”
