[With a death toll expected to surpass 100,000, how will the
nation come to terms with what happened and move forward?]
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AS TURKEY COUNTS ITS DEAD, A RECKONING IS STILL TO COME  
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Evan Pheiffer
February 20, 2023
New Lines
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_ With a death toll expected to surpass 100,000, how will the nation
come to terms with what happened and move forward? _

Families who lost their relatives seen at a cemetery in Turkey on
Feb. 20, 2023., Seckin Senvardar / dia images via Getty Images

 

Late on Monday, a second earthquake of magnitude 6.3 struck the
Turkey-Syria border area two weeks to the day after the region’s
worst earthquake in a century left tens of thousands dead and
destroyed over 110,000 buildings.

Not since Hiroshima and Nagasaki have entire city centers been wiped
from the earth in the course of a few hours. Similar in scale to the
Little Judgment Day of 1509 (a 7.2 quake that damaged half of Ottoman
Istanbul), the evil twin earthquakes of Feb. 6 have destroyed at least
four ancient cities in southern Turkey — Antakya, Iskenderun,
Adiyaman and Kahramanmaras — and probably hundreds of villages as
well.

“Adana is mostly fine,” says Giuseppe, an Italian journalist,
speaking of Turkey’s fifth-largest city. “Urfa isn’t too bad;
Gaziantep a little worse,” referring to the country’s
sixth-largest city, whose 2,000-year-old castle crumpled. “But
Adiyaman, Kahramanmaras [two cities with populations of about 270,000
and 560,000, respectively] and Hatay,” the latter being Turkey’s
southern-most province, a beautiful mountainous enclave between Syria
and the Mediterranean Sea, “are the apocalypse.”

Straddling many of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical and
geological fault lines, Turkey is no stranger to catastrophe. But last
week’s disasters are pushing many to the proverbial edge. “It’s
worse than Armenia in 1988,” says Mickey, a veteran cameraman who
covered the cataclysmic quake that caused the beginning of the end of
the Soviet Union, “and far worse than Kathmandu,” a 7.8 eruption
in 2015 that killed 9,000, moved the Nepali capital by three meters,
and induced a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest.

For what it’s worth, the calamity of Feb. 6 was the worst crisis in
Turkey since the major earthquake of 1939, when the country was still
recovering from over 10 years of total war (1912–23) and had merely
17 million people, roughly the size of Istanbul today (and sustained
30,000 deaths). Contrast that with Feb. 6, which directly affected
13.5 million of the country’s 83 million people, or 16%. If an
equivalent disaster struck the United States, it would mean the
semi-destruction of the entire West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii.

In Turkey, the America of the Old World with its highly mobile
population, everyone has been affected. “My story’s nothing
special,” says Coskun, a waiter in Istanbul who lost 15 of his
in-laws in Hatay. “Everyone in Turkey has a similar tale.”
That’s especially true of major cities, where everyone has at least
one friend whose family was visited by death two Monday mornings ago.

The government has been quick to condemn its opponents for
“politicizing” the catastrophe, but it has a hard case to sell. If
the adage that “all politics is local” has any truth to it, last
week’s catastrophe is impossible to depoliticize. If societal
collapse isn’t political, then what is? As Hannah Arendt once wrote,
“You can’t rule over dead people.”

The heart of the matter lies in one short, contested sentence:
“Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” Although it’s
not strictly true, it’s close enough. In central Adiyaman, for
example, where nearly every building collapsed or saw severe damage,
even City Hall was reduced to an ignominious pile of rubble. Across
the street, however, the Kommagene Cultural Center, a modern glass
building finished in 2022 with EU funds and according to EU standards,
stands tall, without a single glass pane fractured. The other two
buildings to survive intact? The local Chamber of Architects and
Chamber of Engineers.

Although the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been in power for
20 years, it’s not fair to place the entire blame on Turkey’s
ruling party. Yes, a series of “construction amnesties”
culminating in 2018 “legalized” millions of poorly built buildings
as earthquake-ready and up-to-code. Although murderous in outcome if
not intent, this maneuvering was also like a socioeconomic tsunami —
a continuation of countless retroactive legalization schemes that have
transformed Turkey since the 1980s from a country of “gecekondus,”
or urban slums, to flatscreen-having high-rises in less than two
generations. When one person breaks the law, it’s illegal. When
everyone does it, you draw up a general amnesty.

Was Turkey’s urban and economic transformation over the past
half-century entirely haphazard? The sad answer, of course, is that it
needn’t have been. As the liberal weekly Oksijen reminded its
readers, the same headlines were splattered across newspapers after
the 1939 Erzincan Earthquake: “Fraudulent construction exacerbates
disaster!” read Son Posta on Jan. 4, 1940. As today’s editors of
Oksijen now lament, “How has nothing changed in 83 years?”

The answer is the same as it’s always been, from Babylon to the
Bronx: money doesn’t grow on trees. But it does grow on real estate
speculation. Turkey’s significant enrichment over the past
half-century has been the result of several key factors: first, of
course, is incredibly hard work. In addition to being highly educated,
Turks work 50 hours a week, 33% more than the EU average. Much of this
is exploitation and much of it grit, determination and drive. No one
can accuse them of not being among the hardest-working, and
hardest-hustling, in the world.

The next great factor in Turkey’s enrichment, along with tourism and
manufacturing, is real estate speculation. As the urban historian
Dogan Kuban wrote, this quickly became the chief national activity
from the 1950s onward. Like the new money created out of thin air when
banks make loans, speculation was the tinder that lit Turkey’s great
economic boom:

In a developing country, under the pressure of immigration, and in a
working democratic system, reconstruction practices cannot be
controlled by plans. … The only mechanism which controls growth is
speculation, and plans were prepared to serve speculation. The word
speculation covers a formidable range of interests, from landowners
and land and building speculators to car manufacturers, construction
firms, the manufacturers and sellers of construction materials, the
hundreds of thousands of jobless, unqualified workers, i.e. recent
peasant immigrants, thus absorbing social unrest, even helping the
street hawkers to sell their merchandise, raising the hopes of the
homeless, creating an atmosphere of activity, and producing a sense of
accomplishment in the minds of the masses. … Land speculation, which
eventually constituted the basic economic activity of Istanbul and
Turkey, was not a simple phenomenon of pillage. It coincided with many
historically approved demands of a developing country, answered many
desires expressed since the Tanzimat, satisfied the demands of
self-identity, in fact proved to be the most self-satisfying social
activity for the second half of the 20th century.

Over the weeks and months ahead, the witch hunt for shoddy
corner-cutting contractors will only bring fleeting satisfaction and
little to no closure. “Every other shopkeeper is a developer in
Turkey!” says Metin, a taxi driver in Istanbul, speaking of
Turkey’s notorious “muteahhit,” or developers. “Turkey has
over 300,000 of them!” he fumes. “A hundred times more than
Germany! Every grocer is a muteahhit on the side in this madhouse of a
country.” How safe is your building? I ask him. “I’ll be fine,
thank God,” he says. “My muteahhit lives above me.”

Even for a country of go-getters, Turkey’s official number of
muteahhit, at 330,000, is somewhat shocking, with 60,000 in Istanbul
alone. Making them all pay for Feb. 6 would entail a small politicide.
“My father went broke in the ’90s trying to make high-quality
concrete,” says Nihat, a writer who grew up near the mining town of
Zonguldak on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. “He was a highly educated
construction engineer with a specialized master’s degree who later
became the mayor. But when he tried to make a company selling
high-quality concrete, no one would buy it.”

The difference in price for building with earthquake-resistant
concrete, in today’s lira, was 500 Turkish lira (TL) per square
meter, or 60,000 TL for a standard 120-square-meter apartment, or
about $3,000. “For an extra three grand, then, you’d be alive
today,” he sighs. “But people weren’t having it.” When the
1999 Izmit earthquake hit the eastern outskirts of Istanbul, killing
at least 17,000, Nihat’s father drove the crane he had bought for
his failed concrete company to Izmit to help dig survivors and bodies
out of the rubble.

The scale of the disaster is very difficult to comprehend. In villages
outside Adiyaman, wolves had already gotten to the bodies of
“depremzede,” or earthquake victims, before rescue teams could
show up. In Antakya, the capital of Hatay province, one journalist
spoke of hearing voices of survivors crying from the rubble, knowing
all too well that no one would ever rescue them in time, much less
himself. One friend lost three cousins in Hatay, all of whom were
texting frantically for help until the bitter end, or until their
phones died, whichever came first.

It’s not just families, neighborhoods and entire cities that were
wiped out. In Hatay, the last remnants of Antakya’s 2,500-year-old
Jewish community was also destroyed in the earthquake. Both the
synagogue, built in the 1830s, and its last caretaker, Saul Cenudi,
along with his wife, Fortune, died in the early hours of Feb. 6.
Bolstered by special forces, Israeli first responders recovered their
bodies from the rubble. Under the guise of disaster recovery, a source
within the community told _New Lines_, Israeli forces are now scouring
southern Anatolia to help whatever Jewish survivors remain to emigrate
to Israel. In Hatay, the ancient Jewish community is no longer.

Whatever your faith in the five stages of grief, many in Turkey are
experiencing all at once. Start with denial. “Everyone knows the
American warship caused the earthquake!” says Murat, a 20-something
driver. Referring to the USS George H. W. Bush, a Nimitz-class
aircraft carrier that entered Turkish waters on Feb. 8 in anticipation
of providing humanitarian assistance — according to the
“imperialist” press — Murat was immovable in his convictions.
“How do you defend yourself now, my American friend?!” I’m not
sure we have that kind of technology, I respond. If we did, someone
might have used it on China long ago. “No you wouldn’t!” he
shoots back. “U.S. businessmen own half of China!”

The second stage of grief, anger, is also reaching new breaking
points. To be sure, liberal and secular-minded Turks have been furious
with the status quo for a very long time. Although some people are
less prone (with ample reason) to take to the streets, they’ll use
social media, which has been on fire for the past two weeks. As could
only happen in Turkey, one meme making the rounds is a rehashing of
Hammurabi’s code: “If a builder builds a house for someone, and
does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in
and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.”

Many conservatives, for their part, are skipping bargaining and
depression and going straight for the fifth stage, acceptance. In
Turkey, as elsewhere, this is sometimes called fatalism, sometimes
stoicism. For many, utterances of “God’s will” are infuriating
and self-fulfilling. Yet as one friend’s father said after the coup
attempt of July 16, 2016, “We survived the Mongols. We survived the
English. And we’ll survive this,” referring to the secretive
Gulenist movement that nearly took over the Turkish state seven years
ago. “We’re from Erzurum,” a city in eastern Anatolia.
“There’s nothing we can’t survive.”

Central to relief efforts has been the profound solidarity of Turkish
society, one of the strongest in the world. “If a catastrophe of
this scale struck the U.S.,” says a Turkish-American academic,
“the country would collapse. We’re selfish and used to far too
many comforts; we’d never rise to the challenge.” Although it’s
questionable to lionize a people in profound pain, one saving truth
remains: Turkey is a nation of selfless first responders.

Within hours of the disaster, thousands of neighborhood associations
sprang up all around the country to provide emergency assistance to
the “depremzede” (victims). Medicine, blankets, food, water,
heaters, tampons, batteries, clothing and tents were collected from
every age and social class and sent en masse to the affected areas,
along with tens of thousands of civilian volunteers. Of course it was
too little, too late. In the face of a 7.8 quake rippling across a sea
of shoddily-built apartments, civilian aid was never going to be
enough to stem the tide of death and suffering. Only an act of God, or
a good mayor, could do that.

Enter Okkes Elmasoglu, for example, the 42-year-old mayor of Erzin,
the only city in Hatay province where not a single building was
damaged and not a single person perished. For a small region that has
already probably lost 10,000 people, Erzin’s mayor is becoming a
legend: for once, this local official simply put his foot down and
didn’t allow illegal construction — and punished, fined and
prevented it wherever possible.

Another unsung hero is Turkey’s TOKI (“Toplu Konut Idaresi”),
the government-backed social housing agency that has built nearly 1.2
million affordable units across the country over the past 19 years.
While not always the most attractive, these ubiquitous, affordable and
spartan buildings dot the skyline of every city in the republic.
Remarkably, in none of the 11 regions did a single TOKI-made building
fall. Although hundreds of municipal buildings collapsed last week, at
least one state-run agency can stand tall.

Second only to the sin of poor construction, a crime for which most of
Turkey is a co-defendant, is the question of the state’s response.

President Erdogan is on record saying that his government was not
adequately prepared, but that no state could have been prepared for a
disaster of this size. Nonsense, say his critics. After the 1999
earthquake, for which the state’s response was widely ridiculed,
24,000 soldiers were immediately sent to help with disaster relief. In
comparison, by Feb. 7, nearly 30 hours after this year’s disaster
struck, only 12,000 search and rescue personnel had been sent to all
11 regions. The rest of the hard work was left to civil society
organizations, desperate survivors and foreign volunteers, say
critics.

Others, however, including a team of Italian rescue workers that
volunteered in Turkey after the 1999 Izmit earthquake, say that Afad,
the state-run search and rescue organization, did excellent work and
was everywhere it possibly could be.

This author, too selfish, incompetent and scared to visit the disaster
zone, cannot confirm the claims of either. “Whoever goes to the
region for whatever reason — to help, witness or report upon —
becomes a “depremzede,” or victim, themselves,” says Nihat.
“One of my friends, a mountaineer type, spent four days in Hatay
trying to help with the search and rescue. He came back a broken man,
unable to sleep or talk about what he’d seen.”

Others have less traumatizing but no less harrowing tales of trying to
help. One aid worker, Busra, whose own family had to flee Malatya
because of the quake, spent five nights sleeping on the cold floor of
an open market with 200 other volunteers in Antakya. “We got no
sleep, couldn’t shower or change our clothes, and didn’t have a
clean place to go to the bathroom,” she says. “And yet we met
hundreds of wonderful people every day. Locals, soldiers, aid workers,
internationals. I must have hugged 300 people goodbye on the last day.
Even the communists in our group were hugging and kissing the
gendarmes by the time we left!”

On their way to the airport, where dozens of “depremzede” along
with several rescued cats were among the passengers back to Istanbul,
they stopped in a small village of Hatay that had been badly damaged.
There they met with Emel Korkmaz, the beloved mother of Ali Ismail
Korkmaz, a student who was beaten to death by police during the Gezi
Park protests of 2013 and is now something of a national leftist icon.
Though Turkey feels like an eternity away from the ebullient spring of
2013, for Emel the struggle continues. “All communications were
knocked out in her village,” says Busra, “but Emel Sister was
running back and forth to get every possible item for everyone in the
village for the past nine days. From food and water to tampons and
heaters, Emel Sister somehow secured it. She was an emblem of hope and
a beacon to all.”

As Turkey comes to grips with its worst calamity in a century, the
five stages of grief will be in stiff competition during the days,
months and years to come. Never mind the chronic problems of
yesteryear: hyperinflation, housing and economic crises, and the
world’s highest refugee burden. How will the country identify and
bury (at least) 100,000 dead or feed and house an estimated 3 million
extra people made newly homeless — and, on top of all this, hold its
most contested presidential election in history in less than three
months? (Simple answer: It probably won’t.)

Anger, fear and frustration were already reaching breaking point prior
to Feb. 6. In addition to a humanitarian catastrophe of biblical
proportions, this disaster has raised the specter of the country’s
greatest lurking fear: What happens when the long-overdue Istanbul
earthquake finally strikes? “Then it’s quite simple,” says Esra,
a leather goods manufacturer. “There will be no more Turkey.”

Though hardly sanguine, others are less dramatic. “Even in the
decimated heart of Antakya, locals were bringing us coffee each
morning and coming to chat,” says one aid worker. “I was astounded
at how upbeat and outgoing people were, given the circumstances.”
One tries to imagine civilians sipping coffee and trading pleasantries
in Berlin in 1945, Managua in 1972 or Port-au-Prince in 2010. If any
country on earth can survive the existential odds it’s currently up
against, it’s Turkey. But it needs all the help it can get in the
meantime.

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