Earthquake Unveils Turkey's Many Ugly Faces
by Burak Bekdil • February 24, 2023 at 5:00 am
The worst disaster in modern Turkey's history, the earthquake killed, as of February 15, more than 35,000 people and injured 100,000. The death toll will likely reach 40,000 or more. According to one estimate, the quake will result in $84 billion in economic losses to Turkey, more than 10% of gross domestic product.
It was not the quake that killed tens of thousands, but politics and suicidal profit-maximization behavior on individual level.
[I]n the aftermath of the 1999 quake, Erdoğan said: "What broke here is not the fault line ... It is [the state's] sense of shame. This is [the result of] poor building planning and stealing from construction materials." Now that he is in power, Erdoğan explains that the loss of life in this month's earthquake was (God's) fate.
As part of his election campaign in 2018, Erdoğan granted "amnesty" to 7.4 million applications for unregulated buildings in return for fees, of which his government collected more than $13 billion.
More than 10,000 buildings were destroyed in the latest earthquake.
With the amnesty, contractors were allowed to skip crucial safety regulations, increasing their profits but putting residents at risk. Few buyers and tenants could guess that those permits would be their death certificates.
One of the buildings that collapsed in Hatay, one of the worst-hit provinces, was a government hospital. In 2012, experts wrote a report that the building was not earthquake-resistant. The authorities did not mind. Ironically, a bridge in the same region, built 18 centuries ago during the Roman Empire, survived unscathed.
An Israeli relief team from United Hatzalah, after having rescued 19 people under the rubble, was forced to cut short their work in Turkey and leave the country "in the face of growing security threat to the team." Yeni Akit claimed that "the Israeli team consisting of intelligence agents disguised as relief workers left Turkey in the face of threats and local people's cries of 'go home.'"
At 4:17 am on February 6, an earthquake of 7.8-magnitude hit 10 provinces in Turkey's east, which account for a sixth of the country's total population. The worst disaster in modern Turkey's history, the earthquake killed, as of February 15, more than 35,000 people and injured 100,000. The death toll will likely reach 40,000 or more. According to one estimate, the quake will result in $84 billion in economic losses to Turkey, more than 10% of gross domestic product.
The earthquake, epicentered in Kahramanmaraş province and triggered by geological fault lines, also has revealed Turkey's socio-cultural and political fault lines. It was not the quake that killed tens of thousands, but politics and suicidal profit-maximization behavior on individual level.
