Disasters in Turkey
by Burak Bekdil • March 24, 2023 at 5:30 am
[W]hen the earthquakes struck, the Kızılay [Turkish Red Crescent] had, through a little-known business arm, sold thousands of tents to a Turkish charity, and scored a profit of $2.5 million, instead of dispatching the tents immediately to the victims free of charge.
The Turkish Union of Pharmacies was one of the quickest to respond to the earthquake. The organization wanted to set up "tent pharmacies" in the earthquake zone to distribute the most urgently needed medicines for free. It needed tents. It had none. It appealed to Kızılay for help. Kızılay helped by selling them tents -- at $7,000 each.
Turkey is a poor country, where per capita income is barely $9,000. The earthquake zone is one of the country's poorest. It was not a surprise that the Erdoğan administration pledged to build new homes for the earthquake victims. Nice? Nice. A local chamber of architects found out that the cost to build each apartment would be $40,000. The government said each apartment would be sold for $80,000.
Compare the response of two countries, one Middle Eastern, the other European.
In Turkey, twin earthquakes on February 6 took more than 50,000 lives, even though there was warning about the impending earthquake.
In Greece, a train crash on March 1 killed more than 50 people.
Greece's Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis, a former prime minister, immediately resigned, saying:
"I feel it is my duty [to step down], and a minimal gesture of respect to the memory of the people who perished so unfairly, and to take responsibility for the long-standing errors of the Greek state and the political system."
In Turkey, not a single official resigned, including Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu, who has refused to answer any one of the 64 parliamentary motions, filed by the opposition, who had warned about the earthquake.
