One week on, 37,000 dead, and the toll still rising. UN aid chief Martin Griffiths says he expects the number of dead to at least double. More than one million people have been rendered homeless in Turkey, up to 5.3 million in Syria, and hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping in the open in often sub-zero conditions.
The terrible truth is dawning on the country’s battered people that Turkey’s earthquakes, the worst in the region in 80 years, are more than a “natural” disaster. Nature’s brutal handiwork has been compounded by human failure after failure – slow responses after the quakes from both Ankara and Damascus, political game-playing over humanitarian access, bureaucratic complacency and systemic failure in recent years to enforce building controls, enabling builders impunity to cut corners as they constructed death traps.
The powerful earthquake that struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, killing more than 17,000 people, had produced promises of widespread reform of construction rules, which were substantially upgraded, but then ignored. Many construction projects in Turkey’s south-east were undertaken with insufficient protections against earthquakes.
This time 134 people have already been subjected to legal proceedings over ties to collapsed buildings and the justice ministry has authorised almost 150 local prosecutors’ offices to set up earthquake investigation units to probe contractors, surveyors and others with links to destroyed buildings and ensure they do not flee.
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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,who is facing a fiercely contested election in May, has unrealistically pledged to erect hundreds of thousands of seismically safe buildings within a year in a massive reconstruction effort. And yet on the campaign trail in 2019 Erdogan, long close to many of the country’s top construction magnates, boasted of the legislation that his political party had pushed through, allowing property owners to have construction violations forgiven for a fee, without bringing their buildings up to code.
Meanwhile, aid efforts in rebel-controlled areas in Syria are virtually non-existent because of Damascus’s unwillingness to send assistance, leaving homeless many people who had already been displaced several times by a decade-old civil war. And because of sanctions, only one inadequate border crossing from Turkey at Bab al-Hawa has been authorised by the UN for the transit of aid. A UN vote has been held up because Russia insists only one crossing is needed.
In another rebel area the hardline Hayat al-Tahjr al-Sham group is refusing to allow access to aid sent via Damascus, claiming the regime is using the crisis to gain political advantage. The scale of this tragedy threatens a prolonged crisis. The response so far is unlikely to head this off.