Despite vows to tighten the rules after the 1999 quake, cronyism and complacency have undermined Turkish building regulations – at the cost of many thousands of lives. By Justus Links, The Guardian, 4 May 2023.
Two men lie on their sides on the cobblestones. A heavy winter boot bears down on the face of one of the men. From behind we hear voices: “Get the uniforms, come,” and then, from whoever is wearing that boot, something indistinct, like a curse. The boot kicks the man in the face – but not hard, it seems, just to scare him. These men are the looters, and now they’ve been caught. The video has been shared more than 1,000 times; there are others in this vein. Justice has been served.
Next in my Twitter feed: the response. Two young men appear, with scraggly beards, and bruises and bleeding around the eyes. “We are the youths you have seen in the video that has been making the rounds … We are not looters. We went downtown, my cousin and I, to get the medicine that our family urgently needed. On our way back, members of the security forces, seeing my backpack and the medicine in our hands, treated us like looters, took us behind a building and beat us, innocent earthquake victims, mercilessly … We are not looters. We are Turkish youth who love our country and were there to take care of our needs.”
In February, the day after two earthquakes of 7.9 and 7.8 magnitude rippled across multiple Turkish provinces and a swath of north-western Syria, affecting around 14 million people on the Turkish side alone, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared a “state of exception” in the affected region. This measure, he said, would give him the powers needed to combat “plunderers” who take advantage of the chaos to rob upstanding citizens.
No one really knew who the alleged plunderers are. Some seemed to think they were Syrian refugees. Selahattin Demirtaş, imprisoned leader of the Peoples’ Democracy party (HDP), called on the public to dismiss rumours of refugees “plundering” collapsed buildings. Others, friends of mine, said that the plunderers were real. They have some friends whose home had been destroyed by the earthquake, they told me, and who now live in a car. A man came and knocked on the window, said that the governor had announced that the local dam had broken, and the place would soon be flooded. Having no passable streets before them, and rubble blocking their car, they got out and ran for their lives, and were robbed.
The current death toll of the two earthquakes – nearing 55,000 – is more than 100 times the human cost of the failed military coup of 2016, and has now surpassed the number of people who have died in four decades of guerrilla war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). It is a catastrophe that is sadly not without precedent.
Slow violence is not slow in Turkey. Anyone living in the country in the past decade has witnessed a long trail of disasters, some partly “natural” and others wholly human in origin. Fires, floods, train crashes, terrorist attacks and collapsing mines have flickered across the screen of public attention, a string of massacres brought on by negligence, if not active malice, on the part of a state that reacts by burnishing its own emergency powers, cracking down on critical scrutiny and punishing the victims. Death comes quickly, in large numbers, and without accountability on the part of those in power. On the contrary: the culprits keep winning elections, and not even necessarily by cheating.
For the first several days after the earthquakes on 6 February, the government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent. Social media users took issue with the way Erdoğan at first called only the mayors of affected municipalities who belonged to his own party, the Justice and Development party (AKP). When a lawyer who had searched in vain for his relatives amid the rubble tweeted “where is the state?” prosecutors opened an investigation against him on charges of “insulting the state”.
It was not until five days after the earthquake that the authorities began to confront the crisis in earnest. On 11 February, Erdoğan said that some public university dorms would house refugees from the earthquakes while students would be sent home for distance learning. The day after the president’s announcement was made, a nationwide student-housing activist organisation tweeted that “dozens of students from the earthquake region who have lost their families and cannot afford bus fare have been abruptly chased out of their dorms”. The decision to commandeer dormitories has drawn criticism from academics discouraged by the decline in learning standards during the Covid-19 era, and one prominent economist has called for the state to house survivors in hotels and on military bases instead. But of all the institutions that the government could disrupt for the good of the earthquake victims, academia is an opportune one: campuses are bastions of opposition.
The country’s disaster relief agency, the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD), is one of several state bodies whose share of the budget declined in recent years, as funds have been redirected to the Presidential Directorate of Religious Affairs. From 2022 to 2023, the government shrank AFAD’s budget by one-third, from 12.1bn to 8bn Turkish lira, while expanding the directorate’s funding by 56%, to almost 36bn lira – more than the foreign and culture ministries combined.
Moreover, money spent on AFAD does not necessarily go toward disaster relief. Though Turkish citizens pay a tax officially meant to solidify buildings to withstand earthquakes, Erdoğan and his ministers have revealed that the money has largely been spent on unrelated infrastructure projects and paying back an IMF loan. After questions from opposition parliamentarians, the court of accounts (the supreme governmental accounting body) reported that 7.7m lira of the agency’s 10.8m lira budget for 2021 had been spent on “capital transfer”. In response to the parliamentarians’ questions, AFAD claimed that it had passed the money on to the state’s Turkish housing development administration.
AFAD’s general director of disaster intervention, Ismail Palakoğlu, is a theologian who had no career experience in disaster relief before being appointed to the position in 2018. The staffing of the agency with people chosen for their proximity to the ruling party, not professional qualifications, has not escaped notice. In an internal document, AFAD employees have even alluded to this weakness in criticising their own agency’s response to a much smaller earthquake near the Black Sea coast last November, noting that “instead of civil engineers, we have assembled teams of teachers and imams”.
In the critical first 40 hours of rescue efforts in February, AFAD was clearly overstretched, reportedly sending 9,000 relief workers to a part of the region where 5 million needed help. Social media and the few remaining opposition newspapers were full of reports from locations where people were trapped under rubble and AFAD personnel had not been seen. Yet the state has not been passive. The day after the earthquake, the directorate announced that it had mobilised 2,500 “spiritual advisers” to console the victims. Pictures of “mobile prayer rooms” sent to the region inspired mockery from people who thought they looked like toilets, while an acute shortage of actual toilets made life even more difficult for survivors, an untold number of whom froze to death in the winter night.
As the death toll grew, the response from AKP leaders went from ineffective to actively obstructive. Noting that AFAD had not yet appeared at sites where relatives were buried under the remains of their homes, people turned quickly to Twitter to organise relief on their own. As desperate survivors posted the coordinates of lost friends and relatives, makeshift rescue and aid instructions appeared alongside criticism of the state response. On the third day of the crisis, the authorities blocked access to Twitter in Turkey.
Not wanting to see AFAD upstaged, government spokesmen mounted a propaganda campaign against private charities. Interior minister Süleyman Soylu said that donating to any organisation but AFAD was a “provocation”. A particular target is the nationally famous ageing rocker Haluk Levent, whose charity Ahbap (“Buddy”) has raised hundreds of millions of lira to provide supplies for survivors, and to repair damaged schools and medical facilities. From the first day of the crisis, the question “AFAD or Ahbap?” became a popular query on Turkish wiki sites. Under the rhetorical onslaught of AKP media, Levent has assured the government that he means no harm to AFAD, pleading with his own supporters to say that “both AFAD and Ahbap are ours”, and underlining that he had already signed a protocol of cooperation with AFAD. Soylu subsequently said necessary steps would be taken against “those who think they can go step for step with the state”.
In spite of the government’s attitude, the Turkish population has shown a heroic readiness to help the afflicted. The student council building of a university where I donated supplies was floor-to-ceiling full of boxes within hours of opening its relief effort, and many students were leaving their studies to volunteer full-time. On the initiative of local governments and hotel management, more than 200 hotels in the tourist centres of the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts volunteered, within a day of the earthquake, to take in earthquake victims free of charge. Volunteering for service in their thousands, miners have put their lives at risk and their skills at work by digging under the wreckage to extract survivors.
Miners are no strangers to this kind of disaster. Part of the neoliberal programme that won the AKP accolades from the international business press after the party’s rise to power in 2002 was an aggressive sell-off of state-owned enterprises, including mines. After privatisation, the already grievous problem of fatal “work accidents” in the country’s mines got a lot worse.
When Erdoğan and his entourage visited the site of a devastating fire in a coal mine in Soma on the Aegean coast in 2014, Erdoğan said that the death of 301 miners was part of “the nature of this business”. In similar mine disasters elsewhere, he has said that it was their “fate”, and forwarded further questions to his director of religious affairs.
In the mandatory religion classes first imposed on Turkish schools by the military junta in the early 80s, every Muslim child learns that fate (kader) is an article of faith in Islam. In the popular mind, the concept is strongly linked to the moment of death. Hence the director of religious affairs’ early statement that those killed by the earthquakes were “martyrs”, and the tweet from one university physicist that “Earthquakes or buildings do not kill, God kills those whose time has come. Even if those who died during the earthquake had been on Mars at that moment, they would have died just the same.”
Turkey’s location and topography render it rich in renewable resources like wind and water power, agriculture and coal, but also make the country vulnerable to a wide range of natural disasters. The Anatolian peninsula is surrounded on three sides by seas, and is the meeting place of several major fault lines running along the coasts.
In 1999, a massive earthquake shook the eastern part of metropolitan Istanbul, killing 17,000 people. The state has since implemented stricter building codes – setting higher standards for materials and engineering work to ensure that buildings would withstand earthquakes – but it has systematically failed to enforce them. Builders have been allowed to hire private inspectors, who sign off on substandard construction, and Erdoğan himself has issued numerous “amnesties”, legalising unregistered buildings in exchange for a fine. In a 2019 speech in Kahramanmaraş, Erdoğan boasted of having “solved the problems of 144,556 citizens” of that city by forgiving the unlicensed structures built in their name.
Turkish officialdom has had its reasons for not taming the lawless construction sector. On the one hand, it has needed to appeal to a population that relies on cheap housing. In the intense urbanisation of the past several decades, many small contractors put up houses on public land, generally on steep hillsides or on the fringes of cities, for families fleeing failed farms and dying villages in favour of an uncertain life of urban wage labour. The custom is to let these houses “built overnight” (gecekondu) stand, though the state does have the right to demolish them, and periodically does so. On the other hand, large-scale construction has been a mammoth industry in the past 20 years, and a staple of the AKP’s political economy, in the private sector and through huge public works projects put up by the state. Not only has construction been one of the main engines of growth, but its tendency to employ workers on short-term contracts has helped shift an already inhospitable labour market even further towards the interests of capital.
The basis of the AKP’s economic strategy goes back to Turkey’s neoliberal turn after the military coup of 1980. The junta and its rightwing successors aimed to transform an economy based on promoting domestic production and marked by high levels of union membership. In order to reorient the economy toward industrial exports, they cut agricultural subsidies and opened the food market to competition from imports, accelerating urbanisation as cities swelled with migrants from the countryside.
In a legal climate increasingly hostile to unionisation, and an economic one characterised by “informal” short-term labour, many of these new proletarians never entered the labour movement, but have had to scrape by with help from private religious foundations. Connecting conservative businessmen with non-unionised, informal-sector workers in networks involving both public welfare programmes and private charities, the Islamist parties have been able to pin the livelihoods of these labourers to the specific AKP-affiliated personnel who manage those programmes and fund those charities. Instead of labour rights won through collective struggle at the point of production, workers have come to depend on periodic relief targeted to specific constituencies, and made contingent on political loyalty.
This system of patronage enabled political Islam to gain a foothold within the working class without interfering with capital’s control over labour. While the petite bourgeoisie is the traditional social base of Islamic conservatism in Turkey, and small businessmen are still the class that most reliably votes for the AKP, the new urban informal proletariat has swelled the ranks of the movement and given it a credible claim to represent “the people”. All the while, the party has cultivated an ever-cosier relationship with construction magnates, some of whom have been AKP politicians or their relatives.
After the earthquakes, many new buildings and pieces of infrastructure hurriedly constructed during Turkey’s retail and credit boom of the 2000s now lie in ruins, including multiple public hospitals. Official sources now list 50,783 dead and more than 122,000 injured in Turkey, and at least 8,467 dead in Syria. How many of the Turkish dead would still be alive had AFAD been better funded, or alternative rescue efforts had not been blocked by the state? What would the earthquake-stricken landscape look like if the construction industry had had to abide by building codes?
On 7 March, authorities counted 232,632 buildings either heavily damaged or in urgent need of demolition. The presence of sound buildings standing firm in some of the hardest-hit areas demonstrates that the destruction could have been far less severe. In one district of the Hatay province, not one building collapsed and no one died in the earthquake, though on all sides the neighbouring districts were ravaged. The exceptional district’s mayor, who had been admired and mocked for his extreme punctiliousness, told journalists that in all his time in office, he had never permitted anyone to build anything without the proper regulatory checks.
Although the government tried to discredit even the most perfunctory calculation of cause and effect behind so many avoidable deaths with its sermons on fate, it has had to make concessions. After five days of calls for the arrest of contractors who had allegedly flouted the building codes, the police finally apprehended one businessman trying to leave the country. The author of a complex of luxury apartment blocks in Antakya that the earthquake had immediately pulverised, he had conspicuously denied responsibility for his brainchild being substandard. The next day, the police started nabbing more contractors, and since then, more than 300 arrests have been made.
Yet while the arrest of contractors does signal recognition of the need for accountability, it does not constitute an acknowledgment of the party-state’s systemic failure to enforce public safety requirements when its clientelist political economy was at stake. As a colleague put it to me in conversation, the culprits will not be held to account when the culprits and those holding to account are the same people.
In this lawless environment dominated by unscrupulous contractors, building often proceeds with little or no input from architects or engineers. To the detriment of Turkish urban planning, the architects are also a target of the AKP’s ongoing war on professional organisations, long a vital organ of civil society. Until 2013, the architects’ bureau had the exclusive right to monitor new construction, and new projects were sometimes delayed for years in the courts. The government cancelled this right after the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations against government plans to clear a public park to make room for a shopping mall. (Architects Bureau official Mücella Yapıcı was arrested for her part in the protests, for which she is now serving an 18-year sentence.) After months of the largest protest movement in Turkish history, Erdoğan opted to let a court ruling take the issue out of his hands. Preserving the park was a rare victory for the resistance to the AKP drive to close public spaces not devoted to either commerce or religion.
Turkey’s illegal buildings include the biggest house of all: a complex 30 times the size of the White House, and home to Erdoğan. This 1,000-room home erected for the leader even before he made the move from the prime minister’s office to the presidency in 2014 was built despite a court order to halt construction. Erdoğan has established a Presidential National Library within the palace complex, and can now worship in an enormous mosque on his own grounds.
One can read the AKP’s progress as a two-step process of privatisation. In its first two terms, the AKP government privatised a large portion of Turkey’s state assets; since then, it has made the state itself something like the private property of one man and his friends. The first phase – standard neoliberalism – won applause from the western establishment, which is now aghast at the second phase, which looks more like Putin than Thatcher.
The road leading from neoliberalism to state capture must be understood better if we are to prevent other societies – including in the west – from travelling it. There are more than merely economic factors involved. One clue to the Turkish case is available in the aforementioned 2019 Erdoğan speech, in which the president praised himself for releasing people from the rules. This now looks like a grave mistake. A large part of the appeal of authoritarian leaders is their promise to free us from the burden of law. In January 2016, Donald Trump said he could shoot someone in the middle of the day on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. His subsequent election shows he may have been right.
Erdoğan is set to face the voters on 14 May. His opponents face an uphill battle. The crackdown on opposition since the July 2016 coup attempt and the collapse of the peace process between the state and the PKK have landed major figures from the Kurdish and secularist oppositions in prison – including mayors of major cities, who have seen their municipalities handed to unelected “caretakers”. Meanwhile, the arrest last week of dozens of activists, journalists and politicians in majority-Kurdish provinces seems aimed at depriving the opposition of those best placed to monitor irregularities at the voting booth.
The opposition is diffuse and divided. The HDP (currently under threat of being banned by the constitutional court) is the third-largest party in parliament, but is not part of the six-party coalition that forms the main oppositional block. That coalition is led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the Republican People’s party (CHP); if the predominantly Kurdish HDP lends him its support, it risks antagonising the Turkish nationalist elements among the other parties in the already shaky coalition.
It does not help that the ruling party has commandeered more than 90% of the media, forcing many journalists into jail or exile, and seized media companies by court order and handed them over to crony businessmen. The result is a media swimming with tales of foreign conspiracy, vengeful memories of past eras of secularist dominance, and an emphasis on any issue likely to exacerbate internal divisions within the opposition.
Since first coming to power in 2002, the ruling party has ramped up inequality while granting gifts to formerly marginalised sectors. It has cancelled civil servants’ privileges in the health system and legalised the hijab in public buildings. It projects a face and voice with which groups displaced by Turkish modernisation feel at home. The instinctively conciliatory Kılıçdaroğlu has come to sound like more of a fighter since the earthquake, promising to break with “neoliberalism” and forcefully rejecting the government’s demand that he stop “politicising” the disaster and its aftermath.
In a time of mourning and chaos, people whose differences over religion, nationhood and other issues going back more than a century must work together. The unity with which civil society confronted the earthquake is needed on the political front. Otherwise the plunderers will get away with it again.