As Turks look at collapsed buildings, anger at government grows

With hopes scant of pulling many more survivors from the rubble of last week’s devastating earthquake, Turkish citizens are expressing growing anger and resentment toward the government, demanding accountability for shoddy construction practices they say cost thousands of lives and for its delayed response to the disaster.

Relief efforts pivoted urgently over the weekend to feeding and housing survivors on both sides of the Turkey-Syria border even as the death toll climbed steadily, passing 36,000 on Monday. The 7.8 magnitude quake Feb. 6 and strong aftershocks that followed constituted the deadliest natural disaster in the region in 80 years.

In Turkey, criticism of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party mounted. Critics said warnings about the quake-prone area were ignored, allowing a rush of construction by companies that, to maximize profits, dodged building codes that could have prevented the sudden collapse of entire buildings.

As of Monday, Turkish authorities said they had arrested 12 property developers, issued arrest warrants for 114 people, and launched 134 investigations, but government critics were insistent that more needed to be done to curb corruption, mismanagement, and impunity.

“Buildings should not have collapsed like that. And when they did, why wasn’t the army called on and helicopters used immediately to get rescue workers to save those under the collapsed buildings?” asks Guzide Diker, an activist whose family lost their homes in the quake in Malatya.

Ms. Diker, who says her brothers and parents are now all displaced by the quake, spent Monday looking for shelter for other homeless survivors in Diyarbakir.

Mr. Erdoğan, who faces a serious electoral challenge in May, accuses his critics of using a historic disaster to their political advantage. The president did eventually send the military to help in the quake zone and admitted to government shortcomings, but he also said last week at one of the impacted sites he visited that fate is to blame: “It’s part of destiny’s plan.”

His political opponents, however, are demanding to know where taxes collected over the last two decades in the name of earthquake preparedness have been spent.

Mr. Erdoğan, who has ruled Turkey since 2002, earned respect and popularity for modernization and building projects. But what are now perceived as shortcuts sacrificing safety may cost him the presidency.

Urban planning

Earthquake scientists say if the government had implemented retrofitting laws and zoning codes with the money collected from earmarked taxes, it could have saved many more lives. Thousands of new and old buildings toppled in seconds, the majority of which were built before 2001 when new codes were introduced, says Gencay Serter, head of the board of the national Chamber of Urban Planners.

“Our expertise tells us that certainly buildings should have been more resistant as the site is known to be an earthquake-prone zone. Therefore, we are confident to say that should anti-seismic building regulations be respected, the inhabitants would have had a higher chance of safety,” Mr. Serter writes in an email.

Mr. Serter says older buildings that were at risk should have been retrofitted and new buildings constructed to code, but he says the government failed on all fronts.

“Science didn’t shape our cities. The policy of capitalism did,” says Pelin Pinar Giritlioğlu, also an urban planner with the Chamber, and a professor of public administration and urbanization at Istanbul University.

Dr. Giritlioğlu says she wasn’t shocked to see the massive destruction of this latest quake because many predictions had been made, but she’s upset to see the neglect and disregard for loss of life.

She says earthquake protections include empty spaces where people can escape to, like parks, but instead of creating green spaces, more buildings were erected. Turkey has laws, like the Urban Transformation Action rolled out in 2019, to restore and demolish buildings at high risk, but there was no will to enforce those laws, she says.

Dr. Giritlioğlu says the government sought profits through mega projects. Airports were built on fault lines against all advice, as in Hatay, where aid was delayed because the airport was unusable. It reportedly reopened on Monday.

Responding to the critics, officials say rapid urbanization is a global phenomenon that the government could not stop, and the construction met growing needs for housing and transportation.

According to videos and witness accounts, bulldozers have demolished part of a government building in Hatay where evidence of shoddy construction may have been found in documents and collected from the wreckage. Independent lawyers are guarding whatever proof is left in the building.

“It’s difficult to tell if all the buildings were built in violation of codes. Once on-site examinations are made, then we can be more specific and accurate about the information,” she says.

Short-term needs vs. long-term safety

Serving short-term population demands has outweighed safety procedures, experts say, and that has to change.

To override earthquake prevention codes, ordinances and laws known as zoning amnesties are passed. The amnesties, which began in 1948, gave quick licenses to construction companies that could ignore safety codes.

After the 1999 earthquake near Istanbul that took more than 17,000 lives, measures were taken to stop the amnesties. Yet in 2018, the construction industry paid for a sweeping amnesty to build with impunity, urban planners say.

Even if earthquake prevention laws were followed in giving building licenses, developers cut corners and costs during actual building, experts say, adding that inspections were shady.

Meanwhile, foreign real estate investors were being lured in with shiny building exteriors and glamorous compounds with swimming pools and gyms. About 1,000 people lived in Rönesans Residence, advertised as “a frame from heaven” in Hatay, and few survived. Mehmet Yaşar Coşkun, the developer, is among the contractors who have been arrested, though he told reporters that he’s innocent of wrongdoing.

After the 1999 quake, some 88 billion Turkish liras, about $4.6 billion, was collected through phone and Internet usage and vehicle registration that was targeted for earthquake mitigation measures. But audit reports from the Istanbul Chamber of Accountants say it’s impossible to track how the funds were spent.

Popular anger makes Erdoğan vulnerable

Atila Yesilada, a Turkish economist and financial analyst with Global Source Partners, who is a staunch Erdoğan critic with a Youtube channel called Real Turkey, says the president “treats public money like his private purse.”

Mr. Yesilada says the money ended up in a general fund that gets diluted without any specifics of how these funds are spent. Oversight and monitoring committees in parliament have been stripped of their power over the years, because they are members of opposition parties.

The ruling party and its allies “reject opposition proposals so the opposition looks powerless,” Mr. Yesilada says. “Once a fiscal year is over, the government is mandated to show how they spent the budget, but they don’t do it.”

Mr. Yesilada says this disaster has made Mr. Erdoğan very vulnerable, even to what he says is a flawed opposition.

“Even if he performs miracles, people are angry and they are looking to find a scapegoat, and that’s Mr. Erdoğan,” he says.

But the president still has a strong base of supporters.

Nuran Durdagi, an Istanbul resident working in a shopping mall, has voted for Mr. Erdoğan in every election and says she will do so in the next one.

“He’s a very good person. Our government is very strong, thank God. This disaster came from God, there’s nothing anyone could have done. Hopefully, everyone will have a house in a year,” Ms. Durdagi says.