Turkey is now wrestling with shock and grief and with the dawning realisation of just how large a task it will be to rebuild in the wake of devastating natural disaster. It is also struggling with an uncomfortable truth – that the quake has, with vicious accuracy, sought out not only weaknesses in the earth but fault lines within society itself. Ankara must cope with the criticism that it failed both to plan for a disaster and to react when it struck.
I wrote the above paragraph nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of an earthquake near Istanbul which claimed at least 17,000 lives. And yet it remains cruelly apposite in the tide of devastation and recriminations that have followed the twin earthquakes earlier this month.
Turkey cannot help but wonder if a political shift is about to happen again
Infamously, the 1999 quake destroyed the reputation of a whole political generation – including the then powerful Turkish military, who during the crucial first days of the rescue effort, sat on their hands as the catastrophe unfolded. It exposed the contractors who short-changed on steel and cement, their accomplices in local government, and the national politicians who bartered amnesties for building-code violations in exchange for votes. The chain of culpability seemed to include a whole post-war generation, from the in-migrants who flocked to the cities, to the politicians they backed, as unplanned and unregulated urbanisation spiralled out of control.
The reputation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the former mayor of Istanbul (1994-1998), was built in the aftermath. He was the one who got public services literally back on tap, rescuing the city from notorious water shortages and the sound of waterpipes hissing air. In an era before social media, Erdoğan oversaw the construction of a vast political machine and a network of supporters glued together by culturally conservative values. Erdoğan had the ability to speak over the heads of a then hostile national press – and developed a contempt for media which he does not appear to have lost. As his popularity as mayor grew, the powers that were manoeuvred him out office and he notoriously spent four months in prison on charges of inciting religious hatred by reciting a poem. He was released less than a month before the August 1999 quake.
All these years later, president Erdoğan sits in a new and lavish presidential palace with his powers – the legacy of a 2017 constitutional referendum – mostly unchecked. Yet, in the aftermath of last week’s quakes, even as rescuers call for silence to see if there are still voices under the debris, Turkey cannot help but wonder if a political shift is about to happen again. The whole logic of the last two decades of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party rule and the authority of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may be about to implode.
‘The Erdoğan era is over and done with,’ said Selahattin Demirtaş, the charismatic (and imprisoned) former leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, in answer to questions I sent through lawyers to his cell. Demirtaş, once the great hope of Turkey’s minorities and liberals, characterised the period as one of one-man rule in which state and government have become indistinguishable: ‘Young people have known nothing else, older ones cannot imagine an alternative and believe that without Erdoğan, the state will collapse.’ However, the tragic course of the earthquake and inability to cope with its consequences have done much to undermine peoples’ trust: ‘Through much heartbreak it emerges that Erdoğan is neither as powerful nor as much in control as people thought.’
Yet for some, the starker precedent may not be the 1999 earthquake but the 2016 failed military coup, an event which Erdogan used to move Turkey from a parliamentary to a ‘super-presidential’ system, through a referendum the following year. Many of the emergency powers which the government assumed after the collapsed coup attempt have since been adopted into law. New legislation, already being used in the aftermath of the earthquake, makes the dissemination of ‘disinformation’ a crime, a move designed to intimidate what is left of Turkey’s independent press.
‘Erdoğan will now try to re-establish his shaken authority with new shows of strength,’ warns Demirtaş. Already, the government has imposed emergency rule on the ten provinces affected by the quakes, ostensibly in the interests of public order and to prevent looting.
The government has tried to bat away opposition criticism as an attempt to capitalise on the country’s misfortune. ‘This is a time for unity, solidarity. In a period like this, I cannot stomach people conducting negative campaigns for political interest,’ president Erdoğan said as he toured Kahramanmaraş, the city nearest the epicentre of the first and fiercest quake.
However, even as he spoke, the country’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority appeared to be playing politics: access to social media platforms, including Twitter, was restricted – with the presumed intention of stopping scenes of popular anger and frustration going viral.
While it is accurate to see the 1999 earthquake as undermining popular belief in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Father State’ – shorthand for a benevolent authority that keeps itself busy lining the streets with gold – it took another three years for the old guard to finally implode. This was the result of the 2000 and 2001 home-brewed economic crises. It was as much the collapse of the banking sector as of the pious instincts of its followers which brought the AK Party to power in the 2002 general election
‘The Erdoğan era is over and done with,’ said Selahattin Demirtaş, the charismatic (and imprisoned) former leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party
Many believed that it would be the radical devaluations of the Turkish lira that would prove the governments undoing. The argument for a powerful presidency was that it would make government more efficient. Instead, over-centralisation has made policy the result of one man’s whim.
‘Thanks to this system, no one can move their finger unless there is an order from the president,’ writes columnist Murat Belge. It is, he believes no system at all. Erdoğan is implementing the counter-intuitive strategy of lowering interest rates to curb the rate of inflation (down to 57.7 per cent). Political pressure on the courts, public regulatory agencies, let alone the Central Bank is fierce. The senior ranks of AFAD, the government agency charged with coping with the earthquake, is manned by those with theological training not in disaster management. President Erdoğan has already referred to those who died in the quake as ‘religious martyrs’.
The president is known to pay careful attention to opinion polls. However, a partner in one of the most respected polling firms concedes the obvious: given the disruption to the lives of the 13.5 million people (15 per cent of the entire population) who inhabit the earthquake afflicted regions, sampling public opinion is virtually impossible. With eight of the ten worst hit cities already under ruling AKP control, conventional wisdom is that while the government may not see its base evaporate, it is unlikely to increase its support.
This matters because Turkey was due to go to the ballot box for joint presidential and parliamentary elections that by law must be held by 18 June this year. Elections were due to be brought forward to May, if only to get around the rule preventing a president who completes two full terms from standing for a third. The presidential contest was always bound to be bitter. Few recent polls showed Erdoğan gaining the necessary 50 per cent share of the vote, even if the balloting were to go to a second round. There is now much speculation whether the vote can be held at all, but this poses another legal conundrum since the constitution allows for the postponement of elections because of war, but says nothing about force majeure.
The government is trying to balance two competing views of the disaster. The first is that the twin quakes, what Martin Griffiths, the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, described as the ‘region’s worst [natural] event for the last 100 years’, would have tried the capabilities of any government and that the AKP government, with its reputation for man management, is the only one that can return the country to normality. The second is the need for someone to blame for shoddy construction.
Architect Emre Arolat has some sympathy with the first argument. It was, after all, not just recent buildings but historical mosques and churches throughout the region – Gaziantep Castle, the historical quarter of Antakya – that were badly damaged. He is responsible for a new structure in Antakaya, the Museum Hotel, suspended on 20,000 tons of steel columns above a fabulous set of Roman ruins, including a fourth century public space that is a contender for the world’s largest mosaic.
‘The undulations in the mosaic designs are themselves evidence of a long history of seismic activity,’ Arolat says. In short, there was no excuse not to be prepared. A special levy on mobile phone bills was imposed after the 1999 quake to retrofit buildings and this is calculated to have raised nearly £32 billion. Many suspect the tax simply disappeared to fund the budget deficit, or, in some cases, highway construction. At the same time, building codes were revised and strengthened but it is an open secret that these have been more honoured in the breach.
Hence, the flurry of arrest warrants for some 131 contractors, charged with building sub-standard buildings. Police detained a man as he tried to catch a flight to Montenegro alleged to be responsible for a luxury complex of 250 flats in Antakaya which the earthquakes turned into dust. Yet Erdoğan campaigned in the 2019 local election, boasting in the city of Kahramanmaraş that ‘the problems of 144,556 of our citizens had been solved by a construction amnesty’. Under the terms of that amnesty, homeowners could pay a fine to obtain an official occupancy permit in lieu of bringing the building up to code. On campaign in Antakya the same year, the president gave the figure of those benefitting from the amnesty as 205,000.
‘They turned peoples homes into graves and then charged for the privilege,’ said the leader of the opposition, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu. Like many, he rejects the notion that now is not the time for politics. They ask the question, if not now when.
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