Elif Shafak

The government’s guilt over Turkey’s devastation

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Early last week I bought myself a teapot. I have several, but I could not resist this with its turquoise Mediterranean charm. Alongside I purchased tea glasses — not mugs or cups, but glasses. The Turkish way. It comes with a milk jug. The English way. Excited to use them for the first time early in the morning, I went to the kitchen where I found my 74-year-old mother, who was visiting us from Ankara. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. She spoke in a voice so low that I struggled to hear at first. ‘There has been an earthquake.’ The glass in my hand felt small and fragile. We both knew what the next question was: ‘Did anyone die?’ I asked. She started crying again.

As I write these words the death toll from the twin earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria is close to 40,000, though the full scale of devastation is still unknown and the real number is estimated to be at least twice as high. What made the disaster even more catastrophic was not nature itself, but a human-built system of inequality, corruption, mismanagement and nepotism. The sad truth is an alarming number of buildings in my motherland are not up to code. The AKP government under President Erdogan kept issuing ‘construction amnesties’ which allowed dodgy contractors to skip safety regulations. The government has also collected ‘earthquake tax’ from its citizens for many years, but no one knows where the money was spent. 

There is a correlation between the lack of democracy in a country and the extent of the destruction and the inadequacy of rescue efforts in the wake of a natural disaster. Erdogan says no government could have been prepared for an earthquake of this magnitude, but that is not true.

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