By David Pratt, Foreign Affairs Editor-The Herald,
Over many years during my time as a journalist I’ve reported on three earthquakes. Afghanistan in 1998, Kashmir in 2005 and Haiti in 2010. Each and every one of them is indelibly etched in my memory, each and every one of them hitting countries and communities often already on the brink and vulnerable through poverty, civil strife, or war.
I’ll never forget arriving at the small city of Balakot in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan which sat at the epicentre of the Kashmir quake. In less than a minute 16,000 people had lost their lives out of a population of about 50,000. In total some 86,000 people were killed.
I can still recall seeing the limbs of the dead protruding from under pancaked houses, how whole mountainsides surrounding the city had sheared off and the eerie blood red colour of the river that ran through the city resulting from minerals released from the ground after the tectonic rupture. There was the terrible smell of death too and the miracle of watching a toddler being rescued after days under the rubble.
As with every quake I’ve covered there is a grim familiarity also in the way events in the immediate aftermath of such disasters play out. There are always the questions raised over building standards, emergency provision and failures over the speedy delivery of aid.
And so it is once again after the world was confronted by the terrible scenes coming out of Turkey and Syria where over 20,000 people are dead following a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that slammed into the region last Monday.
People speaking of earthquakes often refer to them as “natural disasters, but this is only part of the explanation.
It was Cameron Sinclair founder of the Worldchanging Institute an organisation that focuses on architectural and design solutions to humanitarian crises who once said that “earthquakes don’t kill people, bad buildings do.” But this too is only part of the story. Earthquakes and their aftermaths play out in other ways too not least politically.
While last week’s quakes were historic in scale and would be difficult for the best prepared government to manage, the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under particularly sharp criticism.
Writing in the Financial Times in the aftermath of the quake the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak observed that “what made it so deadly and the suffering so immense was not nature itself… it was human-built systems of inequality and corruption.”
Shafak is far from being a lone voice in her criticism. Other critics have pointed to how national funds meant for natural disasters just like this quake were instead spent on motor way construction projects managed by associates of Erdogan and his coalition government.
After a catastrophic earthquake in north-western Turkey killed more than 18,000 people in 1999, authorities imposed an “earthquake solidarity tax” meant to corral billions of dollars’ worth of disaster prevention and relief.
One of the taxes, paid to this day by mobile phone operators and radio and TV, has brought some 88bn lira (£3.8bn) into state coffers. It was even increased to 10% two years ago. But the government has never fully explained where the money has been spent. In short, Turkey’s reliance on construction-driven economic growth, cronyism and willingness to ignore its own building standards have all played a part here.
According to Pelin Pınar Giritlioglu, Istanbul head of the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) periodically granted “construction amnesties” to buildings that blatantly defied earthquake regulations. Up to 75,000 buildings were given such amnesties in the earthquake zone alone, says Giritlioglu.
To make matters worse Erdogan’s centralisation of Turkey’s government has meant a plethora of restrictions on how individual cities and aid organisations can operate in the country making it almost impossible for other organisations, civil society and local leaders to actually help thus hampering overall rescue efforts.
Right now politics might seem far off for those still looking for victims amidst the rubble and there is truth in the view that this is not the time for finger pointing but getting help to people who need it. But Erdogan is if nothing else very much a political animal and knows that a June election is looming. So too perhaps is a day of political reckoning.
