Notebook #15: the Bolu fire, the TV industry, Fidan on Greece

Notebook #15

This is a weekly roundup where I react to the news, or write about the things I’ve been reading and watching. The first item is for everyone, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

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The Kartalkaya fire and the wider crackdown

It already feels a bit like old news, but last week was dominated by the fire at the Grand Kartal hotel in Bolu. 78 people died in the fire, many of them being kids. People didn’t have access to a fire escape, so a lot of them screamed from high up in their rooms as the place was burning down.

Source: İbrahim Yazoğlu, AA

I have many fond memories at this hotel. I went to the German middle school in Ankara for a couple of years, and we had an annual getaway at the cabin right adjacent to that building. It was a tiny school, so they’d just move everything to Kartalkaya for a week. The teachers would become ski instructors, and we’d ski during the day and huddle around the cabin at night. It was a great time.

I went back every once in a while over the years (before 2018 or so, when hotels were still affordable), but the hotel wasn’t doing very well. The slopes weren’t great and the service was crap, but it was always just nice to be back in a familiar place.

Now the Grand Kartal is a site of horror for many families.

When something like this happens in a country like Turkey, it’s a little different from when it happens in a rich country. Turkey is still a place that’s trying to “catch up” to “level up,” to be more “developed.” So when these things happen, there’s not just the shock of something awful having occurred in your country, there’s fear of what people in other, more “developed” countries are going to say about it. That’s why there’s always a lot of coverage of the international coverage of the event. (The equivalent would be FOX News and the NYT covering how China or the EU covered the LA fires.)

It all feels a bit like the earthquake. Were there fire hazard checks? Why didn’t the fire trucks get there sooner? The thing that hammers into people’s heads again and again is that in Turkey, human life isn’t valued. In Turkey, the profit instinct always trumps safety. You could sit there and say that isn’t true, that disasters like this happen in rich countries as well, but that’s not how half the country is going to see it. They’re going to be caught up in these feelings.

Usually there’s a lot of that. Due to unusual political circumstances, however, the country rushed through all that to get to the politics.

I think we’re at a political moment where the governing elite no longer has a need to keep up pretenses. The world has moved past the idea of liberal democracy, the presidential palace doesn’t see much use for the opposition any more, so they’re looking at pruning its outgrowth much more aggressively.

So when bad things happen, they argue that they happen because the municipal governments aren’t doing their job, and that they’re a threat to the country’s safety. In this particular case, the government claims that the fire is the CHP-run municipality’s fault, while the CHP claims that it’s the AKP-run ministries’ fault.

I’m not qualified to make a real judgment on this, but it sounds like it’s one of those situations where both authorities have some oversight and responsibility, but the municipality has no enforcement capability, while the government does.

Bolu municipality is run by Tanju Özcan, the CHP mayor notorious for his anti-immigrant statements. He has been across opposition TV, furiously trying to defend himself. He represents the CHP at its lowest register, but he’s definitely a political animal, and as such, too slippery for the government to catch. Still, Erdoğan has said that he’d move fast against whoever was found responsible. State news agencies have also been pretty quick to point the finger at the municipality, and a few of the municipal staff, including one of Özcan’s deputies, have already been arrested, as well as the hotel’s owners. I think they’ll use the event to hack away at the CHP and the idea of non-regime controlled municipal government.

The political climate in Turkey had been heating up slowly for a long time, but now it has kindled into a flame, spreading with greater speed and hunger.