The Earthquake's First Anniversary
Unearned Optimism vs. Despair
One year ago yesterday, Turkey’s Southern provinces and Syria experienced an earthquake of magnitude 7.8. The official figure for the deceased is 53,000, but experienced journalists cite higher numbers. Many of the survivors still live in tents and container homes.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the government’s response, including my own. Today I’d like to think about the earthquake’s place in our lives today.
Most of the coverage these days is of Hatay, which saw the worst destruction. I think there are two main reasons for this. First, the province is kind of tucked away in the south, and was physically hard to reach. Second, it was governed by the opposition, and there was therefore less of an incentive for the state, and organizations in its orbit, to make the effort to reach it. Many of the people who made it to the region yesterday said that Antakya, the provincial capital, still looks like it was hit yesterday.
As with everything else, there’s a huge split between government and opposition spaces.
The state broadcaster TRT, for example, is airing programs that focus on recovery. One mini-documentary, for example, follows young people who lost their limbs in the earthquake, and have now being fitted with prosthetic limbs, are going through rehab, going back to school, or doing sports, all thanks to government programs.
These tend to be pretty high production value. They highlight the buildings under construction, the programs binding the wounds. I think most of this kind of footage is taken from provinces other than Hatay.
Senior government spokespeople also highlight the new construction projects underway, but it doesn’t feel like they want to dwell on it too much. This is probably because they’re way behind deadline. Erdoğan said that the homes for victims would be ready a year from the earthquake. As of yesterday, about 8% of the planned homes were about 80% complete. I think they ended up pushing back a lot of the deadlines to the end of this year. Still, they’re being upbeat about it, pointing out that state-built TOKİ homes did not collapse in the earthquake.
I can understand it if victims want to go in the positive direction. I can also understand that people in the region voted for Erdoğan in the presidential elections. His supporters didn’t blame him, and even if some did, they probably thought that he was going to win anyways, and if their province didn’t vote for him, they wouldn’t see as much aid. Erdoğan said as much this week, saying “if the central government and the provincial government aren’t working hand-in-hand, nothing goes to that city.” Opposition figures attempted some protest at this, but it fell flat. Erdoğan’s statement was bordering on truism. Of course there was going to be more support for “patriotic” populations.
On the opposition side, things are quite different. The mainstream channels like Halk TV and Sözcü are pretty disorganized. Their fly into the region, set up their cameras, wait for people to flock around them, then do a free-flowing program. Sometimes this includes victims getting a hold of the microphone and voicing very specific grievances. Last night, for example, a woman was allowed to speak and said that the building they lived in didn’t collapse, but was declared fragile, so her family now lives in a container. Her son apparently operated a gym on the ground floor, but they obviously can’t operate it any more, and can’t even sell the place, so they’re laden with the debt they took on. She then gave the specific address and asked authorities to lift their ban on the building. It felt like one of those early days, when people were passing around information on social media to collectively direct relief efforts. The country moved on pretty quickly, but people in Hatay especially just kept living under those conditions.
Aside from those brief moments when someone is allowed to speak, the two opposition channels mostly have their anchors and CHP politicians ranting against the government. I can’t watch much of that, not even for you, dear reader.
There is, however, some interesting footage produced by independent journalists. Below, for example, is Duygu Demirdağ’s mini-documentary entitled “The Story of Those Who Remain.” She’s been traveling to the region since the earthquake, built relationships and interviewed regular people living among the rubble.
There’s stories in there about people who lost their children, can’t find places to live, can’t find work. There’s a woman whose husband committed suicide because he couldn’t provide for his family. Another woman says her newborn baby isn’t recognized as an earthquake victim, so she has to pay full price for his medication. Pretty much everybody has PTSD flashbacks whenever it rains. It takes them back to the night of the earthquake, when it was also raining.
The production value with this kind of thing is considerably lower than you see with TRT. Demirdağ worked in mainstream media for a long time, but she doesn’t seem to be good at the technical aspect of production. The 51-minute video is mostly interviews spliced together thematically. There’s little in the way of a story arc or background reporting. This is a fairly raw account of people living in Hatay, and maybe that’s its strength.
There’s other film makers who go down to the region and shoot very polished video of the victims, and post video of protests, but I feel like this degree of aestheticism is misplaced, even inappropriate.
The thing that I keep coming back to is accountability. After the great earthquake of 1999, in which 17,500 people died, the state infamously arrested seven people, and even those contractors didn’t get heavy fines. For this one, a lot of citizens have been investigating on their own and making accusations of negligence, so there’s close to three thousand pending cases, and roughly 350 arrests that were made. Pretty much all of this is at the lowest levels, so it’s small-time developers, building inspectors, and business owners (those little shops on the entry floors of buildings.) I have a feeling that it’s going to be like the Gülenist cases - the defendants with money and power are going to get away, and the weak ones are going to get some jail time, but probably not a lot of it.
There have been no high-level cases holding senior bureaucrats or politicians to account. On either side. The AK Party never holds its people or industry leaders to account on this sort of thing. They don’t do it on coal mining disasters and industrial accidents, and they haven’t done it for this either.
The CHP, meanwhile, is under the spotlight because it currently has Hatay’s mayoralty. Lütfü Savaş was the AK Party’s Antakya mayor 2009-2014, then switched to the CHP and became mayor of Hatay province in 2014, and again in 2019. Most people say that he holds a lot of responsibility for lax building regulations. He’s pretty unpopular among the electorate, but the CHP establishment has been insisting on putting him up again. Hatay is a pretty corrupt part of the CHP, and most people think that Savaş made a lot of people down there rich, which would explain why they’re so protective of him. Still, the backlash against him has been so popular that the party leadership is now reconsidering him as its candidate.
There are a few journalists doing solid work on the wider impact of the earthquake, especially how new laws are re-shaping the inner city of Istanbul and other rich areas. I’m reading through some of it and will report back here.