Suffer the little children
A violent earthquake struck the Turkish province of Bingol last week, demonstrating once again the murderously high cost of a bureaucratic culture of nepotism and corruption. Gareth Jenkins reports from Ankara
Click to view caption |
Rescuers pull the last body of the 83 children killed in Sunday's earthquake (left); two groups of students with opposing views clash on campus in Istanbul over a dispute about May Day posters
|
Last week a violent earthquake struck the predominantly Kurdish province of Bingol in southeastern Turkey, killing 176 people and injuring more than 1,000.
The earthquake, wreaking death and devastation, was yet more proof of the bureaucratic corruption that has made a mockery of Turkey's theoretically rigorous building safety standards.
The tremor, measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale, struck just after three o'clock on the morning of 1 May, sending terrified residents rushing into the street. Almost half of the deaths came in the town of Celtiksuyu, where a state-owned primary school dormitory collapsed, killing 84 children and injuring over 100.
Bingol is one of the poorest provinces in Turkey. Decades of neglect by the central government have been compounded by the effects of the brutal 1984-1999 guerrilla war between the Turkish army and the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Illiteracy rates are amongst the highest in the country and many children in rural areas simply do not have a school to go to.
All of the students in the dormitory came from poor village families whose only hope of educating their children was to send them to the state boarding school in Celtiksuyu. But, as has become the pattern in Turkish earthquakes, it was the state buildings which suffered the most damage. Experts agree that reasonably well constructed buildings should be able to survive a much stronger earthquake than the one which hit Bingol. But most public building contracts are awarded to friends and relatives of local officials, who maximise their profits by ignoring safety standards, confident that their connections will protect them against any repercussions. Unfortunately, when an earthquake strikes, a policy of profits over safety has murderous results.
"There were already cracks in the walls before the earthquake," said Mustafa Gurhan, the head of the school in Celtiksuyu. "We notified the central authorities but they weren't interested. When the rescue teams arrived they couldn't believe what they saw. Most of the time the builders hadn't even used concrete, just sand."
Unlike previous earthquakes, when Turkey's cumbersome state machinery had been slow to respond, last week the rescue teams were on the scene within hours. But the aid effort was overshadowed by a combination of arrogance and officiousness that too often characterises the attitude of state officials, particularly in Kurdish areas.
On Friday, hundreds of survivors staged a protest outside the local governor's office claiming that, two nights after the quake, they still had not received tents, food or water. The demonstration turned violent after a police minibus drove into the protesters and police fired into the air to disperse the crowds. But the authorities remained unrepentant.
"We can't just give tents to anyone," protested one local official. "You never know where they might end up."
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan placed the blame for the protest squarely on supporters of the PKK.
"Intelligence reports confirm that this was a provocation staged by people who just wanted to disrupt public order," he announced.
On Monday, public prosecutors announced that they would press charges against those responsible for erecting the sub-standard buildings that killed the victims of the Bingol earthquake. But few expect the guilty to be punished. Similar threats were made after the devastating earthquakes in Istanbul and Bolu in 1999 in which over 25,000 were believed to have been killed. In the aftermath of those disasters the authorities arrested a prominent contractor, Veli Gocer, who had used sand from the beach to build a string of paper thin apartment blocks along the coast outside Istanbul. These apartments collapsed after the very first tremor, killing hundreds. On Tuesday it emerged that not only had Gocer escaped any punishment, but he is still constructing buildings.
Nor, despite many promises, have the authorities made any effort to prepare against future earthquakes. A recent report by the State Institute of Statistics estimated that over 700,000 buildings in Turkey were unfit to withstand even a minor earthquake, including 2,800 schools.
Last week, Turkish seismologists predicted that the Bingol tremor would have a knock-on effect along the Northern Anatolian fault line, which runs from Turkey's border with Iran to the Aegean Sea, and passes through major population centres such as Istanbul. The death toll from a large earthquake in Istanbul could exceed 500,000. Seismologists insist that a major earthquake will come; the only question is when.
