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Obvi­ous­ly after the peo­ple in Elazığ were sub­ject­ed to an earth­quake of mag­ni­tude 6,8 on Jan­u­ary 24, their pain at the loss­es of life, the wound­ed and the mate­r­i­al dam­age was shared by every­one across the world. But the anger is just as strong as the sad­ness because, once again as in pre­vi­ous cat­a­stro­phes, one can only note the insuf­fi­cien­cies of the State and of its insti­tu­tions. Most of all, the state­ments by the author­i­ties and those in charge of orga­ni­za­tions sup­posed to be pre­pared for this type of cat­a­stro­phe caused a great indignation.

Fac­ing peo­ple in need who had lost their homes, their pos­ses­sions, their close ones and who cry “The State did­n’t reach all the way here!” How can a min­is­ter calm­ly state, con­cern­ing insuf­fi­ciens in the aid ” you can’t expect the State to do every­thing “? What are peo­ple sup­posed to do after their roof has col­lapsed on their head? Do you silence denun­ca­tions, as the one Eren Keskin relayed on Twit­ter: “The pre­fec­ture of Elazığ did not autho­rize access to 2 trucks loaded with human­i­tar­i­an aid sent by the City Hall of Ergani (HDP) and turned both of them back.” Of course, sol­i­dar­i­ty ini­tia­tives began with cor­po­rate groups orga­ni­za­tions from civ­il soci­ety from those few City Halls still under HDP admin­is­tra­tion, where, luck­i­ly, elect­ed mem­bers have not been revoked…But what are the State’s respon­si­bil­i­ties, espe­cial­ly in a coun­try locat­ed in a high risk zone?

Those peo­ple in author­i­ty appro­pri­at­ing the peo­ple’s mon­ey, mobi­lize as much as they can when it comes to per­pet­u­at­ing their pow­er, for mil­i­tary oper­a­tions with­in the coun­try’s bor­ders and with­out, or for use­less, pharaon­ic and harm­ful, projects aimed sole­ly at prof­it-mak­ing, thus keep­ing the pop­u­la­tions from obtain­ing the emer­gency or pre­ven­tive aid they need. And when the cat­a­stro­phe occurs, every­thing goes wrong. To top it off, they declare that the “dis­grun­tled” express­ing their indig­na­tion and crit­i­ciz­ing the State would be pros­e­cut­ed for they were “prac­tic­ing a pol­i­cy of oppor­tunism pig­gy-back­ing on the catastrophe!”

Opportunism…

Thus, one must not men­tion that a num­ber of sci­en­tists have con­duct­ed research, pub­lished reports, sug­gest­ed pre­ven­tive mea­sures in the past decades. They stat­ed that Elazığ and the sur­round­ing vil­lages must pre­pared for major earth­quakes. The Turk­ish Sci­en­tif­ic and Tech­no­log­i­cal Research Cen­ter (TÜBITAK) as well the the State Plan­ning Oga­ni­za­tion (DPT) refused to lis­ten. Tak­ing their find­ings into account would amount to polit­i­cal opportunism?

Can we not ask why media func­tion­ing as pow­er flunkeys have tar­get­ed come­di­an Berna Laçin with despi­ca­ble head­lines because she said on TV that the earth­quake scaled at 6,8 and not 6,5 as the State had declared…And because she react­ed in these terms on social net­works: “We will donate every­thing we have, that is not the ques­tion, but why is it that the first thought after an eartquake is col­lect­ing mon­ey? What hap­pened to the monies from the “eartquake tax­es”? Today, she is pros­e­cut­ed for “provo­ca­tion” Yet, as Veli Saçılık men­tions on Twit­ter, “Fol­low­ing the attack on Suruç, the State pros­e­cu­tors did not open a sin­gle inquest against those who pub­lished the tens of thou­sands of tweets say­ing “it’s par­ty time in Suruç!” or those who said “well done” con­cern­ing the death of Vey­sel, killed at age 9…”

So one must not ask where the mon­ey went from the so-called “spe­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion tax­es” (ÖIV). This tax was imple­ment­ed on a tem­po­rary basis fol­low­ing the earth­quake near the sea of Mar­mara in 1999, hence it’s pop­u­lar moniker as “the eartquake tax” or again “the sol­i­dar­i­ty tax” as a ref­er­ence to the French “nation­al sol­i­dar­i­ty tax” in 1945. Fol­low­ing its imple­men­ta­tion, it was sup­posed to end in 2003. But it became per­ma­nent fol­low­ing a deci­sion in 2005. At first, it con­sist­ed of a 25% tax on the price of com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Since 2005 and to this day, com­mu­ni­ca­tion on mobile phones are taxed at a lev­el of 25%, land lines at 15% and the inter­net at 5%. Some 65 bil­lion Turk­ish lira would thus have been col­lect­ed, and prob­a­by more (63,7 bil­lion in 2018). It would thus be a mat­ter of polit­i­cal oppor­tunism to ask “where did this mon­ey go?” when Kızılay (The Red Cres­cent) imme­di­ate­ly begins sol­lic­it­ing dona­tions of at least 10 Turk­ish lira per text message?

It would be a pol­i­cy of oppor­tunism, only “meant to oppose the regime” and act crit­i­cal, to point to those respon­si­ble for autho­riz­ing build­ing in non-con­structible zones and who close their eyes on the lack of cement, rein­forced con­crete that does not meet the norms, the ille­gal adding on of extra storeys… No, crit­i­ciz­ing those respon­si­ble and the State orga­ni­za­tions, mired in cor­rup­tion up to their necks and dri­ven by prof­its and bud­dy sys­tems is forbidden.

Need­less to say, it is main­ly for­bid­den to say where the true oppor­tunism lies. “Do not exploit a cat­a­stro­phe for polit­i­cal oppor­tunism, let us trans­form it into an oppor­tu­ni­ty to solid­i­fy and ren­der the nation­al union permanent.”

All crit­i­cism is for­bid­den at the risk of legal pro­ceed­ings. But “com­mu­ni­ca­tion” has the field all to itself…

On site, Erdoğan, sheds his tears… In Elazığ, he goes to the site of a col­lapsed house in the Mustafa Pasa Mahalle­si neigh­bor­hood where res­cue oper­a­tions are under­way. Abdulka­dir Tez­can, the Pres­i­dent of AFAD (Direc­torate for the man­age­ment of cat­a­stro­phes and emer­gen­cies) gives the teams a wave of the hand. “Send him over.” The wound­ed one, bare­ly removed from the rub­ble is “transported“to Erdoğan on a stretch­er. And TRT, the tele­vi­sion sta­tion that serves as “it’s mas­ter’s voice” has mate­r­i­al for a “com­mu­ni­ca­tion”: “While the Pres­i­dent of the Repub­lic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was fol­low­ing the res­cue oper­a­tions on loca­tion, anoth­er wound­ed per­son was saved.” The media sendika.org head­lined its arti­cle: “Are you shoot­ing a film?”

turquie elazig

sendika.org

What can one say about the spe­cial cor­re­spon­dent from CNN Türk who insists on inter­view­ing the eathquake sur­vivors hud­dling in tents? He shows chil­dren sleep­ing “peace­ful­ly in the warmth” of a tent “that was brought in and installed real­ly very quick­ly” and asks: “You are saved, you are warm here inside the tent, you have had some tea. Are you hap­py?” When the peo­ple start to say “we can­not go go inside” the hous­es”, he inter­rupts them and asks again “are you hap­py to be here?” He final­ly man­ages to get the answer he wants… A woman inno­cent­ly answers “May God bless our State, our Pres­i­dent, we are crammed in here inside the tents”… He clos­es off his reportage with “So you are hap­py to be in these sur­round­ings”…(We count­ed the num­ber of times the ‘reporter’ pro­nounced the words hap­pi­ness and hap­py: 9 times in 1:41, the length of the video on CNN Türk). Fol­low­ing a surge of indig­na­tion, the jour­nal­ist pre­sent­ed pub­lic apolo­gies. Being one among those to whom the State has with­drawn a jour­nal­ist per­mit, these were his words: “I watched the video sev­er­al times and I’m angry at myself. Since the peo­ple had been out­side, in ice cold con­di­tions all night, the ques­tion came nat­u­ral­ly and not as a attempt to lick the boots of any­one whatsoever.”

Just a few exam­ples among others…

What is there to say about a CHP may­or new­ly elect­ed in Istan­bul who trav­els 1 200 kilo­me­ters “to inves­ti­gate” and to show off also, where­as his imme­di­ate job whould be to sig­nal in Istan­bul the dis­ap­pear­ance of true areas of safe­ty and regroup­ing in case of earth­quakes, areas replaced by shop­ping cen­ters, and to also ques­tion the “tax­es” that fly off to parts unknown. But he also has a few pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions… And he also calls on “nation­al uni­ty”, just as he does in sup­port for the Turk­ish sol­diers in Syria…

Imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the news of the earth­quake, search­es spiked on inter­net under the ques­tion; “Is Elazığ a Kur­dish town?”…Would the answer depend on one’s affini­ties? This says a lot about the polar­iza­tion in the Turk­ish pop­u­la­tion. And these con­tro­ver­sies over “Kur­dish ter­ri­to­ry or not” are uncalled for, except to say that these ter­ri­to­ries received no finan­cial pre­ven­tion pol­i­cy from the State…No more today then they did yesterday.

Seis­mic fault lines on these lands do not fol­low bor­ders as can be seen on this map. How­ev­er, it does con­firm the urgency of pre­ven­tion and the ignominy of policit­i­cans who embez­zle funds, replac­ing them with emp­ty words at best, and even more reg­u­lar­ly with vast and use­less and gigan­tic projects designed for mas­sive profit-making.

As for risk pre­ven­tion, giv­en the extreme cen­tral­iza­tion of State pow­ers, hyper­tro­phied in Turkey, only con­tribute to a pol­i­cy of laiss­er faire, and work in favor of every form of cor­rup­tion through­out the pyra­mid when impor­tant sums are at stake. At a time when this same pow­er replaces those local elect­ed ones not to its lik­ing with cho­sen admin­is­tra­tors, this dis­tanc­ing from involve­ment with the local pop­u­la­tions keeps on increasing.

This earth­quake will not cause the regime to fal­ter, but it does reveal the giant faults grouped under the notion of “nation­al uni­ty” and a polit­i­cal oppor­tunism from one end of the Turk­isness stra­ta to the oth­er, all of its par­tic­i­pants being eager for a chance to grab future good­ies. As for the peo­ple, they will have to sat­is­fy them­selves with prayers and prohibitions.

Thus does oppor­tunism hide the for­est of cor­rup­tion whose roots show through in the con­text of this earthquake.

Translation by Renée Lucie Bourges

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Lila Montana
REDACTION | Journaliste
Voyageuse, pho­tographe, jour­nal­iste. Lib­er­taire, fémin­iste, activiste têtue et déterminée.
Trav­eller, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, jour­nal­ist. Lib­er­tar­i­an, fem­i­nist, stub­born and deter­mined activist.