365 days have passed, but in southern Turkey and northern Syria you can still see the consequences of the earthquakes. A year ago, they shook the land and the lives of thousands of people, who are waiting for the unfulfilled promises of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The latest official figures in Turkey speak of 53,537 people, who were buried under piles of cement and another 6,000 in neighboring Syria, raising the total number to close to 60,000 deaths. Furthermore, the Red Cross estimates that close to 100,000 people were injured and more than 17 million people were directly affected by the natural disaster. Many of the victims are still shocked by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, described by President Erdogan as the “disaster of the century.”
"A year has passed, but this does not abandon us," Cagla Demirel, 31, told AFP from the tents set up in the city of Antioch. "Life has lost all interest (...) I have no family to visit, no door to knock on, no nice place to live. I have nothing left," laments Demirel, a victim of the more than 100,000 buildings collapsed. There are 700,000 people relocated in containers or temporary tents due to the lack of accommodation while waiting for the buildings promised by the Government.
Nobody forgets the words of the Turkish Head of State, when two days before the first round of the 2023 presidential elections, he stated in a televised debate that he had “started the process of constructing 142,000 residences, hoping to complete 319,000 within a year.” ”. But, there is a long way to go for that.
12 months later, only 46,000 homes are ready to be delivered, according to the Ministry of Environment and Urban Development. Although, during a visit on February 3 to Hatay, one of the Turkish provinces most affected by the earthquake, Erdogan symbolically handed over the keys to the first 7,000 homes to families selected by lottery, which will be available to live in. of a few weeks or months.
These figures are very far from those announced during the campaign, fueling a situation of resentment among some survivors. To demonstrate the feeling of abandonment, the victims of Antioquia have created the February 6 Platform, which met at 4:17 this morning, the time of the earthquake, to shout “Does anyone hear us?”, and symbolically demand their despair on the anniversary of the tragedy.
For his part, President Erdogan is trying to respond to the impatience of the affected population, with the promise of delivering "between 15,000 and 20,000 homes per month" and intends for his fellow citizens to "trust the State and have confidence in it." .
But the shortfall in construction numbers is not the only cause of anger among survivors. After the earthquake, public controversy immediately focused on real estate developers, who were accused of using low-quality materials in an affected region.
In the weeks after the earthquake, 260 promoters were detained, in some cases while trying to flee Turkey. However, lawyers for the victims' families express concern that many are evading legal responsibility, as some evidence against them has disappeared after being succumbed to bulldozers.
President Erdogan's responsibility for the catastrophe has been raised by his detractors. At a rally held in Kahramanmaras in 2019, the Turkish head of state welcomed a controversial amnesty law passed the previous year, which regularized almost six million illegally built homes across the country. This legislation may have contributed to the increase in the number of victims.
With local elections on the horizon, the question is whether Erdogan will pay politically for the consequences of the earthquake. Jean Marcou, associate professor at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, says that "there is certainly anger, but it is difficult to know how it will be expressed at the polls." In Kahramanmaras, one of the regions most affected by the earthquake, Erdogan won the 70% of the votes in the presidential elections of May 2023, shortly after the event.
