London - As earthquakes in Türkiye and Northern Syria continue to produce victims who, at the time of writing, were nearing an estimated 15 000 fatalities, with hundreds of thousands injured, maimed, emotionally and mentally traumatised and millions left homeless, hungry and exposed to the bitter Anatolian winter, it is as if nature is exacting a double whammy on the gallant but stoic survivors.
Never mind the economic cost due to the destruction of infrastructure and social development assets; housing and businesses; the pressure on health-care systems already under pressure due to the ongoing impacts of the Covid pandemic; and the spectre of further potential damage due to aftershocks.
The reality is that the true scale of devastation and reconstruction cost will only unfold over the next few weeks or even months.
Hardly had the first earthquake, registering 7.8 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, struck with its epicentre in Gazientep and two days later, another, registering 7.5, struck with its epicentre in the adjoining city of Kahramanmaras, followed by tens of ongoing aftershocks, the blame game had already started.
Tempered with the archetypal modern mix of eyewitness reports and social media posts, juxtapositioned with fake news, conspiracy theories, ideological diatribes and the politics of opportunism.
As if it is a perpetual body blow to the sacrifice of those who perished and the heroism of the survivors and first responders, including the White Helmets volunteers in Syria.
This must not detract from the genuine task of enquiring to learn lessons and remedy and enhance the disaster preparedness fault lines, which were brutally exposed and compromised in the affected areas.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s assertion that “it’s not possible to prepare for disasters of this magnitude” may have some merit, but even he conceded that mistakes were initially made, which slowed down the scale and urgency of the immediate response.
His critics, both at home and abroad, never fail to mention his rising authoritarianism peppered by his near-obsessive contempt of his former partner, the mysterious cult-like Gulen Fetullah, exiled in America after the bloodiest coup attempt in Türkiye’s modern history in 2016, which spectacularly failed.
True to form, the ineffective opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the socialist Republican People’s Party put the blame squarely on Erdogan, leader of the pro-Islamist AK Party.
As if timing and unity in the nation’s hour of need are passé. As if the president has divine powers to conjure up his own nefarious “Erdogan’s Inferno”. The two are set to fight it out in the general election scheduled on 18 June. There must be serious doubt whether the poll can go ahead given the extensive damage to infrastructure and whether the electorate would be in the right frame of mind to countenance voting under such cathartic conditions.
There is no doubt that Erdogan is the bogeyman of the West. He dared to continue his relations with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, acting as an honest broker between Moscow and Kyiv; played a crucial role in getting the two sides to restart grain exports to dependent developing countries; threatened to buy air defence missiles and jet fighters from Russia after the US played hard ball in supplying an equivalent US system; refused (together with Hungary) to endorse Sweden’s membership application to Nato after the government turned down the bid to ban the public burning of the Qur’an outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm under the guise of freedom of speech and protest – the list goes on.
It is as if the West is bent on proving that Türkiye, with the second largest army in Nato, remains the “Sick Man of Europe,’ which is rather ironic given that Europe, a Christian club, has effectively impeded Ankara’s progress towards membership of the EU on the grounds that it is a Muslim country.
Leading up to the attempted coup, Erdogan was the most successful democratic politician in the world, winning a spate of general elections and referenda, often with handsome majorities.
Western Islamophobia, even in Türkiye’s hour of need, is nauseating.
Our profession – the media – has both been conniving and redeeming. Take Charlie Hebdo, that hypocritical and self-styled French paragon of absolute freedom of speech.
On Wednesday, it published a cartoon by artist Juin depicting the earthquake in Anatolia, showing a damaged building, a toppled car and a heap of rubble with the caption: “No need to send tanks.”
In glorious contrast, let’s take our hats off to our Greek colleagues.
The newspaper Kathimerini on Thursday declared in a banner: “We are all Turks.” The Greek state TV channel, in solidarity with the victims and survivors, even started its programme with a popular Northern Turkish folk song, Ben seni sevduğumi da dünyalara bildirdum, roughly echoing the sentiment: “I shouted to the world that how much I love you.”
Such are the margins between self-absorbed hubris and a timely sense of human empathy!
In many respects, the tragedy is a tale of two earthquakes, one in Türkiye and the other in Northern Syria – not in their form but in substance and access to supplies and services, with hardly a crossing available between Türkiye and Syria.
Northern Syria, rocked by over a decade of conflict, is literally a Wild West – different areas controlled by a motley of groups – Kurdish forces, Jihadist cliques, Türkiye-backed Syrian rebels, Syrian government forces, and Syrian opposition rebels.
This has infinitely compromised the rescue and aid effort.
Yet, amid this perversity, there was the miracle of hope – the rescue of a newborn baby girl from beneath the rubble in Jindayris whose umbilical cord had to be cut from her dead mother.
Her father, four siblings and an aunt were also killed.
The country seems to have been spared an even greater tragedy. The region is home to the South East Anatolia Project (GAP), an interconnected number of dams and tunnels, of which the Ataturk Dam is the flagship which harnesses the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Turkish sources confirm that there have been no serious breaches of any of the dams, and are monitored daily, given the unpredictability of the aftershocks.
The GAP Project has been steeped in controversy, with Syria and Iraq accusing Türkiye of diverting the flow from the two rivers southwards, while Ankara is concerned about the salinity of the waters in the two countries.
The three parties, however, do hold regular meetings regarding riparian rights relating to the two rivers.
Similarly, Iskenderun port has for decades served as the Turco-Iraqi pipeline export terminal for crude oil from Mosul. Apart from the black blaze of an oil container, which the army extinguished, there have been no reports, to date, of related damage to any oil infrastructure.
In many respects, a large earthquake was inevitable in an area cursed as the confluence of the African, Arabian and Anatolian plates, whose last major earthquake was in 1822, registering 7.4 in magnitude, with 7 000 deaths in Aleppo alone and aftershocks continuing for over a year.
Prior to the 7.8 earthquake, the largest ever one registered was the 9.5 magnitude one in Chile in 1960, followed by the 9.1 Boxing Day earthquake off Indonesia in 2004, triggering a tsunami that swept away entire communities around the Indian Ocean that killed over 228 000 people, and the 9 magnitude earthquake in Japan in 2011 which caused widespread damage on the land, and a tsunami that led to a major accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant along the coast.
Parker is a writer based in London
Cape Times
* The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.