First the suffering, then the hope, then the anger

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First the suffering, then the hope, then the anger and entry of the army

Stuart Millar sees the desperate hunt for more earthquake survivors in Bingol, eastern Turkey, as shock turns to anger and violence on the streets

Saturday May 3, 2003

The Guardian

Feyzi Ketenal had good reason to be angry.

The farmer, from a village 12 miles from Bingol, had rushed to the regional boarding school at Celtiksuyu where his 14-year-old son Serat was a pupil after learning that the dormitory building had collapsed in the quake.

Almost 200 students had been trapped as they slept. By yesterday afternoon, 117 had been pulled out alive, at least 48 bodies had been recovered, and about 33 remained missing. Serat was one of them.

"From my village, 13 children came to this school," his father said. "Eleven of them have been taken out, seven dead and four alive. My son is one of the two still under there." The dormitory was built only five years ago, but its walls had not so much collapsed as vapourised, as if they had borne too much weight for too long already and had simply given up the ghost at the first excuse.

At first glance it seemed like a lottery as to which structures in Bingol survived and which collapsed. But according to residents the odds of survival in buildings like the dormitory were horribly skewed by cheap workmanship and what many allege are illegal building practices.

The immediate reaction of the city's traumatised population to Thursday's huge earthquake may have been shock and fear; yesterday that was replaced by a seething, gut-felt fury at the powerful people who had woefully failed to protect them and who, they claimed, had then failed to do enough to ease their plight.

The tension which had been there since the first tremors erupted just before lunchtime. The catalyst was the failure of the local authorities to distribute tents, leaving people without shelter more than 24 hours after they had fled their quake-mangled homes.

That failure was compounded when a paramilitary policeman, panicked by a steadily growing crowd in the centre of the town, fired shots in the air. When an elderly man remonstrated with him, locals alleged, the policeman hit him with his rifle butt.

By this time more than 1,000 people, the vast majority of them young men, were gathered. Paramilitary police opened fire into the air with automatic weapons for about two minutes, sending people sprawling onto the ground and into side streets for cover.

The crowd regrouped, and youths began throwing stones at police vans and armoured vans lined up along the main square. Again, the forces replied by opening fire. Locals claim several people were killed in these exchanges, al though Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, later insisted the police and troops had not fired at people. But while he condemned the clashes as "acts of serious provocation and exploitation", he also announced that the local chief of police had been dismissed.

That did nothing to quell the crowd's anger.

There is more to this than resentment at the perceived inadequacies of the relief effort. Bingol lies on a political fault line almost as deep and even more volatile than the geological one. Located above a river valley in the middle of the Kurdish separatist heartland of eastern Turkey, the city is home to a population already deeply aggrieved at how Ankara exercises its power over them. The earthquake has merely forced these shallow-buried resentments up through the cracks to the surface.

"This is another country," complained a protester called Selman. "The government sees us through different eyes, they think of us as savages."

As the violence flared the digging continued at the dormitory. The three top floors, where the pupils were sleeping, had pancaked down on top of each other. Only the steel lockers and beds had put up any resistance to the crushing downward force.

Yesterday, a row of mangled grey lockers was supporting a small gap between the second and third floors through which billowed the remains of bed linen and curtains. The only architectural features still fairly intact were two concrete staircases at either side of the facade, down which the rescue workers had carried body after body.

Feyzi too had no doubt about who was responsible for this horrific scene of carnage.

"Earthquakes don't kill people in Turkey, it's the builders who kill them. The government gives them $100m to build a school. They steal half for themselves and use the other half for the building, so they have to cut corners on steel supports and cement."

A local builder, not involved in the construction of the dormitory, said the contractors had not bothered to link together the steelwork supporting the walls.

There was evidence of the complicity of the builders and their political cronies wherever you looked in Bingol.

Thursday's quake brought nothing like the cataclysmic "mini-nuclear" shifts in the Anatolian fault that killed 17,000 people and rendered 250,000 homeless in western Turkey in 1999. This time, the damage was more akin to precision bombing: new, cheap public buildings like the dormitory were destroyed, neighbouring older buildings were damaged but still stood.

Feyzi pointed to the two school houses on either side of the dormitory rubble. One was badly damaged on the ground floor, but, crucially, its walls had stood up to the quake, with the pupils' paintings still displayed upon them. The other had suffered only a few gouges in the external roughcasting. The satellite aerials on the roof were not even askew.

"These ones were put up by proper builders, not by the criminals who built the dormitory," he said. "They are lucky because they are rich so they didn't have to send their sons to this school. There is a school in our village but we can't afford teachers so we did not have a choice."

There had been a flurry of hope for the waiting families around 7.30am when one boy was rescued alive. Somehow Enef Gunce managed to endure 30 hours beneath the weight of three floors and sustain only slight injuries.

By early evening, the mood had changed. Neither the 15 rescue dogs, which had been sniffing through the wreckage in pairs, nor the listening equipment had picked up any signs of life for several hours.

The only significant discovery had been the bodies of five children. While they were being removed, the rescuers began using two cranes and a heavy bulldozer to bite away the top crust of rubble - a clear sign that they were starting to lose faith in the chances of finding any more survivors.

Mehmet Tamrisiver, a dust-caked rescuer from a mountain rescue organisation, who had arrived at around 7.30pm on Thursday and had been digging ever since, was trying to remain positive. "The chances are low but nobody can say there's no chance at all," he said. "That is why we keep going. I've seen worse situations than this and people have come out alive."

Meanwhile, Ahmet Cakir was taking shelter from the fierce afternoon sun on the back step of an ambulance while rescuers continued to dig. His nephew, Recep, was still in the rubble, and Ahmet was struggling to contain the fury growing inside.

"I am not angry at the government, at least they are working at it," he said. "I am angry at the dishonest builders who built this trap for our children and their political allies who let them get away with it." For 40 hours he had watched as one pupil after another was pulled from the wreckage, mostly alive, many dead, but none of them the one he was looking for. "Now I am starting to lose hope," he said. "And my patience."

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Earthquake toll rises to 2,000

Specialist teams dig through the night for survivors

More about the earthquake in Turkey

Chris Morris in Ankara

Wednesday August 18, 1999

The Guardian

Rescue workers were still tearing at the rubble early today, some digging with their hands, in a desperate bid to save the lives of thousands of people believed to be trapped in collapsed buildings across western Turkey following one of the most devastating earthquakes to strike in 20 years.

The death toll late last night stood at 1,169, but was rising steadily as aid workers in some of Turkey's most populated and industrialised districts continued to pull bodies from the wreckage.

Many people were crushed while asleep. Some of the bodies were shrouded in blankets and sheets from their own beds.

The earthquake lasted just 45 seconds. It happened at 3.02am, as if timed to strike its victims - many of whom lived in poor districts where building regulations are often ignored - when at their most vulnerable.

The epicentre was near the industrial city of Izmit, about fifty five miles east of Istanbul. Turkish authorities placed it at 6.7 on the Richter scale, but American geologists based in Colorado recorded a magnitude of 7.8 - making it the strongest quake since the Mexico disaster of 1985 that killed 9,500 people.

Buildings shook up to 200 miles away from the epicentre. A massive rescue effort, led by Turkey's large conscript army, was in full swing throughout the night. Recovery teams often appeared overwhelmed by the scale of their task.

Multi-storey apartment blocks were reduced to piles of rubble and twisted masonry in a matter of seconds. Minarets fallen from the roofs of mosques lay shattered on the ground. A major fire was still raging at an oil refinery near Izmit last night, while roads and bridges were destroyed and lines of power and communication were cut across wide areas of the country for much of the day.

At Golcuk on the Sea of Marmara the local mayor said he feared 10,000 people were still trapped. They included more than 200 naval personnel caught beneath the rubble of collapsed barrack buildings.

Officials believe there is little chance of finding many of them alive. An exhausted naval guard, his light brown uniform covered with dust, said "We heard a great noise and ran towards the building where our friends were. It was completely destroyed. We struggled to dig them out with our bare hands."

Among the debris of an apartment block in the town, Gulser Onat screamed: "My loves, my children are there, my 15-year-old son and my daughter. but no one is fighting to save them."

Mahir Eryilmaz dug for 12 hours, trying to free his nephew. When a crane finally arrived, it was too short. "The crane couldn't do anything. No one is helping us. Neither the city nor the military," he said as he continued bashing the concrete that pinned his 21-year-old nephew's feet.

No one really knows how many bodies still lie under the rubble -- nor how many people may still be alive, injured and running out of air. Rescue co-ordinators have by no means given up hope of finding people alive, but it is a race against time.

Specialist teams moved into the worst affected areas with sophisticated listening equipment and highly-trained sniffer dogs. They are able to locate the smallest signs of life from deep beneath the rubble.

Medical services in the region have been stretched to the limit. Makeshift hospitals were set up among the ruins to care for thousands of injured people, after regular hospitals were forced to begin turning away all but the most seriously wounded.

In Izmit patients were treated in the street. As the Turkish prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, predicted the loss of life would be huge, neighbouring countries, including Turkey's historic enemy, Greece, offered immediate disaster assistance.

"We can only imagine how difficult this is for them and we will do what we can to help," said U.S. President Bill Clinton in Washington. The US offer of military help and a search-and-rescue team was matched by Britain which prepared to send 39 disaster specialists.

The British Consulate in Istanbul, where around 1,600 Britons are usually living or visiting, reported no British casualties. Survivors of the earthquake say they were thrown from their beds by the initial tremor, and hundreds of thousands of people spilled out onto the streets in panic.

The general confusion amid the darkness led to initial chaos, until the Turkish army mobilised to begin helping civilian services co-ordinate recovery efforts.

Turkey sits on an active geological fault line, but there was no obvious warning of impending disaster. Last year a slightly less powerful tremor killed more than one hundred and forty people near the southern city of Adana.

Hundreds of aftershocks throughout the day provoked widespread unease and occasional panic. The blame may not be nature's alone. In many areas buildings survived the full force of the tremor, while others crumpled into a heap of metal and concrete.

Most people detected the hand of greedy building contractors, who have used widespread corruption to ignore what should be tough regulations to make sure buildings meet safety standards.

Previous earthquakes have pointed the finger in the same direction, but little has been done to prevent buildings being constructed too quickly and too cheaply. The Izmit region has experienced a building boom in recent years as migrants have flooded into the area from the east of the country in search of work.

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Istanbul warned to expect earthquake

Rory Carroll in Duzce, Turkey

Monday November 15, 1999

The Guardian

Aftershocks hit north-western Turkey yesterday, as fears spread that its terrrible earthquakes were a prelude to a cataclysmic strike on Istanbul.

Seismologists at the country's Kandilli observatory warned that a major fault system had been activated, and that it was only a question of when, not if, the metropolis would be levelled.

Freezing, homeless survivors of Friday's earthquake in Duzce said they would rather live in tents than accept shelter in Istanbul, 170 kilometres to the west.

The discovery of an unbroken section of fault line beneath the Marmara sea just south of the city, made it more likely that the so-called Big One was on its way, said Ahmet Isikara, the observatory's chief seismologist.

Istanbul, Turkey's cultural and economic heart, has 10m inhabitants packed into often badly built apartment blocks.

Friday's tremor, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale, made some of the city's blocks wobble like rubber, sending hundreds of people running into the street. They lit fires and spent the night out of doors.

A closer, more powerful quake could strike at any time, said Mr Isikara. "We have to live with this reality. One should ask how to minimise damage, instead of asking if there will be another quake."

"There is a seismic vacuum in the west," he said. The timing of the strike was impossible to predict and could be minutes, months or years away, he said.

But the government yesterday refused to call off this weekend's summit in Istanbul of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which 54 world leaders are due to attend.

Trucks laden with blankets, food, tents and building materials streamed across the Bosphorus to aid survivors of Friday's tremor, which devastated the province of Bolu, killing more than 380 people and injuring 2,000.

More than 700 buildings collapsed, half of them in Duzce, the epicentre.

The government, stung by accusations of incompetence after the first disaster, mobilised the army, fire services and volunteers within hours. "The resurrection of the state," proclaimed Saba, a mainstream daily newspaper.

Ignoring more than 20 aftershocks, search teams from 15 countries raced through a landscape of shattered concrete and twisted girders, hoping to find survivors.

Amid rescuers' cheers, Saziye Bulut emerged from what was left of her kitchen after 41 hours. Alerted by her knocking a lump of concrete against a wall, Turgut Ozkan had soothed her while his rescue team dug. "You must come to tea," she told him.

During her ordeal Mrs Bulut had asked about her two daughters. One was dead. Mr Ozkan had lied. "She might have lost the strength to resist death if I had told her the truth," he said later.

The seismologists' warning threw into doubt initial hopes of resettling the homeless in Istanbul. "I am afraid of moving there. It could be worse than here," said Halil Yeldkim, 38.

Two miles away on Hamidije street, a 51-strong team of British rescue workers was discovering growing willingness to abandon Muslim burial rites for the sake of the living.

Erdogan Polat, a baker, could see his brother's arm reaching out from the first floor of a collapsed four storey block. Yet he gave permission for it to be demolished, allowing the rescuers to hunt for survivors rather than spend hours extracting the dead.

HMS Ocean, a helicopter carrier, docked at the southern port of Aksaz and sent two Sea King helicopters to ferry the wounded from Duzce. The ship will sail to Istanbul on Wednesday, when 10 helicopters will join the operation.