Inside Turkey’s Struggling Earthquake Response

Crane to clear debris and rescue survivors.

Antakya/Istanbul, Turkey:

Kevser said she could hear her two sons trapped under the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in the Turkish city of Antakya but for two days she couldn’t find a rebel commander emergency response to order their rescue.

“Everybody said they weren’t responsible. We couldn’t find out who was responsible,” she said last Tuesday as she stood on a central street where at least dozens of buildings are located. another has collapsed. “I begged and begged for just a crane to lift the concrete.”

“Not much time left. A crane, for God’s sake.”

When Reuters returned to the street a day later, neighbors said no survivors had been pulled from the building’s rubble.

Many in Turkey say many could have survived the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit the south of the country and neighboring Syria a week ago had the emergency response been quicker and well organized. than.

Reuters spoke to dozens of overwhelmed residents and first responders who expressed bewilderment over shortages of water, food, medicine, body bags and cranes in the disaster area in recent weeks. days after the earthquake – leaving hundreds of thousands of people to fend for themselves in the depths of winter.

The death toll in both countries on Monday surpassed 37,000, making it one of the world’s worst natural disasters this century and the deadliest earthquake to hit Turkey since 2015. 1939.

“The common problem here is organization, especially in the medical field,” Onur Naci Karahanci, a doctor working in the southeastern city of Adiyaman, said on a call by the association. Turkish Health (TTB) organization, professional group for doctors. . He said there were not enough body bags for the dead, especially in the first two days after the earthquake.

In the cities of Antakya and Kahramanmaras, near the quake’s epicenter, Reuters reporters saw few rescue teams in the first 48 hours.

Some survivors said they tried to contact the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (AFAD) with no success and ended up begging local teams to rescue their loved ones from the disaster. wreckage – was only told that such requests had to go through AFAD coordination centers, Reuters witnesses said.

Asked about the rescue efforts, AFAD’s press department directed the news agency to the Interior Ministry, saying its teams were busy at the scene. The interior ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AFAD has been tasked since 2009 with coordinating aid and disaster response efforts in Turkey by 7,300 staff and over 600,000 volunteers, as well as by Turkish and foreign groups other.

AFAD said Saturday during its regular public briefing that more than 218,000 rapid response personnel, police, gendarmes, soldiers, volunteers and other AFAD personnel have now been deployed in the area. earthquake area.

However, top AFAD officials have not publicly addressed criticism of some residents for their slow response.

Two experts consulted by Reuters partly blamed the delay on President Tayyip Erdogan’s government centralizing the emergency response under AFAD.

This includes restricting the military’s freedom to deploy troops without direct instruction from civilian authorities and eliminating other first responders, such as the Red Crescent and search groups. and rescue AKUT, they said.

Hetav Rojan, Copenhagen-based security adviser to the Danish government and expert on the region, said Turkish politics and governance had “turned towards centralization” under the ruling AK Party. .

“But centralization is bad in disaster management,” he said. “Top-down deployment hinders response effectiveness. Local units should be tasked with acting on local needs. This is not the case in Turkey.”

Erdogan’s office did not respond to requests for comment. A senior official, who asked not to be named, said authorities could have been better prepared by stocking more first aid supplies, medicine and blankets in warehouses in earthquake-prone areas.

The president – facing tight elections this year after two decades in power – acknowledged last week that the search and rescue response was not as quick as the government would have liked, in part due to bad weather and Damaged roads impeded early movement over a long stretch of the area. 450 kilometers (280 miles).

Emerging more than two decades ago thanks in part to his criticism of the response to the massive 1999 earthquake, Erdogan dismissed criticism of his administration’s response this month.

United Nations aid director Martin Griffiths, speaking in Kahramanmaras on Saturday, called Turkey’s disaster response “extraordinary” given the historic scale of the quake. “In my experience, people are always disappointed from the start,” he said, clearly hinting at the criticism.

Important report

Some opposition politicians have increasingly criticized AFAD for its lack of preparation.

An AFAD report on their response to a much smaller 5.9 magnitude earthquake in northwestern Turkey in November, reviewed by Reuters, acknowledged that their means and resources were not enough to deal with a larger disaster. The quake injured 98 people but caused no deaths.

The report found that AFAD had difficulty finding the right people to respond to the November 23 earthquake, and that local coordination was poor due to the lack of informed managers. complete emergency plan. An impromptu group of 300 teachers and priests lacked expertise and made a mistake in assessing the damage.

“The disaster teams were not prepared, the AFAD centers were chosen incorrectly, and there was not enough coordination and cooperation between the organizations,” the report said. It noted that more drills are needed to prepare for disaster.

Referring to the report, Kemal Kilcdaroglu, leader of the main opposition party, said that even more damaging than last week’s magnitude was a “lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence”.

The interior ministry did not respond to a request for comment on what steps were taken following the report.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said he authorized this report to improve Turkey’s disaster response capabilities.

“Exploiting this problem, making political gains from this will create more damage than the damage caused by the earthquake,” he said on Friday.

AFAD’s budget for 2023 has been cut by a third to 8.08 billion lira ($429 million), down from 12.16 billion lira in 2022. However, the budgets of the agencies that AFAD helps coordination, including police and coast guard, has been strengthened.

The role of the military

After the failed coup in 2016, Mr. Erdogan tightened his economic, foreign and defense policies. The government has arrested thousands of people and expelled tens of thousands of others from state jobs for alleged links to the Gulen movement, which it accuses of orchestrating the coup.

Until 2018, AFAD was under the prime minister’s office. But then, when Turkey switched to a centralized presidential system with Erdogan as head of state, AFAD fell under the administration of the interior ministry which was responsible for reporting to the president.

Nasuh Mahruki, founder of search and rescue organization AKUT, said the army did not respond early enough to last week’s disaster because it needed civilian permission to mobilize manpower.

In 2010, in an effort to reduce the influence of Turkey’s powerful military, Erdogan’s government scrapped a protocol that would allow the military to conduct internal operations under certain conditions without the need for approval. consent of the common people.

“In such big events, a collective effort is essential,” said Mahruki. “Now the responsibility seems to lie with AFAD, but of course it is not prepared.”

The defense ministry referred questions to the interior ministry.

In a statement, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said soldiers had set up emergency centers in southern Turkey within an hour of the earthquake and their numbers had grown to more than 25,000 by the end of the year. Saturday.

Centralization

Turkey is crisscrossed by two major fault lines, and the Turks are used to terrible tremors. But overall they found the state’s emergency response to be effective.

One nurse, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of being excluded from her relief work, said she was ready to go to the quake zone on Monday but had to wait for orders from AFAD and it took her 40 hours to arrive.

When she arrived in Hatay, the worst-affected area, she came across a makeshift hospital that had no water, electricity or portable toilets – and was located too far from Antakya city for many to reach.

She told Reuters she had rushed to every major Turkish disaster in the past 25 years, including the 1999 earthquake that killed more than 17,000 people, but was shocked by the response to the disaster. last week.

“I don’t know why AFAD failed so miserably,” she said.

(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)