A year on from Turkey’s earthquake, devastation continues

Gönül Tol is the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program. She is the author of “Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria.”

My niece Asya is one week old. When a 7.8-magnitude earthquake leveled whole neighborhoods of her parents’ hometown of Hatay on Feb. 6, 2023, she was one of the thousands of frozen embryos in a fertility clinic at a local hospital.

The clinic’s fertility doctor was able to prepare a rescue plan for the stored embryos when the badly damaged hospital lost electricity, rushing in liquid nitrogen from a nearby town to keep them frozen.

Asya was born almost a year later, and her parents, who lost their home as well as some of their relatives in the disaster, are thrilled to now be holding her.

But not all children who lived through the earthquake made it safely into their parents’ arms. Hundreds are still missing. Many families report that their children were rescued from under the rubble and checked into hospitals in nearby towns but have since vanished.

A Turkish NGO, the Children and Women First Association, which was established to provide legal and psychological support to women and children, said it received complaints from families that their kids fell prey to organ traffickers and religious brotherhoods, like the Menzil and Ismailağa orders, after being rescued. These brotherhoods have flourished under the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and are often in the news for cases of forced underage marriage, child abuse, indoctrination and domestic violence.

Government officials deny the families’ claims, but social media posts by Menzil leaders showing hundreds of children staying in housing run by the order corroborate their account. In one of many cases of child abduction after the earthquake, a five-year-old girl, who said her parents were wounded in the disaster, was found wandering the streets of Maastricht by local police.

What’s more, AK Party and its right-wing ally, the Nationalist Action Party, voted down a parliamentary motion calling for an investigation into the missing children, and announced they would officially be declared dead.

A year on from the devastation, these families are still grasping for some sort of closure. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others in the area are struggling to rebuild their lives.

More than 3 million people were displaced by the earthquake. Hundreds of thousands of them still live in container houses or tents in arduous conditions. And thousands of others weren’t even given tents, being left to rely on friends or relatives instead.

After the earthquake, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had pledged to rebuild the homes that were destroyed within a year. And before the critical May 2023 elections — which he won — construction was proceeding quickly. Since then, however, the work has slowed, leaving many families in limbo. Jobs are scarce; meeting daily needs, like paying for food, rent and other necessities, is a major challenge; and as the country continues to battle inflation, many are falling deeper into debt.

Seeing one’s hometown turned to rubble, losing family members, or not even being able to find their bodies — these tragedies are simply impossible to recover from. And what’s worse, according to Asya’s father Behzat, is that those responsible for our tragedy haven’t paid a price.

After the earthquake, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had pledged to rebuild the homes that were destroyed within a year | Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Behzat’s hometown of Hatay was one of the worst-hit cities. Of the close to 2,000 buildings that collapsed there, half of them didn’t have the necessary building permits. And to quell public anger, cases were filed against private contractors and building inspectors — but they aren’t the ones primarily responsible for the disaster. In Turkey, public officials play a key role in construction projects. Elected mayors and those working for the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change are the ones responsible for issuing construction permits, inspections for compliance with existing laws and approving building safety for habitation.

But even more than them, the one most responsible for the massive scale of death and destruction is the man who’s been running the country for over two decades.

Erdoğan enriched a small circle of close allies in the construction sector, awarding them infrastructure projects without competitive tenders or proper regulatory oversight. And these companies built homes and infrastructure in earthquake hotspots without following proper building codes.

In Hatay, residential buildings, hospitals, the town’s only airport and even the local branch of the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) — many of which were built by Erdogan’s cronies — were either completely leveled or suffered massive damage. And yet, Erdoğan didn’t pay a price at the ballot box.

One might be excused for being skeptical about the election results in earthquake-hit areas like Hatay, where tens of thousands died or were displaced. Shortly after the earthquake, Erdoğan won a slim majority in the town, and not a single public official or elected mayor in the earthquake zone has been prosecuted.

And now, a year later, even though 130,000 lives were lost and millions displaced, it’s business as usual for both Erdoğan and the main opposition parties. Busy campaigning for the upcoming municipal elections, just this week the president inaugurated a public hospital that had collapsed during the earthquake. But for Behzat, a medical doctor who worked there before the disaster and has been operating in a makeshift facility ever since, the building Erdoğan opened isn’t ready to function as a hospital.

The inauguration is meant to convey to voters that Erdoğan kept his promise to revitalize Hatay. But for the earthquake’s victims, life is anything but normal.

Behzat and his wife, my sister Gökçe, named their newborn daughter Asya — it means the one who heals the wounds. But they know some of the wounds this earthquake inflicted will never heal, especially in a country with such a long history of impunity for officials who played a role in their tragedy.