Grief gives way to rage
ANKARA: Across the swathe of southern Turkey that was annihilated by the earthquake last week, shell-shocked survivors and witnesses are united in grief and mounting fury.
Cities, towns and villages have largely been left alone to deal with the country’s biggest natural disaster in centuries, and Turks of all ethnicities and political stripes are levelling blame at the top.
“There is nothing left of Turkey,” said Hurra Koca, as she waited for news of her aunt in Kahramanmaras last week. She was furious as she dismissed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visits to the disaster zone, with his promise to build houses for more than one million left homeless. “Tayyip Erdogan is just playing a game,” she said.
Hopes of finding survivors are fading as rescue operations draw to a close after the 7.8 magnitude quake and its string of powerful aftershocks.
The true scale of this disaster is still emerging. The death toll stood at more than 33,000 across Turkey and Syria on Sunday, local time, but the UN is warning that it could rise to more than 50,000.
Turkey’s state disaster agency, Afad, has been barely present in the worst-hit places. Civilians, independent search-and-rescue teams and local councils across the country flocked to fill the vacuum, using bare hands and equipment brought by miners and local building workers.
“For the first two days it was just civilians trying to rescue their families, and normal people who had come to help. There was no one else,” said Bulent Nihat from Azerbaijan who rushed to Antakya.
Turkish television channels, most of which are progovernment, show endless footage of survivors being pulled from the rubble.
But across the border in Syria, the UN has decried the failure to ship desperately needed aid to war-torn regions of the country.
A UN convoy with supplies for northwest Syria arrived via Turkey, but the agency’s relief chief Martin Griffiths said much more was needed for millions whose homes were destroyed.
“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned – looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” Mr Griffiths wrote on Twitter.
Supplies have been slow to arrive in Syria, where years of conflict have ravaged the healthcare system and parts of the country remain under the control of rebels battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which is under Western sanctions.
But a 10-truck UN convoy crossed into northwest Syria via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, carrying shelter kits, plastic sheeting, rope, blankets, mattresses and carpets.
Bab al-Hawa is the only crossing point for international aid to reach rebel-held areas inside Syria.
The head of the World Health Organisation met Mr Assad in Damascus and said the Syrian leader had voiced readiness for more border crossings to help bring aid into the rebel-held northwest.
“He was open to considering additional cross-border access points for this emergency,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.