TURKEY : A Country of Pointing Fingers and No Answers

When the earth shudders and shakes

And the world throws up its internal

burden

And man cries, what is this?

On that day, there shall be tidings

For the Lord will have been the

inspiration

On that day men will proceed in masses,

sorted out

To behold the deeds that they have done

And whosoever hath done an atom’s

weight of good,

It shall be seen

And whosoever hath done an atom’s

weight of evil,

That too shall be seen.

--The Koran, Surah 99, “The Earthquake”

LIVINGSTON, MONT.

I remember my first Turkish earthquake. I was seated at a table in Pandelis restaurant in the historic Egyptian (“Spice”) bazaar near the Golden Horn in central Istanbul, and the table began to shake. At first, I thought it was the children of a friend playing with the table’s legs. Then I noticed that the chandelier above was also rocking.

“Deprem!” cried the waiter. “Deprem!”

The restaurant’s clientele was down the stairs and in the open street before you could say “earthquake.” I remember the response of the terrified crowd outside the building when I picked a Koran off a shelf at a book vendor and flipped it open to the above verses and began to read. Most of the Turks listening could not understand the Arabic, but they knew it was their holy book, and were visibly soothed.

Judging from the reactions of ordinary Turkish citizens to the far more devastating quake that struck western Turkey on Aug. 17, one might extrapolate that Turks have become far less fatalistic and maybe a little less religious since the 1985 quake I experienced. Instead of accepting the earthquake that has killed more than 13,000 and made some 200,000 homeless as an expression of God’s unfathomable wisdom, Turks are blaming the government of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit for incompetency and even accusing the usually sacrosant Turkish military of sluggishness in responding to the disaster. Several contractors responsible for shoddy building practices have nearly been lynched and are now in hiding. Turks, it appears, are shrugging off their traditional passivity and demanding answers.

The wrath of the Turkish people is focused on the government’s reputed lack of preparedness for a disaster of this magnitude: An earthquake disaster fund set up several years ago is penniless; foreign relief organizations were held up at the airport; the military stayed in its barracks; and there was no coordination in relief efforts in the early days after the quake, forcing citizens to dig for dear ones with their hands. But just how culpable is the Ecevit government?

The government, which has been in power three months, is a new coalition of Ecevit’s Democratic Left and hard-right nationalist parties, plus the remnants of the center-right Motherland Party (ANAP). Before that, Ecevit’s party led a minority, transitional government after the collapse of the last of many short-lived coalitions of some half a dozen or more parties. All have overseen the moral decay of virtually all aspects of public life in Turkey, dating to the election of Turgut Ozal, 15 years ago.

It was Ozal, celebrated in the Western media as the architect of the “Turkish economic miracle” of the 1980s, who was most responsible for injecting short-term greed into the fabric of Turkish society. Vur-Kach, hit-and-run, get-rich-quick capitalism, soon swamped the country, expressing itself in phony export schemes for tax rebates on goods never produced and all manner of development schemes, wherein tens of millions of dollars issued by state credit agencies and semi-state banks simply went missing. A new class of Turks emerged by the late 1980s and early 1990s: magandas, meaning folks with enough insider information at the new Istanbul Stock Exchange to afford Merecedes and BMWs for their kids and Swiss ski vacations for themselves, but who produced nothing.

Ozal was only one man, and he has been dead for six years. The party he formed, ANAP, has been in and out of government for the past 17 years but always in coalition with at least six other parties, ranging from right wing to religious. All have gone along with Vur-Kach, to a greater or lesser degree. All have tried to stay in power by promising general amnesties to voters living in illegal shantytowns or by slapping up instant and instantly shabby satellite cities on the fringes of Turkey’s major cities.

Known as konuk fonu, or housing funds, these development areas are part and parcel of the Turkish political and demographic landscape. Set up by small and large investors as tax dodges, construction funds served as a magnet for contractors who used sea sand in their cheaply cast bricks and duck on the stress rods while paying off inspectors. Ask any member of the Turkish media, now lambasting the Ecevit government for incompetency and passing off their charges of dereliction to the Western media, how much they personally have invested in konuk schemes, and most will dodge the subject. The satellite cities that resulted--legal, semilegal and illegal--also have served as a magnet for Turkey’s fortune-seeking rural population.

Accordingly, anyone who voted for any of the political parties because of a promised amnesty on illegal or substandard housing is culpable, including, sadly, a large number of quake victims. Unless the citizenry ceases its own bad developmental and construction habits, such practices are bound to continue.

Which brings us to the question of disaster preparedness. In some circles, this is a notion dangerously close to survivalism: the desire to outlive unprepared others in the face of catastrophe by having more stored food, picks and shovels and underground bunkers. Many normal--that is, unprepared--people are suspicious of survivalists because their readiness almost always is associated with an undesirable ideology. During the great earthquake in Cairo in 1992, which also knocked down shoddy apartment buildings, killing and trapping tenants while contractors frolicked on Mediterranean beaches, it was the much-maligned Muslim fundamentalists who were the first-aid organization of choice and distinction. The reason? Organization springing from ideology, an ideology of a flavor neither the government of Hosni Mubarak nor his backers in the West have much taste for.

How will the quake play out in Turkey, a country where the concept of devlet, or “the state” as the all-providing Big Brother, is as thoroughly ingrained as it was in the Soviet Union? Unlike in Egypt, where the Muslim Brothers took up the slack in 1992, Muslim associations like the Mazlum-Der foundation, as opposed to the strife-torn Virtue party, which is as tainted as all the other political entities, are being blocked from providing aid to quake victims, because the staunchly secular government fears such aid may attract supporters to political Islam. Indeed, the most stunning thing about the current disaster has been the outpouring of aid from ordinary citizens, whose faith in the state has been shaken as deeply as the crushed buildings in Adapazari and Golcuk, the two towns hit hardest by the quake.

But what to do about the bigger question of preparedness, namely, location. Realistically, living in a known earthquake area like the North Anatolian line, or even near the San Andreas fault, is insane. Earthquakes have been shaking and destroying Izmit since the days of Diocletian, when it was called Nicomedia. Can any government in Ankara force millions of people to move away from potential danger? Will millions voluntarily migrate? The population density of the greater Los Angeles area is one response to that.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, the political fallout from the quake will continue, almost along the lines spelled out by the Koran: The formerly passive population, in their misery and torment, are sitting in judgment of the deeds of their leaders, as well as their own, searching for an atom’s worth of good or an atom’s worth of evil.*