With discontent growing in Turkey over the government’s slow response to the earthquake that hit the country five days ago and possible failures in the construction of buildings and houses, the administration started this Saturday (11) to detain contractors, which it blamed for some of the collapses that have left more than 22,000 dead so far.
More than 100 people have been detained in the 10 earthquake-affected provinces, state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Saturday. The Ministry of Justice has ordered authorities in these regions to create so-called earthquake crime investigation units. In addition, prosecutors must now criminally charge builders and those responsible for the collapse of buildings that did not comply with existing codes, implemented after a similar disaster in 1999.
According to The New York Times, Mehmet Yasar Coskun, builder of a 12-story building in Hatay with 250 apartments that was completely destroyed, was arrested on Friday (10) at an airport in Istanbul trying to flee to Montenegro. Dozens of people are believed to have died when the building collapsed.
Two builders of a collapsed 14-storey building in Adana, who fled Turkey immediately after the earthquake, have been detained in northern Cyprus, according to the local administration.
Erdogan vowed to start rebuilding cities within weeks, saying thousands of buildings were now uninhabitable. The dangers of collapse have not yet passed. Video filmed in Hatay province on Saturday shows a partially collapsed building suddenly slipping and burying a rescuer in an avalanche of debris before his colleagues could pull him out.
Also on Saturday, Erdogan defended the government’s actions, saying the earthquake was “three times bigger and more destructive than the 1999 one, the biggest disaster in our country’s recent memory”. While he acknowledges that the official response has been slow, he said the country was not prepared for an earthquake of this magnitude.
Around 80,000 people are being treated in hospitals, while more than 1 million are in temporary shelters having lost their homes.
The images of buildings reduced to ruins next to buildings without major apparent damages raised discussions among specialists about the quality of constructions in the country. The type of urban planning and the lack of coordination between laws and regulations on the subject, in addition to its politicization, are also the target of criticism. An example is the decision of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2018, which granted amnesty to those responsible for irregular constructions shortly before the elections of that year.
The measure was part of a debt forgiveness package and targeted a huge number of irregular constructions in the country. For property owners with any abnormality, it was enough to register on a website where personal documents and property information were requested, in addition to paying a fee that would be calculated according to the value of the construction and the area. From then on, the property would be considered regularized, fines would be forgiven and it would be able to access the energy, water and gas networks.
In July 2018, about a month after the election, the number of applications for regularization surpassed 2.6 million, according to an article published in the Turkish Engineering Magazine in 2020. However, in February 2019, 21 people died in the collapse of a residential building that had three of its eight floors built illegally —the property, however, had been regularized by presidential measure.
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