Erdoğan faces backlash over building standards in city wrecked by quake

The centre is considered by some as a monument to survival that somehow endured a disaster that destroyed almost everything around it. But to a growing number of others, it’s a sign of what should have been for the rest of a ruined city. 

Nearly two gruelling weeks after the devastation that hit south-eastern Turkey and Syria, shock and despair is slowly being subsumed by a search for answers. First among the questions is how an estimated 85,000 buildings in the earthquake zone could have collapsed, or been severely damaged, killing 44,000 people and maiming tens of thousands more. 

The homes of Adıyaman’s residents collapsed like houses of cards, large tracts of the urban landscape now heaps where 12-storey buildings once stood. The city is now all but uninhabitable, along with swaths of large cities across Turkey’s south-east. 

At the forefront of a growing debate is how the construction of buildings that could not endure a large earthquake was allowed. The widespread destruction has stirred questions about corruption in the building industry and its role in the devastation. Just as pressing is the role that a permissive regulatory environment played in allowing developers to profit from building affordable homes for Turkey’s dwindling middle classes. 

An amnesty declared in 2019 retroactively legalised thousands of buildings that did not meet earthquake construction standards, as long as fines were paid. The move came despite warnings from engineers and architects. Up to 75,000 buildings in the earthquake zone were granted such a reprieve, according to the Istanbul Union of Chambers of Engineers and Urban Planners. Across the quake zone, developments slid from their foundations or splintered in on themselves, crushing those inside and entombing thousands. 

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s reign is deeply linked to his pledge of a construction boom after sweeping to power in 2003, in the aftermath of another deadly earthquake in 1999 which killed more than 17,000 people. 

The dominance of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP) in part stemmed from its ability to mobilise the construction sector, and in the years immediately after his election, government permits for housing construction tripled. In March 2019, a month before local elections, the Turkish government instituted the nationwide building amnesty on illegal construction, despite domestic engineers and architects warning that it risked citizens’ safety. 

Erdoğan has defended the amnesty, claiming one week after this month’s quake that 98% of the collapsed buildings were built before 1999. The Turkish leader, who faces elections expected in May, promised a reconstruction campaign that he said would make cities livable again within a year. 

In Adıyaman, this seems unlikely. At the centre of the devastation, an 800-year-old mosque lies in ruins, along with a Syriac church and thousands of homes and businesses. Across the road from the EU culture centre stood two 12-storey hotels, both of which collapsed when the quake struck. In one, called the Isia, a group of 39 Turkish Cypriots, visiting for a youth volleyball tournament, had been staying. All died. 

On Saturday, the developers of the Isia hotel were arrested, a local official in Adıyaman said. At least 113 builders have been rounded up across the country in recent days. 

One of those arrested was Mehmet Yaşar Coşkun who was detained at Istanbul airport suspected of attempting to flee to Montenegro. Coşkun’s Renaissance apartment building in Hatay province slid from its foundations and collapsed with an estimated 1,000 people inside, although he told prosecutors that he did not know why the building fell. 

The sweep of arrests ensnared many far from the earthquake zone: contractor Hasan Alpargün was arrested in the Turkish-controlled part of the Cypriot capital Nicosia after prosecutors accused him of “reckless murder and causing injury”. 

The role some developers played, and where regulators at a regional and national level, fit into the catastrophe is likely to take centre stage at the election. With a political backlash mounting about building standards and his government’s response to the disaster, Erdoğan faces a tough task convincing a shocked nation that the state did enough to safeguard its people from what was a calamity made worse by human hands. 

Until then, the people of Adıyaman and much of south-eastern Turkey will be forced to pick up the pieces. By late last week, bulldozers had cleared roads, leaving rubble ploughed away like snow and exposing gaping holes in whatever buildings still remained partly standing. Men sat around flaming oil drums at the entrance to their streets, a freezing fog shrouding them as they guarded ruins from looters. 

Not far away, Chinese and Iranian rescue teams worked side by side to remove bodies from a collapsed building. The teams used ropes and stone saws to pry a woman in her nightgown from the mattress she was lying on, then a man from what resembled a bed. Both were slid gently into black body bags, a ritual that has been carried out thousands of times in this city of 270,000 people, where as much as 10% of the population is thought to have died. 

“The graveyards are full,” said Ergün Demiray, the hospitality director of the Shaya group, which runs the Shake Shack and Starbucks franchises in Turkey. Demiray had driven a convoy of trucks to Adıyaman to hand out hamburgers and coffee to those without homes. “We will take whatever steps we can to help the people recover. They need to know they have not been left alone.”