Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday asked residents of Adiyaman province (southeast), which was hardest hit by the devastating February 6 earthquake, for “pardon” for delays in the arrival of aid supplies.
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“Due to the devastating effects of the tremors and the bad weather, we were not able to work as we wanted in the first few days in Adiyaman. I apologize for that,” said the Turkish head of state.
Mr Erdogan was speaking from the city of Adiyaman, three weeks after the earthquake that killed more than 44,000 people in Turkey and also affected neighboring Syria.
Turkey’s president, who has been in power for 20 years and wants to remain in office through the elections scheduled for May 14, has been heavily criticized by survivors who blame the state for the slowness of the relief.
Four days after the disaster, Mr. Erdogan had already sketched a form of mea culpa in Adiyaman, but without asking for forgiveness.
“The destruction has affected so many buildings (…) that unfortunately we could not carry out our interventions as quickly as we had hoped,” he said at the time.
He also acknowledged “gaps” in the response to the earthquake, adding it was “impossible to be prepared for such a catastrophe.”
In that province and in Hatay province, which was also hard-hit, survivors expressed their anger to AFP days after the natural disaster.
One of them, Mehmet Yildirim, assured on February 10 that he saw “nobody”, “no state, no police, no soldiers” before “2 p.m. on the second day of the earthquake”, that is, 34 hours after the first shock.
He had accused the authorities of having “left the population in Adiyaman province to fend for themselves”.
This weekend, it was also football fans from Istanbul clubs who shouted their displeasure in the stadiums and called for the government’s resignation.
On Monday, Turkey’s President pledged to build nearly 50,000 new houses in that Adiyaman province out of a total of 309,000 to be dug up in the 11 provinces hit by the earthquake.