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The massive earthquakes in Turkey, which have claimed 31,000 lives and counting, are a monumental tragedy. This is especially true because, while earthquakes cannot be prevented, much of the devastation they cause can be avoided with good planning. As other cities in places as diverse as Mexico, Japan, and California have demonstrated, governments can significantly mitigate the effects of earthquakes by recognizing hazards, building safer structures, and providing earthquake safety education.
Instead, Turkish politicians have spent decades ignoring best practices in urban planning, construction, hazard analysis and disaster management. Today’s catastrophic losses are ingrained in politics, and it’s crucial Turkey learns from its mistakes now — especially as experts predict there’s a high possibility of a magnitude 7.0 or greater earthquake in Istanbul, a city, by 2030 with more than 15 million inhabitants.
Turkey has been hit by many strong earthquakes in the past century. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Erzincan, a city in eastern Anatolia, in 1939, killing about 33,000 people. But the country subsequently implemented few disaster management laws and regulations—one in 1959 and another in 1988. These regulations focused primarily on crisis management and did very little to mitigate risk.
Then, in 1999, Golcuk (Kocaeli Province) was hit by a magnitude 7.4 earthquake, killing about 18,000 people.
Loose building laws and shabby construction compounded the tragic death toll. Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the contractors of destroyed or damaged buildings. One, Veli Gocer, was sentenced to 18 years and nine months in prison for involuntary manslaughter for failing to comply with building safety laws. His actions had contributed to the deaths of nearly 200 people.
The 1999 earthquake appeared to be a turning point in disaster management and construction supervision in Turkey. The coalition government led by Bulent Ecevit of the Democratic Left Party (DSP) made changes to the country’s massive independent aid organization the Red Crescent (Kizilay), which had been criticized for its handling of the earthquake’s aftermath. It adopted European Union standards for such organizations and also levied an earthquake tax to fund the development of rescue services.
These measures were not enough to keep the Ecevit government in power. Criticism of its response to the earthquake, coupled with an economic downturn, led to the loss of the 2002 election. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) gained control and has dominated Turkish politics ever since.
The AKP continued to address the failings in disaster management manifested after the Golcuk earthquake and another quake later that year. In 2004, it established the National Medical Rescue Team (known by its Turkish initials UMKE) to increase rescue efforts and reduce the human costs and suffering of natural disasters. Then, in 2009, it created the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (known as AFAD). The organization aimed to prioritize risk reduction over crisis management and even improve the latter. Turkey’s parliament also tried to deal with the shabby construction that had exacerbated the damage in 1999 by passing a new Building Safety Law in 2007 and enacting another such law in 2018.
But even these measures overlook the flawed urban and infrastructure planning at the root of the problem. In the second half of the 20th century, the migration of the rural population to the cities of Turkey had led to a dramatic increase in the number of those living in “gecekondus” or shanty towns on the outskirts of the cities.
These cheaply built houses were not built sufficiently to withstand earthquakes. The coastal city of Izmir has the highest number of gecekondus in the country. Experts have warned that without major changes, the city could face disaster in the event of a major earthquake, as even a moderate earthquake claimed 119 lives in the city in 2020.
Rather than heed such warnings, however, the government waited until 2019 – a full two decades after the Golcuk earthquake – to announce that it plans to convert 1.5 million earthquake-prone homes over the next five years. The movement was too little, too late. Rather than prioritizing this transition, the early stages of Turkey’s urban redevelopment initiative focused on opening up vacant land for construction and demolishing buildings to build even taller ones. Worse, Turkish officials have never issued safety regulations specific to the high-rise buildings that are increasingly dominating their cities’ skylines. They also granted “amnesties” to builders whose projects failed to meet the new building codes.
These weren’t just mistakes or mismanagement, however.
They were the result of a friendly relationship between the Turkish construction industry and the authoritarian AKP. In the 2010s, Turkish construction companies began winning lucrative international contracts, prompting them to develop an intertwined relationship with the ruling party. This cozy relationship helped the companies secure lucrative development contracts, while the regime benefited as the companies bought newspapers and television stations, allowing the party to build pro-government media and silence the opposition. As Fikret Adaman and Bengi Akbulut argue, the construction boom spurred by these firms also helped to increase popular support for the AKP because it created jobs and stimulated other sectors of the economy – from the companies that produce building materials to the transport sector . The AKP therefore had every reason not to enforce building codes or to urge its allies in the construction industry to abandon more lucrative projects and instead replace substandard slum housing.
That set the stage for the devastation of this month’s earthquake.
The civil protection measures implemented since 1999 also proved to be inadequate, also because President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government concentrated more on containing criticism than on mobilizing a reaction to the disaster in the hours after the earthquake. It took them 36 hours to approve 3,000 military personnel to join the relief effort – a stark contrast to the 90 minutes it took to get such approval after the 1999 earthquake.
Still, the government took steps to censor and attack critics. Erdogan warned that he would “write down lies of perversion” and “open his notebook when the time comes”. His government has developed a smartphone app to report people who have produced or disseminated “fake news” about the earthquake. She promptly began arresting social media users and journalists for allegedly spreading disinformation and temporarily restricted social media sites, including Twitter.
This hurt relief efforts, as aid workers and survivors used Twitter to coordinate and communicate aid.
Erdogan’s reaction reflects his understanding of how the AKP came to power. Even the Ecevit coalition government’s relatively better coordinated response to the 1999 earthquake contributed to the demise of the DSP. Erdogan understands that he could face a similar fate if the Turkish public blames his government for the earthquake’s devastation. And he acknowledges that after 20 years of increasingly authoritarian rule by his party, his political vulnerability has prepared Turkey for a massive earthquake no better than before.
But that, of course, was the wrong lesson from recent history. If the government wants to mitigate the devastation of Turkey’s next earthquake, it will focus on better urban planning, construction policies and disaster management practices – even if it means alienating powerful interests.