Six days after a massive earthquake killed more than 28,000 in Syria and Turkey, sorrow and disbelief are turning to anger and tension over a sense that there has been an ineffective, unfair and disproportionate response to the historic disaster.
Many in Turkey express frustration that rescue operations have proceeded painfully slowly, and that valuable time has been lost during the narrow window for finding people alive beneath the rubble.
“For three days, I waited outside for help. No one came. There were so few rescue teams that they could only intervene in places they were sure there were people alive,” she said. “This is an atrocity, I don’t know what to say,” said Bediha Kanmaz, 60, whose son and 7-month-old grandson had already been pulled dead out of the building — locked in an embrace — and whose daughter-in-law was still inside.
She and others in Antakya expressed the belief that the presence of a large minority of Alevi — an Anatolian Islamic tradition that differs from Sunni and Shia Islam and Alawites in Syria — had made them a low priority for the government, because traditionally, few Alevis vote for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party. There was no evidence, however, that the region was overlooked for sectarian reasons.
Kanmaz blamed negligence on the part of the developer of the apartment building where her family had been killed.That contractor, who oversaw the construction of the 250-unit building, was detained at Istanbul Airport Friday before boarding a flight out of the country, Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency reported. On Saturday, he was formally arrested. His lawyer suggested the public was looking for a scapegoat.
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