Yes, we need to protect our people not just from the earthquakes but from this regime, too.
Public relations is not politics
The country has been handed over to a contractor, who demolished Turkey and replaced it with structures built on sand and sea. The deadly contractors of the past are nothing compared to the development apparatus of the mafia-state of the past 20 years.
There will be those who will say, “We are in the middle of the disaster, is this the right time to be talking about this? A whole country is joining together to try to help the victims." But even now, planes cannot land at airports built on dried lakes, the construction tenders have been distributed in a way that leaves us with roads scattered in different directions as the aid tries to reach the people in need.
What we are experiencing today is the result of blind partisanship and greed.
Yet at the same time, a real effort is being made in terms of public relations, just in case. Officials of the AKP ruling party were sent to the field to repeat the cliched statements to the cameras of the pro-government media. All they have to do is look human when they do so, but are incapable of even that.
[Update: BBC reports Wednesday afternoon that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on a visit to Hatay, among the hardest hit regions, said: "It is not possible to be prepared for a disaster this big." Calling for "unity and solidarity," Erdogan added that: "in a period like this, I cannot stomach people conducting negative campaigns for political interest."]
The regime of the mafioso party-state did the exact opposite of what science had dictated following the 1999 earthquake, and did it deliberately in order to create a new financial aristocracy that is dependent on them.
What we are experiencing today is the result of a decades-long disaster caused by blind partisanship and greed. The AKP have run this country for two decades with a mentality of “after us, the flood.” They never had the intention of doing something properly and they never will.
Accountability matters
Making this clear is not “making something political,” on the contrary, it is participating in politics in order to prevent destruction like this from happening in the future. It is asking for the return of stolen public funds. It is stating that “you either do this job properly or be held accountable, whether you want it or not.”
Let no one fool themselves: Deaths by earthquakes can be political, too. You cannot prevent the earthquake but you can control the results of the disaster — if that is your intention.
Pointing at those with other intentions is not “making it political,” it is an attempt to keep the arsonists who've been roaming among us with gas cans away from the next fire.
