DISASTER-TURKEY: Swift Political Reform Demanded

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadire Mater

ISTANBUL, Aug 29 1999 (IPS) - This month’s earthquake in Turkey – the country’s worst natural disaster in modern history – has created a strong consensus on the need to sweep away the outmoded functioning of the Turkish state along with the debris of some 60,000 houses.

“Nothing will remain the same after the quake” is the catchword in Turkey these days, while the country mourns the some 14,000 people who lost their lives on 17 August.

Indeed nothing remained as it was. The country’s social, political and economic fabric has been shocked, exposing its deep-rooted flaws. The widespread solidarity with the victims has also stressed the benefits of peace and reconciliation.

Sweeping aside a corrupt political class may take longer than what most people expect, but the disaster has already started to mark an improvement in Turkey’s soured relations with the European Union (EU).

Particularly strained after the EU’s refusal to admit Turkey’s application for full membership last year, relations have regained momentum with the EU’s relief effort – a 2,000-strong rescue and medical force and 2.1 million US dollars in emergency aid.

The earthquake has physically moved Turkey two centimetres westwards, pushing the country over its traditional enemy, Greece, geologists here say.

Politically, it has done much more, as Greece reacted with a massive aid drive and, for the first time since 1974, it has signalled a possible lift of its veto on EU financial aid to Turkey.

Stavros Peros, the Greek minister for the Aegean territories was quoted by Turkish media as saying that, “Greece must not waste time with partial solutions but directly lift the veto and open the path for Turkey’s membership in the EU.”

“The taboo that ‘Turks have no friends but Turks’, has been destroyed by the quake, ” observes sociologist Nilufer Narli of Istanbul’s Marmara University. ‘

The ‘Turkish public, thanks to foreign rescue efforts, have realized that foreigners are not their enemies but friends. Israel is now praised by the sceptics who have witnessed their rescue efforts and a new phase is opening in Greek-Turkish relations, ” she told IPS.

“And new hopes are born for restoring relations with the EU, ” she added.

“The swift intervention by foreign rescue teams as the state dragged behind, has raised serious questions regarding the state’s functioning. A substantial change is observed in the Turkish public’s look at political problems. From now on the people cannot be mobilized with empty slogans any longer, ” Narli believes.

She relates the new public attitude to the Izmit region’s peculiarities – it is the country’s industrial heartland and where Turkey’s best educated and specialized work force live.

“Until the last one, quakes had usually been perceived as the fate of the country’s (impoverished) east and southeast parts. Previous quakes had not shaken industrial regions, ” Narli observes.

“Now the quake has finally hit ‘la creme de la creme’, including the Navy. It has also directly touched the middle class. And it has thus aroused a complex array of new demands. You never heard before of victims asking for hygienic pads, deodorants or shampoo, ” Narli says.

She also points to the fact that most of the destroyed houses – built with substandard materials – mostly belonged to immigrants from the rural areas on the Black Sea’s coast and from the war-ravaged Kurdish areas in southeast Turkey.

Ironically, among the quake victims are hundreds of Kurds who had fled their villages after their homes were destroyed by previous earthquakes in Erzincan (1939, 1992), Varto (1966) and Lice (1975).

They believed that moving westwards would free them from danger. However, the northern Anatolian geological fault line is moving in the same direction, from Erzincan to Istanbul every year, specialists say.

In spite of decades of discrimination and of a 20 year-old war for self rule the Kurds also came to the aid of their Turkish brethren since the first reports of the disaster reached Diyarbakir and other Kurdish provinces.

“There is widespread affection for the victims here,” says Seyhmus Diken, and advisor to the city of Diyarbakir’s Mayor. “People are actively campaigning for gathering aid. Even the poorest are participating with a bottle of drinking water.”

The “Democracy Platform” comprising 28 local non governmental organisations, the Greater Diyarbakir Municipality and the Diyarbakir provincial government have jointly set up an “aid committee” Diken says. “We have collected 26,000 dollars and 10 truckloads of food and medicine, plus machinery.”.

He believes that the quake has been a turning point for the province. “Until now the HADEP (pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party) mayors and the Democracy Platform had been only subject of persecution. Now we are a party to cooperation, ” he told IPS.

Diken also believes that the countrywide solidarity will affect the Kurdish issue positively: ” In the meeting in the governors office today the governor pointed that the disaster has created an opportunity for east-west contact, ” Diken said.

“This is the fist time I hear such statements coming from a (government) official, ” he stressed.

Diken noted that Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan’s peace offers during his recent trial, followed by the withdrawal of PKK’s (Kurdish Workers Party) troops from Turkish territory have been matched with a wide response to the plight of victims, generating a new trend.

“The earthquake has indeed rattled the Turkish system itself,” believes Ali Haydar Gulec, deputy HADEP chair in Istanbul. “The necessity of change in the system is now apparent to all.”

“The generous aid from the EU and the US, inevitably leads to wonder whether further aid will be conditioned to Turkey’s solving domestic and international problems,” he told IPS. “Those include the Kurdish Question and the Cyprus issue too.”

Turkish troops invaded Cyprus in 1974 and established there an “independent Turkish republic” recognised only by Ankara, severely straining relations with Greece.

“Reports of Greece lifting the veto against Turkey might very well hint a step in Turkey’s membership in the EU,” he argues.

However, Turkish foreign minister Ismail Cem voiced a less enthusiastic approach at a TV show last week. “Humanitarian solidarity is one thing, and diplomacy is something else.”

“The forthcoming EU summit in Helsinki will be the last stop for us. The EU should decide whether they want us or not,” he said.