Why is Turkey investigating contractors after the earthquake

Turkey remains in the middle of a state of emergency, affected by the earthquake that killed at least 35,000 people last week. But the finger pointing has already begun.

The rush to punishment comes amid grief, but also growing anger and frustration with the Turkish government’s response to the earthquake. Much of it focuses on emergency response — waiting for teams to help and rescue — but it also extends to anger about politics before the earthquake, about how shoddy building construction exacerbated the devastation of the disaster.

Turkey’s Justice Ministry said this weekend that 134 people were being investigated for their role in the construction of buildings that collapsed during the quake – and some declared that they adhered to building regulations. At least 10 people have been arrested, and a few have been banned from traveling abroad, according to The New York Times. Some of the detainees tried to escape. Turkey’s Justice Ministry also said it was setting up earthquake crime investigation offices to investigate deaths and injuries. (Vox has emailed the department for comment but has not yet received a response.)

“We will follow this matter closely until the necessary judicial procedures are completed, especially for the buildings that were severely damaged and the buildings that caused deaths and injuries,” Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters at a briefing on Saturday.

This sounds like an accountability effort, but it is a far cry from a solid accounting of Turkey’s earthquake failures.

Turkey lies along two major fault lines, and after the deadly 1999 earthquake, the country passed stricter building codes, but they were not consistently enforced. This goes beyond builders and contractors who cut corners or use inferior materials. There are also likely to be municipal and state inspectors and officials who issued passes when they shouldn’t, or looked the other way. There are those who lobbied for (and politicians who supported) building amnesty laws, which essentially trump ordinances in the name of quick construction and profit.

Earthquakes are a natural phenomenon. Yes, it happens. “But the consequences of the earthquake are, as I say, governmental, political and administrative,” said Hisyar Özsoy, deputy head of the People’s Democratic Party and an opposition member of parliament representing Diyarbakir, a city close to the earthquake devastation.

All this happened under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, along with the Justice and Development Party (AKP), has been in power for about two decades. Erdogan made the construction boom the focus of Turkey’s economic growth. At the same time, he consolidated his power over the institutions, the press, and the judiciary. This rapid economic growth, occurring alongside democratic erosion, created layers of corruption and government mismanagement that allowed contractors to build buildings the way they did.

“It has a lot to do with the whole system that Erdogan has built — not just his politics, but also the economies behind it,” said Sibnem Gomusko, a political science professor at Middlebury College who has studied democracy and authoritarianism in Turkey. “The whole system is built around these corrupt networks, patronage networks, all levels: the local level, the national level, the local branches of the party, the local builders, the developers – they’re all in this together.”

Accountability after the earthquake – but to whom?

In 2019, during the election campaign, Erdogan promoted efforts to grant amnesty to builders. According to NPR’s translation of the Turkish news website Diken, he said, “We have solved the problems of 205,000 citizens of Hatay with zoning to peace.” These amnesty policies were a kind of red tape that allowed buildings to be built and certified even if they did not meet safety and legal requirements. The developers had to pay a fine, but it was basically an exemption from the rules.

This granting of building amnesty predates Erdoğan, and also before the 1999 earthquake prompted Turkey to overhaul its safety and building standards to better withstand the next earthquake.

After the latest amnesty law was passed in 2018, tens of thousands of amnesties were granted, including in the earthquake-affected areas. Pelin Pinar Geritlioglu, head of the Union of Turkish Chambers of Engineers and City Planners in Istanbul, told the BBC last week that the number could be as high as 75,000 in the quake zone. (Vox has reached out to Giritlioğlu for comment and will update her comments if we hear back.)

Another amnesty bill was awaiting approval in parliament before the earthquake, reports the BBC.

The amnesty is a window into the kind of practices that enabled the mismatch between existing regulations and what was actually applied – and what allowed this gap to become so widespread. Even those individual policies, such as amnesties, are difficult to separate from the broader dynamics of economics and politics.

As the experts said, construction was the engine of the economy and so everything went into maintaining this business.

This means all layers of the political and economic structure, from the bottom up. Construction has also been a source of political power for Erdogan and the AKP, with major Turkish construction companies enriching themselves with government contracts and spilling over into the regime. That construction boom, which fueled other sectors of the economy, helped make Erdogan and the AKP popular. This, in turn, allowed him to consolidate his power, and helped put the AKP in power at all levels of government, including state and municipal offices—often those offices tasked with overseeing permits or enforcing building codes.

Politicians had incentives to agree to things like amnesty laws. People enriched themselves through this ecosystem of patronage, so there was no incentive to make sure earthquake protection standards were enforced. And the institutions that can hold these actors and politicians to account—the press, the civil service, and the courts—have been hollowed out and eroded by Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism.

So yeah, developers and contractors were probably careless, building buildings with cheap materials or designs that couldn’t withstand a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. But these shortcuts could not have taken place without the complicity or encouragement of government institutions, all of which knew the weaknesses of the country and moved forward anyway.

“Bundling contractors is an act of responding to public outcry,” Taner Yozgek, former president of the Chamber of Building Engineers, told the New York Times. The real culprits are the current government and the previous governments that kept the system as it is.

The Justice Department investigation could also be an attempt to defuse not only the pressure from past crimes, but also the criticism and complaints about the government’s response to the earthquake. Erdoğan has centralized many of the institutions under his control, which means that many state functions pass through him. That likely contributed to some delay in disaster response, including on the part of the military, experts and critics said.

These questions about Turkey’s response — felt most acutely by people waiting to find their loved ones or sleeping in the cold — are generating the most anger right now. However, investigations targeting individual builders could take some of the pressure off Erdogan, his party and those associated with his government. “He does a good job of pursuing some soft targets, to show that he is serious. I look after the interests of my people, and I will hold these people accountable for what they have done,” Gomusko said.

The question now is whether commissioning a few low-level people will suffice, or whether this could be a deciding factor in Erdogan’s political decline. Elections are due in May, and the country’s economic crisis and Erdogan’s long grip on power have already made him vulnerable, even as he deliberately eroded democracy.

Whether the earthquake fully challenges Erdogan’s hold on power is an open question, but what happens in the aftermath of the earthquake will determine Turkey’s future. Millions became homeless after the collapse of thousands of buildings and apartments. These homes must be replaced. Turkey will rebuild. but how?

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