As the death toll from the Turkey earthquake grows, so does anger at the government

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While the Justice Department has arrested more than 230 people—mostly contractors—in connection with the building’s collapse, many have focused and blamed existing building regulations. Of particular note is the 2018 “amnesty” law that legalizes hundreds of thousands of buildings across the country that either did not have planning permission or ignored building codes, including earthquake safety measures.

Under the amnesty law, an unauthorized building owner can only pay a fee and have it legalized without a thorough examination. In other words, according to critics, the new regulation allowed builders to circumvent building codes while the government collected fees and fines.

The government raised 23 billion Turkish liras (about $4 billion at the time) after the 2018 legislation went into effect, Murat Corum, Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, told parliamentarians in 2019.

“A pardon is murder,” the Federation of Turkish Chambers of Engineers and Architects said in a 2021 statement. The organization added, “It should be assumed that all buildings approved under this amnesty have not received any engineering services, and they should be inspected.”

Professional chambers, which defend the interests of some 650,000 engineers, architects, and urban planners, play an important role in Turkey, as the constitution states that organizations “function as public institutions” in order to “protect professional discipline and ethics.”

Also in 2021, a parliamentary report found that nearly 8 million buildings constructed before 2000 were highly vulnerable to earthquakes.

Erdogan, who is cultivating a pro-business reputation, has campaigned on the amnesty law.

“We built 8,000 housing projects and solved the problems of 205,000 residents of Hatay with amnesty,” he said at an election rally in 2019 in Hatay, one of the cities most affected by earthquakes, referring to the amnesty granted. to unauthorized buildings.

According to Corum, more than 7 million units have been rationed thanks to the amnesty.

Neither Turkey’s Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change nor Erdogan’s office responded to requests for comment for this story. On February 8, during a speech in Hatay, Erdogan said that “it is not possible to prepare for a disaster of this magnitude.”

construction boom

Both the central government and local municipalities in Turkey play a role in shaping cities. The reason the ruling Justice and Development Party has come under so much criticism is that it holds the most seats in parliament and can pass important legislation such as amnesty. It also controls the Public Housing Authority, which implements urban development projects.

Local municipalities, some run by the ruling party and others by the opposition, also play a key role, as they are responsible for drawing up zoning plans that define building rights, such as defining open areas for building and enforcing floor space and height limits. border. In addition, municipalities are responsible for examining construction projects in their areas and issuing permits if they conform to the code.

Experts say laws such as the 2018 amnesty fueled a construction boom, giving developers across the country hope that the government would support the sector.

“Turkey’s economic growth since the late 2000s has relied heavily on construction,” said Benci Akbulut, a professor of geography, planning and the environment at Concordia University in Montreal.

“This is reflected in the growth rate of the construction sector between 2002 and 2014, which exceeded, and sometimes even doubled, the GDP growth rate,” added Akbulut, who has written extensively on Turkey’s economy and government.

Mega development projects, wide highways, bridges and airports have served as models for the AKP, announced during rallies and covered by pro-government media.

Construction workers stand on top of a building under construction during weekend shifts in Ankara, Turkey, on April 22, 2018. Altan Gocher / NurPhoto via Getty Images file

Construction peaked after the introduction of another much-discussed law in 2012, which dealt with the transformation of areas at risk of natural disasters. While the government promised to use legislation to rebuild unsafe buildings, new regulations gave the government expanded powers to designate entire neighborhoods as “vulnerable” and to forcibly seize property through eminent property.

Renovating old and unsafe building stocks has been one of the AKP’s most high-profile undertakings over the years. But despite the expanded powers granted by the 2012 law, critics such as Gencay Serter, of the Chamber of Urban Planning, say the authorities have not focused on rebuilding old structures to make them earthquake-safe, instead prioritizing new construction.

Allegations of rampant corruption that undermine the integrity of buildings have long plagued Turkey’s construction sector.

Building regulations, which apply at the local level, are often not followed because of the “intimate relations between construction companies and the government,” according to Howard Eisenstat, associate professor of Middle Eastern history at St. Lawrence University in New York.

Another factor that contributed to the lack of proper oversight was the Building Inspection System that was put in place in 2011 and was in effect until 2019, according to the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects. Under this system, contractors could choose any inspection company they wanted and pay the inspectors themselves.

This “led to a kind of illegality in the system,” said Mustafa Erdek, a professor in the Department of Earthquake Engineering at Istanbul’s Bogazici University.

The law was amended in 2019 so that the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change began assigning inspectors to contractors. In announcing the review, the ministry wrote that the most important objective was to eliminate “deficiencies in inspections” caused by “illegal business relationships established between building contractors and inspection firms, something that “all actors agreed is the biggest problem in the system.” .

Zoning changes made by central or local government authorities were also a problem.

“Areas that were not safe for building, such as riverbeds and other unstable areas, have undergone zoning changes and have been opened up for building,” Serter said.

Over the years, the Chamber of Architects and the Chamber of Urban Planners have sued the government several times to contest the safety of building projects. They won on some issues, delaying projects and angering Erdogan himself.

“These rooms, their names are architects, but their aim is to demolish, not to build,” Erdogan said in 2016.

Two critics of government building policies, architect Musila Yabeci and urban planner Tayfun Kahraman, have been jailed since April for their participation in the Gezi Park protests, which were sparked by the government’s plan to build a shopping mall in what is now the park. in Istanbul.

Yabeichi, who is a staunch advocate of strict earthquake standards, asked her lawyer to send a tweet from her account on Saturday.

“After the search and rescue is over, prosecutors and experts should come to every wreck,” Yabichi wrote. “Concrete/iron etc. should be sampled as evidence of debris!”

Correction (March 4, 2023, 5:37 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this story misstated the number of buildings a parliamentary report found to be earthquake-prone. 8 million were built before the year 2000, not in the year 2000.

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