When opportunists seek political gains from humanitarian disasters

The repercussions of the major earthquake that hit Turkiye and Syria early this month are still with us. The sadness still haunts us. Every day, we hear tragic stories that break our hearts and bring tears to our eyes. Thousands of corpses are still under the rubble, and thousands of families are still without shelter. The lucky ones are those who have even a tent to live in, especially in Syria, where limited aid does not match the magnitude of the catastrophe. Moreover, what little aid there is in Syria is being pilfered by the regime and distributed to its loyalists.

Even though we are thousands of kilometres away, we cannot get over this ordeal and stop thinking about it, so how do those at its heart feel? As we see the images of the terrible destruction, and count the victims — more than 43,000 killed so far, 38,000 of them in Turkiye — we can also see that the catastrophe is bringing people together.

One Turkish man, for example, owns a building and had been arguing with a Syrian tenant about a rent increase. “We spent our night fighting over the new rent price, and now we are both on the street without shelter,” he explained. “We are sharing food and both wrapping ourselves with the same blanket.” Landlord and tenant are now both homeless along with many other victims of the disaster.

Such disasters do not discriminate between people, everyone is equal; status, identity and race are meaningless when you are trapped under rubble, or searching desperately for survivors. When it comes to death, there is no difference between us; it is the great equaliser.

Earthquakes are natural phenomena that demonstrate how fragile human beings and our societies are. Governments can only do so much to provide for what we call “civil defence”, but there is bound to be a limit to how effective this can be. Nevertheless, that has not stopped some politicians from trying to make political gains from the humanitarian disaster which has hit Turkiye.

With elections scheduled for May, opposition groups are taking the opportunity to attack Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the government of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, attacks have been made against Erdogan personally in an attempt to discredit him in the eyes of the Turkish electorate. He has been accused of failures and corruption which have cost many innocent lives. Lies and rumours have been spread, while rescue work has been pushed to one side. Claims that nothing is being done are on the increase. Far-right politician Umit Ozdag has even claimed that rescue teams are only saving members of the ruling AK Party, a foolish and absurd allegation. Did the victims under the rubble have to express their political affiliations before rescuers would pull them from the rubble?

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Such political opportunists should be ashamed of themselves. They have lost their humanity and forgot the pain and sorrow that the people are experiencing during this tragedy that has not discriminated against humans, animals or even inanimate objects in the destruction.

It is a fact that Erdogan was involved in the response from the first moment. His ministers played their role and rushed to the stricken areas to be with those affected. The Minister of Transport faced terror like everyone else when an aftershock hit the building where he was holding a press conference.

Erdogan and his wife went directly to Kahramanmaras and the other affected provinces to reassure his people about the progress of the rescue efforts. He toured the streets, and his sadness was evident on his face. He met families and wept with them, promising to rebuild what was destroyed and provide them with decent housing, and help them financially at this time. He announced a seven-day mourning period and a state of emergency for three months to remove the rubble and bring life back to the towns and cities.

The Turkish opposition groups will still seek to use the disaster in their favour, as the affected areas in the south of Turkiye are among the electoral strongholds of the AK Party. With the May elections looming, one opposition figure has said that the earthquake was divine punishment for the region because of the people’s support for Erdogan and his party.

The opposition media jumped straight into election campaigning mode, and hastened to make an unfair comparison between the 1999 Izmit earthquake and the latest one. The common headline was: “Erdogan between two earthquakes: He came with the 1999 earthquake and will leave with the 2023 earthquake”. This was both unreasonable and a misrepresentation of the facts; it was an insult to the rescue and humanitarian relief efforts.

The truth is that there is absolutely no comparison between the performance of Bulent Ecevit’s leftist government in 1999 and Erdogan’s government today. Ecevit declared his inability to cope with the catastrophe, while Erdogan stood strong, firm and with great courage to face the the disaster and support his people with humanitarian aid.

“We are like a building, its roof is strong, but its pillars are rotting, and we only have Erdogan,” said one Turkish citizen on satellite TV. “We ask God to protect him and prolong his life for us.”

That sums up the reality and conveys the clear message to the president’s opponents who are fishing in troubled waters and taking advantage of the earthquake disaster to undermine Erdogan and tarnish his image. Opportunists who use humanitarian disasters to seek political gains are shameless in their ambitions.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.