EARTHQUAKE and STATE (News File) Written by Serdar Öztürk
Türkçe Dead city odour Three months after the 1999 Marmara Earthquake, I travelled to the Gölcük region again with a group of experts. The ruins of the city were already frightening. What was more frightening was the pungent vinegar-like odour that covered the city even though months had passed, burning your throat a little more with every breath. After a while, I gathered all my courage and asked the guide why. "The smell of a dead city," they said. It was not only the odour of the people who had died under the rubble and could not be reached until then, but also the odour that the buildings and the things inside them gave off with the change in the air temperature. It was quite difficult to get used to. The odour that people gathered around the fires lit in the rubble at night, trying to bandage each other's wounds, could no longer hear. That smell haunted me for a long time. Everywhere I turned, it was with me. We travelled from city to city together. We accepted that the earthquake was a natural tremor. We do not have to accept that the unnatural consequences of a natural tremor are tried to be accepted by millions of people in subsequent earthquakes. That is why we have the right to oppose, to speak out, to object to the unnatural consequences. If we direct our objection only to the contractor who steals iron, cement, sand and foundations, we internalise the acceptance that is demanded of us. Thus, we attribute earth tremors to religious foundations and deaths to numbers. However, not only the contractors of the buildings constructed with unscientific methods are responsible for what happened, but also those who drew, implemented, controlled and approved all these mistakes. Of course, the system above them, those who establish that system and exchange living life for money are also responsible for the deaths. What we are experiencing is the result of the value of an inch of land expressed in millions, the cost of the building built on it, and the resort to fraud to reduce costs in order to increase profits. What we are experiencing is the result of the state, the political preferences that constitute it, the understanding that fuels the ambition to make more money, not human life. What we are experiencing is the natural result of concrete gaining more and more power in political financing. What we are experiencing, in such a system, in such an administration, is the impoverishment of the people, enabling them to accept bad choices by taking advantage of their poverty, causing them to be buried under the rubble as a result of bad choices and making them believe that God did it. Another tremor, another collapsing concrete. Nothing has changed. Old concrete graves must be quickly removed to build new concrete graves, and we must prepare for new disasters by taking refuge in fate. This is what is happening. What they don't know is the odour you feel even months later in destroyed cities. When it gets on you, it is the same smell whichever way you turn.
