Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, here touring the site of destroyed buildings during his visit to the city of Kahramanmaras in southeast Turkey two days after the severe earthquake, has faced severe criticism for the government’s response. Photo by Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images

Voices & Opinion

POV: Erdoğan’s Response to Earthquake Leaves Turkish People Feeling Abandoned—Again

“Turkish citizens outside the quake zone were much faster and willing to act than the public agency responsible for disaster management”

I wrote my master’s degree thesis 11 years ago at Bogazici University in Istanbul about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s vision of governance. That thesis began by surveying headlines from national newspapers the day after one of the deadliest tragedies in Turkish history: the earthquake of 7.4 magnitude that struck northwestern Turkey on August 17, 1999, which led to 18,000 deaths, physically disabled many more, and traumatized even greater numbers.

In the earthquake’s aftermath, almost every paper used a version of the same headline and described society as having been left sahipsiz, which translates as unowned, unattended, derelict, without a guardian, or uncared for. The earthquake in 1999 had hit in a time of economic crisis and political instability, and the ineffectiveness of the public response had hurt as deeply as our reckoning with the poor quality of the building stock we called our homes, the deceitful practices of contractors who built them, and the corruption of regulators who turned a blind eye.

Erdoğan was elected in 2002, three years after that earthquake, and in the context of mass demoralization. Reversing the societal sentiment of being abandoned by the government has been a key trope of Erdoğan’s ascendancy.

But today, as I write this, after another catastrophic earthquake has struck south Turkey and left dozens of towns in ruins, and more than 20,000 dead, the societal sentiment of abandonment by state institutions is back, in full force. On Turkish Twitter, many users are sharing images of newspaper headlines from 1999.

Seeing them, I remembered the lines I wrote about Erdoğan’s obsession with micromanaging public displays of governing prowess—while censoring scenes of ineptitude. Blackmailing private broadcasters and doctoring media narratives is central in this modus operandi. One of Erdoğan’s innovations in government is a digital infrastructure for ordinary citizens to petition the presidential office and air grievances against bureaucrats and functionaries. This performs personalized attentiveness from the seat of executive power while helping Erdoğan single out rivals or subordinates for every wrongdoing. It also harvests public relations benefits, and preempts the possibility of being held personally responsible for failures. I called this “performative government,” concerned with stagecraft before statecraft.

Allow me to describe the frustration that leads me to write this piece as I sit in Boston with little in my power other than donating and fundraising. I have been reading tweets about the fate of trucks carrying in-kind assistance to affected communities, but stopping before entering the disaster zone. Or the fate of diggers and cranes lying idle in affected areas when they could be used for time-sensitive search and rescue efforts.

Meanwhile, Turkish citizens outside the quake zone were much faster and willing to act than AFAD [Disaster and Emergency Management Authority]—the public agency responsible for disaster management, which is controlled by the presidential office. Thousands of citizens have participated in a gargantuan collective mobilization to assist rescue and humanitarian efforts before any AFAD teams arrived in affected towns.

Social media, especially Twitter, has been instrumental. Hundreds of survivors and close kin have posted on Twitter to alert volunteers or, ideally, well-equipped AFAD teams, to the location of their loved ones trapped under ruins and waiting for rescuers. Trapped individuals have posted heart-wrenching tweets with the little battery power left in their phones, hoping to be rescued. Volunteering groups have collected and mapped these locations and shared them for use by rescue teams on the ground. Civilians have raised funds to rent diggers to meet the urgent task of sorting through pancaked concrete and rescuing survivors trapped underneath the rubble.

In addition to the rescue effort, municipalities, schools, alumni associations, nonprofits, sport clubs, soccer fan groups, and every type of private association you can think of have mobilized to pool donations in cash or in-kind aid, pack items into boxes and boxes in self-funded trucks headed for the emergency zone. The charitable organization AHBAP, founded by a popular singer with nonpartisan credentials, has led the way nationally.

Many citizens, like myself, trust AHBAP over state officials and witness how civilian efforts surpass state efforts in agility, speed, and most importantly, impartiality. In Turkey and outside, fundraising campaigns have raised millions of dollars, and many donors today trust AHBAP over semipublic bodies like the Red Crescent. It was encouraging to see photos of superstar soccer players mingling with ordinary citizens in packing and moving boxes of aid and [seeing] boundaries separating Olympians and citizens blur away. The desperation of Hatay would have been less publicized if not for tragic Instagram videos by soccer celebrities living there and who became spokespersons questioning the lack of rescue teams in the city.

I had thought that a trustworthy government prioritizing the common good would respond more efficiently than uncoordinated, decentralized mass mobilization. But that has not been the case in an environment of mistrust. Volunteers are not merely filling a vacuum. The agility of spontaneous solutions is rarely matched by centralized coordination.

I deeply respect each and every fellow citizen who ran to airports to board flights carrying volunteers or drove their cars to the emergency zone. These efforts have been less appreciated by state officials, however. The government narrowed the bandwidth to block access to Twitter in anticipation of Mr. Erdoğan’s arrival in the disaster zone and the press statements he would give alongside AFAD officials.

Upon their belated arrival at the scene, AFAD officials reportedly did more to police, commandeer, and frustrate civilian aid than amplify the effort. While AFAD actions may be genuinely motivated by needs of logistic coordination, many have understandably suspected a more sinister agenda, to monopolize credit and socialize blame, rather than address the urgent goals of search and rescue and humanitarian relief.

In the press conference, Erdoğan called critics and volunteers “provocateurs” motivated by the goal of making the government-in-charge appear inept. Little else insults Erdoğan more than making him look weak. In the past two days, followers of Turkish social media content watched citizen-posted videos that show journalists working for pro-government broadcasters muting or refusing to hear survivors who call out the weak response by state officials.

It is hard not to agree with the dark realism of a Twitter user who suggested survivors awaiting rescuers under ruins should post social media content criticizing Erdoğan with the battery remaining on their smartphones, for the digital police will likely arrive on the scene faster than AFAD. The tweet was responding to the arrests of journalists and social media users who criticized the government’s ineptitude. We are witnessing the extremes authoritarian indecency will reach. By any moral standard, doctoring media narratives should not be among a government’s priorities at a time like today.

Between two equally devastating earthquakes in 1999 and 2023, Turkey seems to have moved from feeling like a society abandoned by a fragmented state to one that is still feeling uncared for because it is cornered by the jealous whims of a possessive autocrat. Autocratic acts of possessiveness and the polarizing distrust these acts fuel might be the greatest barriers preventing citizens from benefiting from their own collective altruism, which the people of Turkey have generously activated in the hours since the earthquake.

One cannot help but imagine an alternative universe marked by trust, which could have instead synthesized and amplified the effects of mass volunteering and public coordination. But governing by polarizing stagecraft will neither seek nor achieve that outcome. 

Cultural anthropologist Can Evren, a postdoctoral associate at Kilachand Honors College, is from Turkey; he has family near the region affected by the earthquake.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.