Earthquake devastates Turkiye

By Bojana Cvijic MANAGING EDITOR

Survivors are continuing to be pulled out of collapsed buildings as rescuers fight against time and the elements after a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the countries of Turkiye, where it requested to be known as such in the UN, and Syria on Feb. 6.

The earthquake is considered to be the deadliest in the Levant region and the deadliest worldwide since the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, according to a Thursday CNN article.

The death toll continues to climb, with an estimated 41,100 dead in Turkiye and 5,700 in Syria as of Tuesday. Experts continue to expect the number to rise in the hundreds of thousands, according to a Tuesday NPR article.

Kezban Yagci Sokat is the assistant professor of business analytics at San Jose State and board member of the Humanitarian Operations and Crisis management academic group. She said the Levant region has not experienced an earthquake of this magnitude in the last century.

“The latest earthquake [before this one] we had was in 2014, which was in the last decade. It wasn’t this big,” Yagci Sokat said. “This is the largest earthquake that we have had since over 80 years ago.”

The last earthquake of this magnitude in Turkiye was a 7.8 magnitude quake that hit the east of the country in 1939, resulting in more than 30,000 deaths, according to the USGS. Yagci Sokat said the country’s emergency management agency, Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, works similarly to the U.S.’s agency for disasters and emergencies, Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“One governmental institute that is coordinating the entire response, post-disaster, it’s a similar idea for that specific thing [disasters],” she said.

The governmental response in Turkiye has been criticized for being too slow in its response for recovery and rescue operations in the aftermath of the tragic earthquake, according to a Thursday Vox News article.

“The response was slow, even the president [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] admitted it was slow [. . .] we had two back-to-back earthquakes in the same region over a 7.8, so I think that is the biggest reason why it was slow,” Yagci Sokat said. “On top of not being prepared for it. Disaster management has four stages: preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation, so if you are not prepared, you cannot respond.”

The biggest question in the criticisms towards the Turkish government is its lax regulations towards building standards in the country, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan presided over a construction boom in the 2010’s, according to the Vox of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, have effectively blockaded the region where the earthquake hit, blocking any humanitarian aid from reaching the people in need, according to a Monday Vox News article.

The European Union, U.S., Canada, Switzerland, Australia and the Arab league have all imposed economic sanctions against Syria, severely impacting humanitarian aid to innocent civilians including after the earthquake, according to the Geneva Centre for Security policy, an international foundation dedicated to the maintenance of peace and stability.

Basic necessities including fuel and medicine must come through to the region from Turkiye, where Yagci Sokat said Turkiye has opened more roads for the UN to bring necessities needs.”

“A lot of this aid [to Syria] has not been able to get to the people that it needs to get to,” Armaline said.

The EU is considering exemptions to the sanctions in Syria in the aftermath of the earthquake, according to a Tuesday article by the National News.

The U.S. announced it would ease sanctions on Friday for six months, according to the National News article.

Yagci Sokat said Turkiye hosts the largest refugee population in the world, where it has been the largest hosting country for the past eight years.

She said, this, in addition to the people that have been internally displaced in the country, has caused a larger recovery effort.

“In this field, [you] will news article.

Jabrayilova said.

The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion sent out a campus-wide email on Thursday offering support for students impacted by the earthquake, with links to organizations in the community and campus resources for those in need.

Armaline said the Human Rights Institute on campus has been sharing news links and resources on its social media websites on ways to help and stay informed, but it is also working on organizing aid to help those impacted in Turkiye and Syria.

Yagci Sokat said a great resource is AHBAP, a nongovernmental organization based in Turkiye, where people are able to donate to those who need relief.

People have organized a website with links to each group organizing aid relief efforts in Turkiye and Syria.

Organizations include Kurdish Red Moon in Syria, The Turkey Mozaik Foundation and Karam.

The California Kurdish Center said it organized an Earthquake fund to help efforts in the aftermath of the disaster, where a significant amount of Turkiye’s Kurdish population have been affected by the earthquake.

Erdoğan has broadly rejected any criticisms of his government after admitting to “shortcomings” of his government, calling for unity instead of arguing over political interests, according to a Thursday CNN article.

His remarks come after growing frustration from the public about the government’s response to the disaster, where Twitter had become inaccessible until access was restored and traffic filtering had been applied at the internet access provider level, according to the CNN article.

Syria, in the middle of an ongoing civil war and a large winter storm, has seen a large aid crisis that has been exacerbated by the earthquake. The government and President to the hard-hit region.

William Armaline is the director of the Human Rights Institute at SJSU and sociology and interdisciplinary social sciences professor. He said humanitarian administrators like the UN and other international organizations in charge of organizing aid have failed in what it has reported because of sanctions in Syria.

“So, you know, if you heard them speaking, sort of soon after the actual earthquake, they were saying things like, ‘We need unadulterated access to all people impacted by the earthquake, regardless of border, regardless of sanction,’ ” Armaline said. “They’re saying like, that all has to go out the window, right? But the United States, and some other countries have not bent the knee to those think that international, either countries or their organizations, should be working on helping with that recovery process,” Yagci Sokat said. “[. . .] It’s a very long process [but] in that process, I know that there is a surge of relief efforts –especially donations are going on – but it should be a steady, longer, longer help in the region for all impacted peoples.”

Finance senior Nikki Jabrayilova, said it’s been more than a week since SJSU has said anything about the earthquake.

“We have a lot of Turkish people at SJSU, at that moment we all were under so much of [an] emotional roller coaster. We are so far from our relatives and we [look] at the Twitter update page to see if there is any more news because another earthquake could happen,”

Yagci Sokat said a lot of people in her own personal life have reached out to see how they can help.

“I am extremely grateful that like, you know, even my chair, my Associate Dean, like, you know, my students from this semester past semester, or like my colleagues from the university, like so many people have reached out to me.” she said. “As [a] Turkish person, I’m extremely touched. That people are individually taking the step to ask, “What can I do?’ ”