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| Courtesy of BBC |
The trial has begun this week in Türkiye of eleven defendants with regard to the deaths in the February earthquake of thirty-five citizens of North Cyprus, most of whom were high school students attending a volleyball tournament. They were killed when the hotel in which they were staying collapsed. There seem to have been a number of problems with the construction, including improper provisions when the hotel was converted from a residence and possibly illegal addition of a tenth floor. In addition there are allegations that the river sand used in the concrete was not suitable for high grade building material.
What will probably not emerge at the trial is the culpability of Turkish President Erdoğan. In Adıyaman and other Turkish centres geologists have claimed that most of the tens of thousands of buildings that collapsed should not have done if they had been built to proper standards for an earthquake zone. Part of the problem was the lax regulation regarding construction standards, including an amnesty retroactively legalising thousands of substandard buildings in the interests of meeting the president’s agenda of fostering a construction boom. Substandard construction and lax inspection practices were more than tacitly encouraged. Those on trial might be guilty but they may not be the only ones.
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