On the morning of 6 February, we woke up to a great disaster. A 7.7 magnitude earthquake centred in Pazarcık, Kahramanmaraş caused massive destruction in the cities of Kilis, Diyarbakır, Adana, Osmaniye, Diyarbakır, Adıyaman, Gaziantep, Malatya and Hatay in southern Turkey. This was followed by another earthquake of 7.6 magnitude in the same region, a rare event in the history of human civilisation.
By Kırmızı Gazete editorial board
Türkiye is experiencing the combination of human-made disaster with a devastating natural disaster. Supposedly “collecting special taxes for 25 years” from the workers so that the country would better respond to the next earthquake, we are realizing that the country’s leaders are caught totally unprepared.
The uniqueness of the disaster does not only stem from the magnitude of the losses. This earthquake reveals the rottenness of the socio-economic nature of Turkish capitalism with extraordinary clarity.
The Turkish ruling classes have known for 35 years that the region’s geography is full of destructive fault lines. However, they did not hold back from constructing ostentatious houses that aren’t earthquake-proof. They kept building unplanned cities for their crooked, unequal and ruthless capitalism, which they expanded throughout Anatolia.
Earthquake taxes collected between 1999-2021 amount to 83 billion TL in total, 38.2 billion dollars by the exchange rate in that year! 730 billion TL in today’s money.
And we have absolutely nothing to show for it…
Our working people continue to wait with their hands tied — possibly for a chain of dangerous disasters that are likely to take place in the future. Aren’t you tired of this ever glorified state that only serves the purposes of war and brutality?
We are going through a multifaceted and destructive crisis caused by Turkish Capitalism…
This crisis brings us to the brink of a crossroads. This crossroads is closely related to the problem of how to use the resources produced in the country. Are we going to allow what belongs to us to be plundered by the Turkish ruling classes, who are no more than a parasite?
Or, are we going to turn its use to increase the welfare of society on the basis of a planned economy and under workers’ control?
