Earthquake: Turkish President Declares State of Emergency as Death Toll Nears 8,000

FT/

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared a state of emergency in areas ravaged by the region’s worst earthquake in decades as the death toll in his country and neighbouring Syria crossed 7,200.

With efforts intensifying to rescue people trapped under rubble since two huge tremors hit the region on Monday, Erdoğan triggered the emergency powers to deal with the humanitarian crisis.

They will enable him to rule by decree in much of Turkey’s south-east, bypassing parliament and regional authorities run by opposition parties.

“We have decided to declare a state of emergency to ensure that operations are carried out rapidly,” Erdoğan said, also warning of a crackdown on looters and those seeking to foment unrest. “We are facing one of the biggest disasters not only of the history of the Turkish republic but also of our geography and the world.”

The emergency powers, which he previously used for the country as a whole following a coup attempt in 2016, are scheduled to lapse in May, just before presidential elections in which the president is battling to secure his legacy after two decades in office.

Under the country’s constitution, such measures can curtail fundamental rights, a particularly sensitive issue in south-eastern Turkey, which fell under emergency rule during the country’s decades-long conflict with outlawed Kurdish separatist groups.

Authorities in Turkey and Syria have been racing to move aid to the affected areas and help victims trapped in the rubble, but damaged roads, bad weather and disruption to communications have hampered efforts.

“Every minute, every hour that passes, the chances of finding survivors alive diminishes,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization director-general. “Numbers do not tell us about the perilous situation that many families now face, having lost everything [and] forced to sleep outside in the middle of winter.”

The death toll from the original quake early on Monday and a second tremor later in the day reached more than 5,400 in Turkey on Tuesday, with at least a further 1,800 killed in Syria, according to official sources and groups operating in rebel-held areas of the war-torn country.

Aid groups working in Syria’s Idlib region, one of the remaining enclaves controlled by the opposition where more than 4mn people have sought sanctuary, said they were struggling. The UN said aid delivery into Syria from Turkey had been suspended because of logistical issues.

Kieren Barnes, Syria director for the Mercy Corps aid group, said the initial period after the quake had been characterised by “chaos, confusion, fear”, adding: “There’s obviously going to be huge pressure in Turkey as well for supplies. So this is going to be a scramble for resources over the coming days and weeks.”

In Turkey, authorities closed roads to Hatay and the cities of Kahramanmaraş and Adıyaman to anyone besides rescue and aid vehicles, as people on the ground complained rescuers were too slow to arrive.

As night fell on Tuesday, television showed rescue workers across a vast swath of territory trying to dig people from buildings as emergency lights blinked behind them.

Experts said the low quality of buildings and lack of earthquake resilience contributed to the destruction. Many buildings were “not designed from seismic considerations to absorb this much ground motion”, said Kishor Jaiswal, a scientist at the US Geological Survey.

“It’s difficult to watch this tragedy unfold, especially since we’ve known for a long time about how poorly the buildings in the region tend to behave in earthquakes,” he added.

In a sign of the potential economic fallout, Turkey’s benchmark Bist 100 stock index tumbled 8.6 per cent, twice triggering curbs designed to smooth panicky trading.

The Turkish lira also reached a new low, according to Bloomberg data, after a long slide caused in large part by the government’s unorthodox policy of lowering interest rates despite scorching inflation.

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