Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2023

Front Burner Transcript for March 2^nd, 2023

Host: Jayme Poisson

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Hi, I'm Daemon Fairless in for Jayme Poisson.

SOUNDCLIP

ABDUL MALIK RASSAM: (Speaking foreign language)

TRANSLATOR: The kitchen and bathroom collapsed. Everything fell. The house was all damaged.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Abdul Malik Rassam is a Syrian refugee. He and his family resettled from Syria to Turkey, but a few weeks ago they also had to flee their home there after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake destroyed it. They found somewhere else to stay, but then a powerful aftershock damaged that house, too. So he and his family moved into an aid tent last week.

SOUNDCLIP

ABDUL MALIK RASSAM: (Speaking foreign language)

TRANSLATOR: We were bombarded in Syria a lot. Houses collapsed on us, but we were not scared like this because we would hide behind something. Now we're afraid of walls. We don't know if the roof or floor will hit us.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Tens of thousands of tremors continue to shake the south and east of Turkey, including places already devastated beyond recognition. (sound of building collapsing) This past Monday, a magnitude 5.6 aftershock collapsed this building in the country's east. Officials estimate over 44,000 people have died in Turkey alone. And the U.N. says a million and a half people are without homes. The quake is one of the worst to hit the region in a century. But there are other factors at play beyond natural disasters. The level of destruction and the number of injured and dead are so severe that it's fueling questions about whether corruption allowed the building of dangerously shoddy homes and hampered the roll out of aid. Louise Callahan is joining me today from Istanbul. She's Middle East correspondent for The Times newspaper in London, and she's the host of the podcast The Messiah and is Kittens. It's about a powerful cult in Turkey. She's going to bring us what she saw in the weeks after the earthquake in one of the worst hit cities. And just as a warning, we're going to be talking about some of the people who died among the rubble, including children. So please take care while you're listening. Louise, thanks for joining me.

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Hi. Thank you very much for having me.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So today we're going to talk about a place in Turkey. You've been a lot of times in the past, I guess, a city called Antakya. But before the earthquake, can you kind of take me through what Antakya was like?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Well, Antakya was one of the most beautiful cities in Turkey. You know, it's the site of ancient Antioch, and it's had this amazing old stone buildings and kind of little passageways through the city, these old shops, lots of kind of artisans. And there's a really kind of multicultural heritage and churches. There's an old synagogue. So it's one of those places that, you know, it's been around for time immemorial and lots of different people have traveled through there, made their homes there.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: And sounds beautiful. But then really in February Antakya was one of the places that was worst hit by this magnitude 7.8 earthquake. You got there a couple of days after, if I understand correctly. What did it look like when you got there?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: That's right. I have never seen destruction like this. I never I mean, I've been to Antakya many, many times. And I know the streets of the city center pretty well, but the destruction was so intense, so all pervading that I couldn't figure out where I was. I remember I was standing on the main street, one of the main streets (indistinct), and I had to open Google Maps on my phone to to realize where I was. It wasn't possible to recognize it by the buildings. Now, I've worked in many different war zones as part of my job for The Times. And I, of course, I've seen a lot of destruction before, but the scale of this was just something different. It's not one road or, you know, one area which has been damaged. It's, you know, you keep driving and driving and driving and everything's just destroyed. And even houses that might look kind of alright from the outside. Then when you're looking through a window, you realize that actually it's been really damaged inside or that it's partially collapsed. So it's just the scale is just unfathomable. And we've seen as well that this week, you know, where there have been further aftershocks, more and more buildings have collapsed. So the local authorities are basically warning people, you know, don't go and stay back in your houses even if you think they might be all right.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Wow. One of the really compelling things about the reporting is just some of the stories you got from people in the fairly immediate aftermath of this. I'd like you to take me through some of this. Could you tell me about this one family you spoke with? Nazahat Durran and her daughters, can you can you tell me what happened to them?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Yeah, right. So I was walking down one of the main streets in Antakya, and I saw a couple standing outside a completely destroyed house. There was nothing that it was it was just collapsed into rubble and it was Nazahat and Meta Durran. They were waiting outside the house, had been for a few days for the body of their 15 year old daughter, Urdonar, to be picked up from the rubble. And what happened to this family? It's one of those stories that has definitely really stuck with me and I think tells you a lot about how, for the smallest reasons, people can survive or die during an earthquake, depending on where you happen to be standing in the house, whether it's, you know, under a door frame or a particular room. This is what happens to Urdonar, so that the night of the earthquake, there's a Hartmut, your daughter and her little sister, Zainabatar, they've been out for supper. They were celebrating Meta's 49th birthday. And then they come back and they've given them the present and they all jump from his bed. And then at sort of around 4 a.m., they get woken by this earthquake. Zainabatar, Nazahat and Meta, survived just because of where they happened to be at the time. But Urdonar, was killed as she tried to run across the corridor from her room to her mom. So Nazahat had was stuck under the rubble with her, you know, a daughter who's dad on one side, she could just see her hands under the rubble. And on the other side, her, you know, 13 year old daughter, Zainabatar who's alive, she didn't want Zainabatar to see her sister crushed. So she managed to move some of the furniture around, so and the rubble around so that she couldn't see her. They were stuck under the rubble for hours and hours. Eventually, incredibly enough, one of their relatives actually managed to dig them out with his hands.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Oh, my God, really?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Yeah. And then hours later, then the Meta her husband was rescued, but that they were after they were pulled from the rubble. Nazarhat and Meta they just they've just been camping out basically outside their ruined home. And there's nothing it has no toilets. There's no food. I mean, there's some aid organizations giving it out, but you can't there's no sort of infrastructure at this point. And they're just standing there in the road waiting. And they were desperate for excavators to come and try and dig their daughter's body out. But they were holding this kind of lonely, lonely vigil.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Well, one of the really heartbreaking details that stuck with me is, is that Nazarhat the mom was only able to get this one little keepsake from her daughter.

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Yeah. It was a gold bracelet that she managed to take from her daughter's wrist. And she was wearing it. And she was she was tugging at it, holding her hand while she was looking at the excavator. And the thing is, I got to them about three days after the earthquake, I think maybe two days. And at this point, no one had actually come. This is in one of the main streets in Antakya. At this point, there were no people from the state who had been able to come to the house and and try to excavate the ruins. So one of her neighbors, who's whose three kids were under the rubble, personally hired an excavator to go through the rubble. You hear stories like this all the time where, you know, the state's response wasn't quick enough or there wasn't enough of it to go around because the level of destruction was so insane.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Yeah, it sounds like there's just this tremendous amount of desperation for a response that just, you know, never came.

LOUISE CALLAHAN: People have these horrifying stories. One of my friends told me about her sister in law who was stuck under the rubble with her very young baby and and I'll do them on another city. Her family could talk to her through the rubble. This kind of story you hear a lot that that they could hear them. So her family were telling her, don't worry. Help is going to come soon. 24 hours later, it still hadn't come. And then her baby died. So it was very, very, very cold during this time. Her baby, I think, must have died of hypothermia. And the day after that, she was taken alive from the rubble, still holding her dead child.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Oh, my goodness. And yet occasionally we'll hear these stories of these miracle rescues that happened hours, days, several days after some cases. Have you heard of any of those in Antakya?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Yeah, I saw one, actually. It was so remarkable. It must have been five or six, maybe seven days after the earthquake, the kind of time where you expect, you know, how could anyone possibly be alive? You know, it's just it's unimaginable. But I saw one a 30 year old woman and her and her pet dog, Venus, were taken alive from the rubble. The woman, she she was fine. Apparently, that's what the medics told me. I didn't speak to her, but they said, Oh, yeah, she said she said, I'm okay. I'm okay. And I think it's really kind of depends on how you get buried under the rubble, just which way you happen to be standing and just complete chance almost. So some people told me that they'd survived because they'd been crouching next to a large item of furniture. And then when the roof had collapsed, they'd been kind of protected because the roof had landed on the furniture or or, you know, like a bookcase fell on them and protected them. So it's it can feel so random, you know, how you survive in these situations.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: One of the things that I'm interested in, too, is that Antakya is quite close to the Syrian border. And as I understand, there's a lot of Syrian residents in the city now, presumably having fled the civil war in Syria. How how were they treated?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Well, there's already a lot of tensions in Turkey between Turks and Syrian refugees. A lot of Turks say that there are too many Syrians in the country. There's really a lot of racism. And, you know, almost immediately after the earthquake, the grumbling started. I had a lot of people say, oh, the Syrians got help and the Turks did. And all all of which is completely untrue, of course. But it sort of these disasters tap into existing tensions and can make them worse. I remember I spoke to one Syrian guy who was standing outside his house crying, asking for help. He said he's been begging the excavator teams down the road to come. He said that his sons were buried in the ruins of his house, but they hadn't come. It's obviously I have no idea whether that's because he was Syrian or not. Lots of other Syrians did get help. But there is a feeling, I think, of of being forgotten or or of an unfairness. I think both Turks and Syrians have sensed a lot of unfairness in the way that help was given out.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Rescue teams, equipment and emergency support is now starting to arrive here, but many fear it's come too late. We have 30 dead in there. Is our state really incapable? Are they so incapable? I have no words. 30 bodies have been lying here until the morning.

RESIDENT: (Speaking foreign language)

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So not beyond Antakya. I'm curious what kind of conversations happening across the country about the government's emergency response. We're hearing a lot of complaints. You just mentioned the incredible amount of time it took to get excavation and help and aid. What are the other criticisms people in Turkey have been talking about?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Well, I think a lot of people said, oh, it took the state too long to get here. There's also really widespread anger, not just at the ruling AKP and President Erdogan, but also all levels, including opposition controlled municipalities at the state disaster response. I mean, that the anger just goes towards all figures of authority.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Discontent is spreading. In Istanbul, football fans threw thousands of soft toys onto the pitch for children affected by the earthquake while chanting government resign.

LOUISE CALLAHAN: I should say that President Erdogan has come out and, you know, denied there was a big delay getting the aid to different areas. But he has also asked for forgiveness.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Turkey's president is acutely aware of the fingers now being pointed at him and his government's response to the disaster. And while visiting some of the worst affected areas, he did admit that they had encountered some problems. But certainly there have been shortfalls as the conditions have become clear. It is impossible to prepare to face a disaster like this.

LOUISE CALLAHAN: So there's a lot of discussion over how this is going to impact President Erdogan's chances in the upcoming elections. There had been a lot of fears that the elections were going to be delayed. It now looks as if they are actually going to go ahead in mid-May. But to be honest, you know, while, of course, this is likely to cause support for the government to fall, it's also not great for the opposition because, like, for example, that Antakya was an opposition led municipality. No, no one comes out of this looking good, I think.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So in talking about why the destruction was so extensive and why the death toll was so high, a lot of the focus on Turkey has been on the construction of the buildings themselves. I know you followed a lawyer who is examining some of the ruins in Antakya. I'm curious to know what specifically he was looking for?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: So there's this group of lawyers, several groups of lawyers, actually, and prosecutors who are racing against time at the moment, traveling around the earthquake hit areas, trying to gather evidence of shoddy construction so that they can later be used in lawsuits against contractors. It's really, really interesting when you speak to them about that type of I mean, interesting and also just absolutely horrifying about the types of shortcuts that they've discovered that that contractors use, which ended up being ultimately fatal to people trapped inside these buildings. I spoke to one engineer, an expert who was going around, the prosecutor who said that the concrete inside one of the columns he'd he described as being like cheese, like, you know, it can crumble in your hand. And you hear all these awful stories about developers cutting off the columns of buildings in order to build shops underneath and, you know, thereby obviously completely destabilizing the building. I think there's a sense among people that I spoke to who work in these municipalities and also among contractors that there's a kind of low level corruption of building regulations and inspections is so widespread that one person described it to me as, you know, for every signature, there's a way around it. So, you know, if you need something signed off that something's been done properly. Well, you know, if you know, if you're kind of mates and you can get them to do it another way and not really check it properly, that kind of thing. So that kind of low level, really petty corruption can end up being really, really, really deadly when it's on this enormous scale.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: As pre-election sweeteners, amnesties were repeatedly granted for buildings that didn't meet the standards. Hundreds of thousands of buildings were legalized that way, including in the disaster zone. And despite warnings from geologists, critical infrastructure projects such as hospitals and the airport in Hatay were erected right on top of tectonic fault lines.

LOUISE CALLAHAN: But there's certainly a huge anger at contractors at the moment. So contractors have been arrested across Turkey, one of them while attempting to escape to Montenegro. Another one was hiding out in a hotel for earthquake victims, pretending to be one of them. So I think there's a huge, huge anger at contractors who skipped doing basic checks in order to make more money or skimped on building materials in order to make more money at the cost of people's lives.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: You wrote about this other group of lawyers that were trying to get documents out of the construction inspection headquarters in the city before it was demolished. And just I think it's worth mentioning that that was being demolished even as there were survivors in other residential areas. Can you tell me what those lawyers. We're looking for. Why were they so interested in getting those documents?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Well, I think the most important question, that is why when those people are still alive under the rubble is this municipal building being destroyed and what are they trying to hide inside this documentation regarding building inspections, regarding who gave permission for what to be built? Who owns what? I mean, what these lawyers think is that there are people who were trying to cover their tracks, basically, they were trying to trying to hide what they had done. You know, if if it was so vitally important at this juncture for this empty municipal building to be destroyed, you know, why wouldn't they go and take the documents out first? What's the pressing reason for this to be brought down? Those are the kind of questions that the lawyers are asking.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So the U.N. estimates that there are a million and a half people in Turkey without homes after the quake. And then last week, Turkey said that there's over 800,000 people living in tents. As the weeks drag on, what are the concerns for the safety of the people without homes there?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: So a lot of people are still kind of camped out among destroyed cities and villages because they want to get the bodies of their loved ones before they leave. And it's you know, it's this impossible waiting game and is such a terrible thing to have to wait for. But during that time, I mean, it's not particularly cold. And in Turkey at the moment, it's getting it's getting slightly warmer. And actually for the for the spread of disease, that is not good. Some of the experts I spoke to said with a lot of these bodies still lying under the rubble, complete lack of hygiene facilities in a lot of cities, it's very easy for disease to start spreading. And I think, you know, in some ways that has already begun. And there are also obviously huge logistical challenges for for housing all these people. Turkey is going through a major economic crisis at the moment. There's huge, huge house price rises, you know, for a lot of people. A lot of ordinary people, even before the quake was almost impossible to be able to afford to rent a home. What's going to happen with all these people? You know, they can't a million and a half people can't all live in tents. You know, that's not it's not a sustainable solution. So President Erdogan has said that he's going to build 400,000 units for the people displaced by the earthquake. He said, you know, give us a year will rebuild. But there are pretty obvious flaws in that plan, which experts have pointed out the fact that aftershocks are continuing. And, you know, a lot of experts have urged the president to focus on quality and safety rather than speed when when rebuilding him. And there's, you know, especially with it with Antakya and those kind of places, you know, it's just amazing, beautiful old historical cities, not the kind of thing that, you know, you can just chuck it up in a year like a shed. You know, it's there's so much kind of work that still has to be done in order to to rebuild the city safely.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Yeah. I mean, I guess the concern there is that in the rush to rebuild, the Turkish government will be essentially allowing the precise problem that caused so many deaths and so much devastation. Right?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Exactly. So that's the that's the trade off that they're going to have to make. And, you know, of course, it's not easy like that. There's these huge amounts of displaced people. Where do you put them? How do you keep them safe? And how do you rebuild in a place that is still having so many aftershocks? It's a really, really huge question.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: And there in Istanbul, where you are now, I know that's 800 some kilometers away from Antakya. But how are people in general feeling about the future in Turkey?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: You know, so people are terrified. So this is a really big question, is that Istanbul is overdue, a massive earthquake. There was there have been several before, all of them devastating. And there's a great, great fear now that Istanbul is is going to be next. So I know people who are thinking of leaving the city or have left the city, at least at least for a while. Everyone I know is packing a go bag. People are getting their houses checked by the municipality. So there is there is a really, really big fear here and in other cities across Turkey that that another earthquake will come soon.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: And can I guess also kind of on a final note, I got the sense from your reporting that you, you know, felt connected to Antakya just as someone who'd been there a lot, clearly. You have a lot of love for the city. What's it been like for you personally to to see the region so damaged?

LOUISE CALLAHAN: I could never have imagined. It's just it seems impossible for me and for lots of other journalists who cover the Middle East, Antakya is a safe haven, so it's where we go after we come out of Syria before, you know, during the Syrian civil war, during its most active phase, that's where you'd go. You'd go to Antakya, you'd go stay in a nice stone hotel. There's lovely wine, they'd have nice wine and meza. And then you go to Syria and it would be pretty grim and you'd always look forward to coming back. You know, it would be this. It would be this wonderful place where you can relax and finally feel safe. The people there were so kind and so hospitable. The food was incredible. There's a real lightness there. And then. And now that's gone.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: That's heartbreaking. All right. Well, thank you, Louisa. I really appreciate the time.

LOUISE CALLAHAN: Thank you so much.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: That's all for today. I am Daemon Fairless in for Jayme Poisson. Thanks for listening to Front Burner.

Survival and loss in Turkey's earthquake ruins - Transcript