ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Earthquake survivors are turning their anger not at nature, but at corrupt bureaucrats and the builders of high-rise death traps. As of this date more than 11,000 are known to be dead.
In Yalova, a seaside resort near Istanbul, relatives and neighbors of victims burned the car and stoned the house of a local contractor, seven of whose 16 buildings collapsed when the earthquake hit. The builder, who once boasted in an interview that he was able to provide affordable housing by using cheap materials, dodged his attackers and slipped away, according to local newspapers.

Thursday, Saddetin Tantan, the nation's interior minister, joined the chorus, promising to bring harsh punishment against the builders of shoddy housing and their friends in local city halls. "The contractors who built those buildings and those who issued permits committed murder," Elaborating still further, he said that "The builders and the bureaucrats were involved in organized crime."

An earthquake was not needed to expose the sorry state of Turkey's urban construction, as many people are pointing out. It has been an open secret that many apartment blocks in Istanbul and other cities have been in violation of local housing codes, built by contractors who skimped on materials, added on extra stories, avoided soil tests and ignored earthquake-proof requirements. According to one report done by the Turkish Architects and Engineers Association, more than half of all buildings in Turkey fail to comply with construction requirements, even though 98 percent of the country's population lives in earthquake-prone zones. In Istanbul, where the population has been growing at a rate of almost half a million a year, the rate of noncompliance was estimated at 65 percent.

"We built factories and villas and apartment complexes in Izmit, in Golcuk and other towns that were hit by the earthquake," said Ishak Alaton, founder of Alarko, a Turkish construction company. "There is not a single crack in any one of them. Everything is perfect. This proves that if you use the right equipment, materials and techniques, nothing happens, even in a quake this bad."

According to Turgut Oztas, an associate professor of applied geology at the Istanbul Technical University, the quake, when it reached Istanbul, probably registered a magnitude of 5.5, a severity that buildings put up in compliance with earthquake codes should easily have weathered. Yet about 100 buildings in Istanbul collapsed, killing more than 400 people in the city.

A 1996 map shows Istanbul's hardest-hit districts, including the neighborhood of Avcilar on the shore of the Sea of Marmara, to be inside the highest risk zone, meaning that new construction should have met the most stringent building codes. But Oztas, who joined a team of architects and engineers who went to Avcilar on Tuesday to collect samples of crushed building material, said he believed that, judging from the pulverized concrete, it had been heavily diluted. "The problem is not with the regulations," Oztas said. "The problem is the breaking of the rules and regulations, which has gone out of control."

Many blame Turkey's voracious political system for the breakdown in enforcement, as local officials, seeking votes for their parties, grant favors to local contractors and housing to the migrants who have streamed into Turkey's cities in the last decades.

Korhan Gumus, a director of the Human Settlements Association, a group that has defended citizens' rights, puts part of the blame on an uninformed public, which has never been made aware of the dangers of cheap housing. "The experts direct all their advice to the government, which does not want to share it, and ignores the people," he said.

As chairman of the Geological Engineers Branch of the Turkish Architects and Engineers Association, Oztas is one of many who have repeatedly warned of the precarious state of Turkey's housing. "We have been speaking for several years but no one was listening," he said. "Unfortunately in Turkey it is not experts who are guiding politics but politics who are guiding experts. In Turkey, everything ends up in the hands of the politicians."

[ Article written by Celestine Bohlen for the New York Times - 8/20/99 ]