7 ms·

At first I thought the headline was click-bait, but it's actually accurate. The videos really, truly show Erdogan repeatedly boasting about giving "amnesty" to

by cs702 4y ago

At first I thought the headline was click-bait, but it's actually accurate. The videos really, truly show Erdogan repeatedly boasting about giving "amnesty" to private builders to ignore regulatory codes in order to "solve" Turkey's housing shortage. It appears that a majority of the thousands of buildings that crumbled into dust when the earthquake struck were constructed under such "amnesty." In hindsight, Erdogan looks like a naive moron, and the private builders who put innocent lives at risk to maximize short-term profit look like movie villains.

mc32 4y ago
It's so like people who do wrong. He's accusing the developers of flouting construction code and jailing them when he encouraged them to take the shortcuts all along!
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The scapegoating was so predictable that quite a few apartment block owners, contractors, architects and other people involved in the building industry fled abroad. And a whole bunch of them that moved just a little bit slower were nabbed at the airport whilst waiting for their flights.
tromp 4y ago
The tragedy is that this horrible practice of building for failure did not meet with public outcry when publicly admitted years ago but had to await actual failure...
- ploum 4y ago
  We had a similar story in Belgium. Politicians decided that houses could now safely be built in flood zones because "we had no major flood for the last 20-40 years". (and it could safely be assumed that at least some of them benefited privately from those decisions, it’s a common practice here) Guess what happened in 2021 ? yep… The most deadly flood in human memory. Guess what happened to those politicians ? Yep, absolutely nothing.
2devnull 4y ago
[flagged]
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
Not just in hindsight. Buildings not built to code crumbling when an inevitable earthquake hits was foreseeable.
theshrike79 4y ago
But the man does own the courts and pretty much all politicians, so there's very little anyone can do. He threw his biggest political opponent in jail so he can win the next presidential "election" in peace.
- grugagag 4y ago
  It starts with one nail in the coffin, then another one, then another one.. Eventually most autocrats ends up badly after some time.
- at-fates-hands 4y ago
  He also blamed all the developers and immediately arrested them: Vice President Fuat Oktay said overnight that 131 suspects had so far been identified as responsible for the collapse of some of the thousands of buildings flattened in the 10 provinces affected by the tremors early last Monday. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-steps-up-collapsed-buildings-investigation-orders-113-arrested-2023-02-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-steps-up-co...
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Well, I mean, they should be, too. Nothing forcing them to request such an "amnesty" except greed.
    - munk-a 4y ago
      These folks definitely deserve a pretty big penalty levied on them - but if the policy of giving out these sorts of amnesties isn't reformed we can expect a repeat. I'm concerned that the government is going to force all of the blame onto these contractors for political reasons and won't end up enacting any reforms of inspectors since it'd make Erdogan look bad.
    - gameman144 4y ago
      It seems pretty ridiculous for a government official to say "I am giving you permission to bypass these rules" and then arrest them for breaking those rules. Sure, requesting an exemption may be an act of greed, but the role of responsible government is to say "No, those rules are there for a reason". If developers legally bypassed regulations due to the government saying it's okay, the buck should absolutely stop with the government, and the question should be why they allowed those exemptions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
quantified 4y ago
Just call them "indulgences" to align with history. With foresight everyone knew it would end badly. The safety measures whose variances were being indulged were the result of bitter experience. How much concrete (and GHG emission and coal inputs) were just wasted?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > How much concrete (and GHG emission and coal inputs) were just wasted? I would put the lives lost first on that list. The tragedy is incredible.
roenxi 4y ago
It certainly sounds stupid, but in the spirit of completeness this is forming a conclusion with insufficient evidence and part of a typical emotional response that makes people do stupid things. We don't live forever, and sustained mass homelessness is arguably pretty bad too. If Turkey can't afford indestructible houses then maybe Erdogan made the right decision and it just happens that all the outcomes sucked. Although given the evidence in the article it does look like a catastrophe (20k dead for 350k housed sounds is a bad deal, albeit we can't possibly know that all 20k were from zoning issues) the news right after a disaster is usually highly misleading.
- seydor 4y ago
  What are you talking about? This isnt the first earthquake in the region, it s a story that goes back thousands of years of written history. Most countries in the area have changed their codes and now build houses that are very resistant to earthquakes. Earthquakes happen all the time, (arguably not as big) but rarely you hear about such damages. Turkey has a problem of bad building, like what happened with the Izmir earthquake in 2020
  - roenxi 4y ago
    Which presumably is no secret and which would have been considered in the decision making - indeed, everyone involved would have known that the next earthquake would have worse consequences. The issue I have - and it is in your comment as well as elsewhere - is you are using an argument that this situation was predictable. That isn't enough. You have to argue that the costs in this disaster outweighed the benefits of a lighter building code. My guess would be that they probably do, the death count is quite high. But that is no excuse for sloppy, knee-jerk thinking. We need less of that.
    - seydor 4y ago
      It's not knee jerk thinking. Even turkey has nominally strict building codes because of all the previous earthquakes. And it s not like it s running out of land to build. Nobody in this region thinks it could possibly be a good thing to skirt building codes. Earthquakes are frequent enough to be constant reminders of it
jefftk 4y ago
> it's actually accurate Are we sure? I would normally interpret "zoning amnesty" to mean "you wouldn't normally be allowed to build that thing there, but we'll allow it", and letting people avoid earthquake codes would be more like "building code amnesty". Did these certificates actually exempt projects from the building code?
- sonefromturkey 4y ago
  It works as "you built your building, we will allow you to keep it and legalize it"
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    The Italian equivalent is 'sanification', so yes.
- dandelany 4y ago
  The phrase "zoning amnesty"/"zoning peace" is like the "death tax" or the "green new deal" - a way of rebranding a controversial political issue to make it seem incontroversial and obvious. It's called this precisely so that uninformed citizens will make the same mistake and think "Yes, why should people be homeless over some trivial political bullshit like zoning laws?" From everything I've been able to find, it was building code amnesty, in effect. The proliferation of these laws in Turkey, dating back all the way to the 1940s, created a culture where builders could basically build what they want, without the necessary permits/code enforcement, confident in the knowledge that they would fall under the next decree of amnesty and never be required to fix it. "...more than 50 percent of the buildings in Turkey were constructed in violation of the current building code... Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (TMMOB) Ankara branch chair Selim Tulumtaş warned .. that the legislation put the lives of 2.7 million people across the country at risk since they live in shoddily constructed buildings." https://www.turkishminute.com/2023/02/13/turkey-construction-amnesty-under-spotlight-dead-earthquake/ https://www.turkishminute.com/2023/02/13/turkey-construction...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
slim 4y ago
A Turkish friend told me at the time those buildings were being built that Erdogan was buying votes and loyalty from those buildings inhabitants. So he is absolutely not innocent

by cs702 4y ago

mc32 4y ago

It's so like people who do wrong. He's accusing the developers of flouting construction code and jailing them when he encouraged them to take the shortcuts all along!

jacquesm 4y ago
The scapegoating was so predictable that quite a few apartment block owners, contractors, architects and other people involved in the building industry fled abroad. And a whole bunch of them that moved just a little bit slower were nabbed at the airport whilst waiting for their flights.

tromp 4y ago

The tragedy is that this horrible practice of building for failure did not meet with public outcry when publicly admitted years ago but had to await actual failure...

ploum 4y ago
We had a similar story in Belgium. Politicians decided that houses could now safely be built in flood zones because "we had no major flood for the last 20-40 years". (and it could safely be assumed that at least some of them benefited privately from those decisions, it’s a common practice here) Guess what happened in 2021 ? yep… The most deadly flood in human memory. Guess what happened to those politicians ? Yep, absolutely nothing.

2devnull 4y ago

[flagged]

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

Not just in hindsight. Buildings not built to code crumbling when an inevitable earthquake hits was foreseeable.

theshrike79 4y ago

But the man does own the courts and pretty much all politicians, so there's very little anyone can do. He threw his biggest political opponent in jail so he can win the next presidential "election" in peace.

grugagag 4y ago
It starts with one nail in the coffin, then another one, then another one.. Eventually most autocrats ends up badly after some time.
at-fates-hands 4y ago
He also blamed all the developers and immediately arrested them: Vice President Fuat Oktay said overnight that 131 suspects had so far been identified as responsible for the collapse of some of the thousands of buildings flattened in the 10 provinces affected by the tremors early last Monday. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-steps-up-collapsed-buildings-investigation-orders-113-arrested-2023-02-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-steps-up-co...
- TylerE 4y ago
  Well, I mean, they should be, too. Nothing forcing them to request such an "amnesty" except greed.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    These folks definitely deserve a pretty big penalty levied on them - but if the policy of giving out these sorts of amnesties isn't reformed we can expect a repeat. I'm concerned that the government is going to force all of the blame onto these contractors for political reasons and won't end up enacting any reforms of inspectors since it'd make Erdogan look bad.
  - gameman144 4y ago
    It seems pretty ridiculous for a government official to say "I am giving you permission to bypass these rules" and then arrest them for breaking those rules. Sure, requesting an exemption may be an act of greed, but the role of responsible government is to say "No, those rules are there for a reason". If developers legally bypassed regulations due to the government saying it's okay, the buck should absolutely stop with the government, and the question should be why they allowed those exemptions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

quantified 4y ago

Just call them "indulgences" to align with history. With foresight everyone knew it would end badly. The safety measures whose variances were being indulged were the result of bitter experience. How much concrete (and GHG emission and coal inputs) were just wasted?

jacquesm 4y ago
> How much concrete (and GHG emission and coal inputs) were just wasted? I would put the lives lost first on that list. The tragedy is incredible.

roenxi 4y ago

It certainly sounds stupid, but in the spirit of completeness this is forming a conclusion with insufficient evidence and part of a typical emotional response that makes people do stupid things. We don't live forever, and sustained mass homelessness is arguably pretty bad too. If Turkey can't afford indestructible houses then maybe Erdogan made the right decision and it just happens that all the outcomes sucked. Although given the evidence in the article it does look like a catastrophe (20k dead for 350k housed sounds is a bad deal, albeit we can't possibly know that all 20k were from zoning issues) the news right after a disaster is usually highly misleading.

seydor 4y ago
What are you talking about? This isnt the first earthquake in the region, it s a story that goes back thousands of years of written history. Most countries in the area have changed their codes and now build houses that are very resistant to earthquakes. Earthquakes happen all the time, (arguably not as big) but rarely you hear about such damages. Turkey has a problem of bad building, like what happened with the Izmir earthquake in 2020
- roenxi 4y ago
  Which presumably is no secret and which would have been considered in the decision making - indeed, everyone involved would have known that the next earthquake would have worse consequences. The issue I have - and it is in your comment as well as elsewhere - is you are using an argument that this situation was predictable. That isn't enough. You have to argue that the costs in this disaster outweighed the benefits of a lighter building code. My guess would be that they probably do, the death count is quite high. But that is no excuse for sloppy, knee-jerk thinking. We need less of that.
  - seydor 4y ago
    It's not knee jerk thinking. Even turkey has nominally strict building codes because of all the previous earthquakes. And it s not like it s running out of land to build. Nobody in this region thinks it could possibly be a good thing to skirt building codes. Earthquakes are frequent enough to be constant reminders of it

jefftk 4y ago

> it's actually accurate Are we sure? I would normally interpret "zoning amnesty" to mean "you wouldn't normally be allowed to build that thing there, but we'll allow it", and letting people avoid earthquake codes would be more like "building code amnesty". Did these certificates actually exempt projects from the building code?

sonefromturkey 4y ago
It works as "you built your building, we will allow you to keep it and legalize it"
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  The Italian equivalent is 'sanification', so yes.
dandelany 4y ago
The phrase "zoning amnesty"/"zoning peace" is like the "death tax" or the "green new deal" - a way of rebranding a controversial political issue to make it seem incontroversial and obvious. It's called this precisely so that uninformed citizens will make the same mistake and think "Yes, why should people be homeless over some trivial political bullshit like zoning laws?" From everything I've been able to find, it was building code amnesty, in effect. The proliferation of these laws in Turkey, dating back all the way to the 1940s, created a culture where builders could basically build what they want, without the necessary permits/code enforcement, confident in the knowledge that they would fall under the next decree of amnesty and never be required to fix it. "...more than 50 percent of the buildings in Turkey were constructed in violation of the current building code... Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (TMMOB) Ankara branch chair Selim Tulumtaş warned .. that the legislation put the lives of 2.7 million people across the country at risk since they live in shoddily constructed buildings." https://www.turkishminute.com/2023/02/13/turkey-construction-amnesty-under-spotlight-dead-earthquake/ https://www.turkishminute.com/2023/02/13/turkey-construction...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

slim 4y ago

A Turkish friend told me at the time those buildings were being built that Erdogan was buying votes and loyalty from those buildings inhabitants. So he is absolutely not innocent