HATAY: Greater than 10,000 individuals gathered early on Tuesday (Feb 6) to carry a vigil for the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquakes that hit southeastern Türkiye, as some protested what they known as authorities negligence within the aftermath.
The magnitude 7.8 tremor, the deadliest catastrophe in Türkiye’s fashionable historical past, levelled cities and components of cities within the nation’s southeast and neighbouring Syria. It killed greater than 50,000 individuals in Türkiye, some 5,900 in Syria, and left thousands and thousands homeless.
Within the southeastern Turkish province of Hatay, the nation’s worst-hit, individuals known as for the federal government and native authorities to resign through the vigil, and demanded that officers don’t current themselves on the memorial, whereas booing speeches.
In the primary sq. of town of Hatay, positioned within the province, some chanted, “Can anyone hear my voice?” as Well being Minister Fahrettin Koca spoke, a slogan referring to calls heard from underneath the rubble as individuals waited for days for assist to reach. Residents say many individuals died not due to the buildings collapsing, however quite from ready for therefore lengthy trapped within the rubble within the chilly.
After the vigil, individuals tossed flowers into the Asi River, which runs by town.
Merve Gursel, who misplaced her aunt, her aunt’s husband and her cousins within the earthquake, known as out their names as she tossed a carnation into the water for every one.
“No one was with these folks that day. These individuals’s ache is that they may not be rescued. These individuals’s ache is that they may not have their voices heard,” she mentioned.
“This (the protests) is the echo of individuals’s interior ache. It’s an echo of how a lot individuals have suffered. There is no such thing as a technique to describe learn how to make up for the ache right here. These individuals’s hearts are bleeding.”
Nesibe Duzgun mentioned she was tossing flowers within the water for everybody she knew and that the transfer unified the individuals of Hatay.
President Tayyip Erdogan mentioned in a press release on social media website X that the ache of the loss from the earthquakes was as contemporary now because it was a yr in the past, and his authorities had moved within the instant aftermath of what they name “the catastrophe of the century”.
“The unity of the century was displayed within the face of the catastrophe of the century,” he mentioned.
Nevertheless, Nurul Sabah Aksu, a Hatay resident, mentioned the federal government had deserted the individuals of town to die.
“1000’s of individuals died right here. The place had been they? Why did they go away Hatay like this? Why did they neglect about us?” Aksu requested.