One year after a devastating earthquake: container cities, trials and sorrow

At 4:17 a.m. on Tuesday, thousands of people gathered in towns in southern Turkey to cry, light candles and chant against the government. This marked the moment a year ago when a powerful earthquake devastated the region.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake, followed by a second violent quake hours later, damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings, killing more than 53,000 people in southern Turkey and another 6,000 in northern Syria. It was the strongest and deadliest earthquake in the area in hundreds of years.

The extent of the destruction and the inability of emergency services to reach many people buried in the rubble only days later angered survivors. Many accused construction contractors of cutting corners to increase their profits, and the government of failing to enforce safe construction standards.

In the aftermath of the disaster, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised to build large numbers of new houses within a year. That promise remains only partially fulfilled, and efforts to hold people accountable for flawed construction are progressing slowly.

Many survivors remain displaced, grieving for lost loved ones and dealing with long-term injuries.

A look at southern Turkey, one year after the earthquake:

How much has been rebuilt?

After the earthquake, the government said 227,000 buildings, containing more than 637,000 units, were severely damaged or destroyed. Mr Erdogan promised that the government would build 319,000 new homes within a year.

But at the end of January, only 46,000 new units were ready to be handed over to owners, according to the Ministry of Urban and Environmental Affairs. Officials have said hundreds of thousands of new units are planned or under construction, with many to be completed this year.

The government has also paid rental assistance to displaced families and launched a project to help apartment owners rebuild their collapsed buildings, although some survivors are struggling to access that assistance.

But the delay in returning survivors to their own homes is evident in the sprawling “container cities” that still dot the earthquake zone, where hundreds of thousands of people live in cramped, prefabricated homes. Many have no money to rent elsewhere or rebuild destroyed homes.

Has anyone been held accountable?

Much of the anger in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake focused on contractors and inspectors, whose survivors were accused of shoddy work to save money.

So far, courts have heard 275 cases and others are still under investigation, according to Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc announced last week. More than 260 suspects are in custody awaiting trial.

Court hearings have recently begun in a number of cases.

Last month, the trial opened for 11 defendants accused of “willful negligence” in connection with the collapse of the Grand Isias Hotel in Adiyaman town. More than seventy people died, including a group student volleyball players and some of their parents and coaches.

Another court agreed to hear a case against eight people accused of circumventing rules in the construction of Renaissance Residence, a luxury residential complex in the city of Antakya that collapsed, killing hundreds of people.

A New York Times investigation and forensic analysis found that flawed design, minimal oversight and inadequate safety controls contributed to the collapse.

It is unclear how long it will take for such cases to get through the courts, and whether any government officials will be tried.

Last week Human Rights Watch said that “not a single civil servant, elected mayor or councilor has yet been brought to justice” for the role they may have played in giving the green light or failing to protect people from poor construction work.

Many survivors fear that they will ultimately be denied justice.

Busra Yildiz, a graphic designer from Britain, said in an interview that her mother, grandmother and two other relatives died when their building collapsed during the earthquake.

The contractor who built it is in jail and is being prosecuted in connection with other failed buildings, but not her family's, said Ms. Yildiz, 25. Still, she wants him punished.

“I don't want him to see the sun again,” she said.

How are the survivors doing?

Many survivors, dealing with injuries and grief, believe the government has failed to keep up with the scale of the disaster.

On Tuesday, people in Hatay, one of the hardest-hit provinces, booed provincial mayor and the national Minister of Health, forcing them to flee, according to videos posted on social media. Elsewhere, survivors dropped carnations into the Orontes River to commemorate the dead, and demonstrators chanted: “We will not forget! We will not forgive it!”

Asked about residents' feeling that not enough has been done to help, Huseyin Yayman, a Hatay lawmaker from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, said the feeling was natural.

“We need houses, buildings and especially psychologists,” he said in an interview. “We are all in serious pain.”

In addition to the more than 53,000 deaths in Turkey, 134 are still missing, he said. Eighty-three were from his province.

“A year has passed and our pain is still overwhelming,” he said.

How did the president fare?

Despite frustration in the earthquake zone over the government's initial response, Erdogan won another presidential term in May — even as he faced one of the biggest electoral challenges of his two decades as Turkey's top politician.

He has defended the government's response to the earthquake, which he has called “the disaster of the century.”

“We have lived through a disaster where our houses collapsed on our heads and our hearts were burned, and we will carry within us the pain it caused like a burning coal until the end of our lives,” he said at a ceremony on Tuesday new homes for survivors in the city of Kahramanmaras.

Mr Erdogan said the government had handed out keys for more than 27,000 new units in earthquake-hit cities in recent days and that another 20,000 would be ready soon.

“There are only a few countries and societies that can resist such a disaster as strongly as Turkey,” he said. “Thank God, on the first anniversary of the earthquake, we have cleared the rubble and made significant progress in rebuilding the cities, and people are regaining their lives.”