The huge catastrophe that hit southern Turkey and northern Syria caused a massacre with tens of thousands of victims, among populations already affected by the war for years. In Turkey the earthquake has uncovered the fragility of a state that has long been trying to hide its enormous social deficiencies and its backwardness with a display of diplomatic and military grandeur, with the continuous projection of power precisely towards the areas most affected by the disastrous earthquake , largely inhabited by Kurds, whether it is Turkish territory or Syrian territory.
Areas have been affected Northern Syria for years a place of armed conflict between various actors. Areas affected by attacks by fundamentalist gangs and by military aggression conducted by the Turkish state, which just recently worked to obtain the green light of the Powers for its plans to annihilate the democratic and multi-ethnic self-government of Rojava. Tens of thousands of houses, built without regard for basic safety requirements but only on the basis of the needs of building speculation carried out by entrepreneurs close to the mafia-neo-ilberist regime of Erdogan, they collapsed like twigs. The immense suffering of millions of people, die in the most total abandonment by the Turkish institutions, under the rubble, sometimes removed with still alive people inside, as denounced by some Spanish rescuers, of cold and starvation, are the price paid to an inhuman system that has managed to create a deadly ideological cocktail between Islamism, neoliberalism, oppression of peoples and individuals.
This inhumane system is sustained thanks to the complicity existing at an international level, first of all Europe which continues to squander resources for the senseless massacre in Ukraine, and at the same time continues to support the authoritarian regimes of the Middle-Eastern region, with exports of arms, support for the Israeli government of apartheid and the systematic extermination of Palestinians and, precisely, for Erdogan’s Turkey, laying among other things the foundations for future war which could be even more devastating than the one underway with Russia.
In the face of a tragedy of this magnitude, weapons should fall silent, not only in the affected region, but on a wider scale, and the efforts of the international community should converge in unconditional solidarity with the victims. While people die of cold and starvation under the rubble of this earthquake, thirty times stronger than the one that struck Irpinia in 1980, the most serious of all those that have afflicted our country in the last fifty years, we must ask ourselves what is the point of continuing to squander money on armaments for war.
Erdogan has to ask himself this, even though he has tried to play a positive role in the Ukrainian conflict, but has been careful not to seek a peaceful solution to those that concern him more closely, which he has actually fueled by launching attacks without interruption against of Kurdish-inhabited areas of Syria and Iraq.
They have to ask the governments of NATO and the European Union who continue to pour money and arms into the senseless massacre of Ukraine, while turning a blind eye and ear to this tragedy, to the attacks by Turkey and the slow genocide of the Palestinian people. Putin has to ask himself that he started almost a year ago the special operation which was soon to turn into a bloody war.
The earthquake should also induce the Western powers to immediately suspend the unilateral coercive measures adopted against Syria which, although directly in theory against the government of Assadactually affect populations tried for a long time by the war and now by the catastrophe that has befallen them.
However, we also need to ask ourselves whether or not the earthquake will lead to a further crisis of consensus enjoyed by Erdogan’s regime, already heavily undermined by the economic crisis that has been raging for several years now. On other occasions, as in Nicaragua in the 1970s, catastrophic earthquakes preceded social upheavals and profound political transformations. It must be hoped that this will also happen in the regions affected by the earthquake today, whose populations must be supported and helped to face the terrible emergency underway, but also to definitively recover their own political and social leadership, which it has already achieved, in the Rojava of besieged Kobane and elsewhere, significant examples to follow in the Middle East and beyond.