Turks Rally to the Aid of Countrymen

IZMIT, Turkey —  Zia Arvas, a banker, loaded body bags and boxes of baby formula onto his white panel truck Saturday, drove to the main square here at the epicenter of last week’s catastrophic earthquake and handed them out to eager takers.

Cem Surek sent his crane and a couple of backhoes to help dig up bodies in a devastated town 50 miles from the rock quarry he owns.

And children delivered cookies and water to sweltering emergency workers.

Turks en masse are rallying to the aid of tens of thousands of their countrymen left homeless, desolate and desperate by Tuesday’s quake.

Spurred by their government’s disastrously sluggish response, and by what many describe as religious and patriotic solidarity, they are helping in ways that are enthusiastic, chaotic--and sometimes dangerous.

Ordinary Turks are trying to fill the void left by a general lack of state organization and coordination in the wake of the quake. Although some improvement was evident Saturday, with basic distribution systems being put in place in Izmit and other hard-hit towns, much of the relief effort is the frenzied work of freelancers and foreigners.

Arvas, the banker, said he wanted to help but could find no one to tell him what to do or where to go. So he took it upon himself to buy supplies--he knew that body bags were in high demand--and parcel them out to needy families.

“In the name of humanity,” he said.

Nearby, from the trunk of his car, Guner Cani was handing out things he considered to be staples: olives and cologne, the latter to counter the ubiquitous odor of death.

“I’m just trying to help,” said Cani, who, upon hearing about the quake, rushed back to Turkey from his construction job in Austria.

Because of the ad hoc nature of the relief effort, not everything that is being supplied is precisely what is needed. Some food is reported to have rotted awaiting distribution.

The main highway that leads from Istanbul into the Turkish heartland, where the quake spread the most damage, was clogged again Saturday with cars, vans and trucks carrying supplies. Many bore hand-lettered signs saying “Yardim Araci”--aid vehicle--or had red Turkish flags hanging from their windows.

Government authorities tried Saturday to defend their efforts in the aftermath of the calamity, which may have claimed 40,000 lives and left up to 200,000 people homeless. But residents and foreign rescue teams continued to complain about the government’s poor organization.

At a mountain of rubble that was once an apartment building in the town of Derince, the only state presence was five police officers. The land-moving equipment--a crane and two backhoes--had been provided by Surek, the quarry owner.

Hamza Bayraktar, for his part, had to provide the hearse to take away the body of his 24-year-old nephew, Ekrem. He backed a small delivery truck up to the edge of the rubble, where he waited for hours in the stifling heat while Welsh professionals and untrained Turkish volunteers dug to free the remains.

“Imagine that we had to find our own delivery truck for this,” he said, dragging nervously on a cigarette. “There’s no organization. People are here, but the state isn’t. The authorities say they are doing things, but I don’t see it.”

Another relative had brought a gray blanket to cloak the body.

A large crowd of onlookers kept vigil as the crews dug away. A call for more rubber gloves went out. A man arrived distributing chocolate cookies. None of the Turkish volunteers, whose uniforms were along the lines of T-shirts and jogging pants, had special equipment.

Phil Coughlin, a retired police officer from northern Wales who trains and handles search dogs for the Welsh team that was working the site, said he and his men were relying on local volunteers for water, food and translators. But the chaotic outpouring also complicated the work, he said--especially for the dogs sniffing for survivors and bodies.

“People are obviously here to help,” Coughlin said. “But with everybody trampling everywhere, we have body scent everywhere. In America or Britain, this would be cordoned off, and you’d have police keeping everyone back and special teams doing all the work. You wouldn’t have all these spectators.”

Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, in a televised address Saturday, said authorities were doing the best they could to deal with devastation spread over such a large geographic area. But many Turks did not accept the explanation.

“It is as if our state officials are people from a distant planet watching us as we struggle through this terrible disaster,” Ilnur Cevik said in an editorial in the Turkish Daily News. “All the state has been able to display until now is utter incompetence and bewilderment.”

In Izmit, government authorities set up tables underneath green plastic tarps and were trying to register heads of households and take requests for specific kinds of help.

Cemil Eksi, a father of three from a neighborhood, Topcular, that was leveled in the quake, wandered in miserably.

“We haven’t gotten anything yet!” he complained.

Sweating profusely, the bureaucrat running the place, Yuksel Otman, tried to calm him. Supplies have yet to reach many areas, he said, adding Eksi’s name to an unending list.

Several blocks away on Bahanye Street, where residents were camping out in the neighborhood cabbage patch because they were afraid to reenter their homes, survivors said the only help they had received had come from individuals. People had traveled from as far as Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, to offer diapers, food and cooking oil.

“If we were waiting for the state to help, we’d be up a creek,” Ahmet Sinmez, 34, said as he sat on the sidewalk scanning a local newspaper for names of the dead.

“We don’t know these people who help,” added his neighbor Guzin Seks, a mother of two. “They come from outside. Everyone is joining hands and helping each other. May Allah bless them.”

At the Izmit state hospital--which on Tuesday had resembled a combat zone, with the dead and dying covering the floors--volunteers Saturday complemented the professional staff. Dr. Metin Comlekcioglu said a Turkish spirit of solidarity got the hospital through the worst of the quake’s aftermath.

“We had a huge disaster here, and everyone came and helped--they carried bodies and treated wounded and gave blood,” he said. “It’s a combination of being Turkish and Muslim. What you are seeing is the power and the strength of the Turks.”