11 quotes found
"Removing rubble, searching for victims and providing them with medical assistance in areas that have experience the most severe destruction."
"Regardless of which authority ordered it and their legal reasoning, it is certain that the government, including the president, is annoyed with the growing criticism toward them in terms of handling the aftermath of the earthquakes. [And with the general election in May, the] government is obviously not happy about this criticism and wants to control the communication."
"..this ruling party that has not prepared the country for an earthquake for 20 years."
"Their president offered them housing; our president laughed over the corpses of his people."
"The venerable statesman Demirel used to repeat: "In politics, you go the same way that you came." Erdoğan came to power in the wake of 1999 earthquake... It looks like he'll go in the wake of the 2023 earthquake. This earthquake that has claimed thousands of lives will bury him in the wreckage. The one man regime he's created is crushed under the rubble. Driven by a greed for power, he has taken all the strings into his own hands taken control of every institution. Utterly intolerant of any objection, he is left surrounded by yes men. And the outcome? Turkey is in the grip of the worst catastrophe in its history; hundreds of thousands are screaming under the rubble; millions are trying to help; but with all the power in the hands of one man and the one man conspicuous by his absence as is always the case in any crisis, the state is paralysed."
""We'll go to the Moon in 2023!" he had claimed; we can't even go to Maraş, Adıyaman or Hatay in 2023."
"Knowing all too well what he'd face if he went, he couldn't go to the disaster area in the first days; all he did was watch the devastation he has caused from his palace of eleven hundred rooms."
"You have suppressed screams with calls to prayer in mosques. You have prevented city councils from helping on the pretext of being the opposition. You did not call the military to duty for fear of a coup. You have worshipped concrete but failed to do even that properly. Where are your contractor partners you have made into trillionaires now? Countries you had declared to be enemies are now rushing to help the people; you, however, are absent. Thank to your incompentence, ineptitude, churlishness, you have left this nation all alone under the rubble at the hour of their greatest need; you have abandoned them to freeze. You will pay dearly; you will leave with the fury of this nation you have left to die. Scant consolation; too little, too late! Your plunder has cost thousands of lives. This period of "National Mourning" will be followed by one of "national rescue". Let's see if a single person will come to your rescue from under this political wreckage?"
"It began suddenly at 11:58 A.M. the first of September in the twelfth year of Taisho [1923]. A violent rocking deep in the earth shook the Kanto region on which the capital city of Tokyo rests. Houses creaked and whined, twisted grotesquely, and collapsed. Inhabitants were buried alive, while those lucky enough to flee in time ran about screaming like crazed animals. What had once been a thriving center of the civilized world was in the space of a moment transformed into hell itself. One aftershock came only to be followed by another violent tremor and yet another aftershock. Fires broke out all over the city, and great columns of smoke billowed up toward the sky as from a giant volcano. Tokyo was soon under a blanket of thick, black vapor. The terrible tremors left the population in the grip of fear. Then those outrageous rumors started spreading and pandemonium broke out."
"This (disaster) is one of the greatest opportunities God has given us to share his love with people."
"It's not appropriate in a crisis like this to take advantage of people who are hurting and suffering."