After the earthquake in Turkey: left alone to search for missing persons

Even weeks after the devastating earthquake in Turkey, many people are still looking for relatives. There is no official information on how many people are missing. The opposition is making serious allegations against the government.

Salman walks over the rubble and cries. At the beginning of February the house where his older sister lived with her family was still standing here in Kahramanmaras. The 36-year-old is back here for the first time in weeks, and the images of the earthquake night are coming up.

He immediately got in the car with his family to check on his sister. When they arrived here, the first thing they would have seen was the neighboring houses, which were still standing. “We were relieved and said to ourselves: ‘I don’t think there’s anything here’. But then we suddenly saw that the building here had collapsed completely,” says Salman.

Almost two weeks later, they found his sister, her husband and their two daughters dead in the rubble – except for Mehmet, their 13-year-old son. Days later, rescue workers said they were done here.

“We went to the police and wanted to file a missing persons report,” says Salman. So they told us there’s no such thing. Everyone would be missing right now and nobody would know when who would show up where again.” They left crying.

Blood samples for a DNA match

During his narration, Salman fights back tears again. The tall, strong man with the dark full beard looks exhausted. A file folder and a shoe lie next to him in the rubble. They also found the curtain from Mehmet’s room here, it had the motif of an Istanbul football club that he was a fan of.

The family gave blood samples for a DNA match. “When we drove to the hospital for this, there was a long line with families who also wanted to hand in all the DNA samples because they are looking for their children,” says Salman. That’s not normal, there has to be someone responsible for it.

Opposition fears election manipulation

And it’s not just children who are missing, says Cem Yildiz, leader of the opposition CHP in Kahramanmaras. His party has put together a list of missing persons, also with a view to the parliamentary and presidential elections on May 14.

Yildiz sees room for election rigging: “Have these missing people been removed from the voters’ register? Were they buried? We’re trying to identify the dead, that’s important – also because we absolutely don’t trust the current political power.” Because all of this leaves room for the dead to choose, they also have to deal with this topic.

No official missing persons file

The Turkish authorities do not keep an official list of missing persons. Salman, little Mehmet’s uncle, is also concerned about this. He is now sitting cross-legged in the tent he has been living in with his wife and parents since the earthquake.

Normally Salman speaks very calmly. But suddenly anger mixed into his voice: “So many children are disappearing, they are not in the rubble, not in the hospital. Where are they? Who is responsible? Nobody”. He makes a contemptuous hand gesture, presses his lips together. “You know who’s responsible, I know, we all know,” he says. Salman has to control himself not to be even more explicit.

Many people are angry at the Turkish government for failing to manage the crisis. But that doesn’t bring little Mehmet back. His uncle thinks it impossible that the 13-year-old wasn’t home the night of the earthquake. “I suspect that everyone was wrong from start to finish. He is in the cemetery – and nobody can identify him anymore,” says Salman.

“Only the grave of Mehmet is still empty”

Since the earthquake, the doctor Dogan Erogullari has been working outside again and again. He believes it is possible that the boy was buried anonymously or under a different name. He advises Mehmet’s family: “When a rescue team has pulled a wounded child out of the rubble, you should find out the team and the hospital to which it was taken and also whether a child died there or not. Because everyone did , who died, took pictures before they were buried.”

But where should Mehmet’s family get the strength for such research? Salman’s wife Fatos listens to her husband and helps him with words and sentences when he lacks them. She too has lost family members. Seven graves were dug. “We buried them all, only Mehmet’s grave is still empty. Every time we go there and see it empty, everything comes up again,” says Fatos.

She pulls out her phone and shows a photo. Mehmet beams in the tracksuit of his favorite club. They just need reassurance, Salman explains, to understand that this boy full of life is no longer there.