Since the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, it’s become an even more unusual world. The article on my experience in Turkey in 2002 resulted in a Whatsapp message from a former colleague from MISIS, telling me that he read it sitting in the airport about to fly to Turkey. He works at the Mining Institute and is an expert in securing tunnels and shafts etc. He was asked by the Russian government, through a request from a partner university in Istanbul, to go assist in the rescue effort. I told him to take care and to let me know when he’s back so I could treat him to a beer.
He kept me updated, sent me photos and we met yesterday afternoon for a coffee. He said it was the most disastrous event he’d ever witnessed that was almost entirely human-made. Now, stop, I’m not going down the route of Ukrainian conspiracy folks saying Russia set off a bomb to scare Turkey, nor am I echoing the nuttiness of Russian bloggers saying the US did it to scare Turkey. Nor am I repeating Nordic ultra-Christians that Islam is to blame. No, he said:
In collapsed buildings, where people died, four of five were not safe buildings. They had bad materials and bricks, but bad planning too. Corruption. Very bad corruption. All in the local locality, mayor, people like this. Plus builders.
Vasili went into Syria too and there he found the impact of a decade of war and sanctions to blame. He said if the buildings in Turkey had the same quality as Syria, over half those killed would still be alive there. He wrote short reports, he said, and sent them to Damascus, Moscow and Ankara. He sat there yesterday and stared into space twice. I blamed tiredness, he said no.
You see little children dead before they can live. You see a man sitting outside his house, dead from suicide, because inside his wife and daughter died and he couldn’t save them. Nobody tells the suicides, nobody. And they are not like we know. Not like we think. A woman was screaming and refusing to come back from the building where her family was. Big concrete was falling, she looks at the man beside me, says something, then runs inside and boom, collapse. He tells me - She says she would rather die than live without them.
I’d gotten his updates daily and read them over and again each night before going to bed. It was unsettling and painful and frustrating all at once. I get up in the morning and look at the idiots in the different capitals pushing more war, more hate, more death. And look at the whatsapp messages and ask when is enough, enough? I see the loud voices with very vested interests in global war. Ukrainian-American Victoria Nuland, who wants a revolution here and nuclear war over Crimea. Canada’s Deputy PM & Finance Minister, Ukrainian-Canadian Chrystia Freeland, who calls Stepan Bandera - an icon. I hear, here, Vladimir Soloviev scream that men who refuse to go to the front are cowards, yet his military age son Daniil hides in London. Nobody wants peace. Everybody wants more war. And I don’t understand it.
I don’t understand because we’ve seen Turkey shattered by earthquakes, Syria further destroyed, and 10s of 1000s in Turkey who could have survived were it not for corruption in the construction industry and regional administration. I’ve tried to add it all up in my head - Turkey and Syria already forgotten, Psychos calling for Nuclear War and what is happening to my beloved Ireland worries me even more. I had to get my head around it all while working, training, coaching, Fathering and not curling up under a duvet and waiting for Spring to finally arrive - some time in May.
Buildings , aviation, big pharma, read their history and NASA
What a horrible thing for your friend to witness. I hope he can cope with it. I'm not sure I could.