Looters whose eyes even the earthquake could not open

As a nation we are living through one of the greatest natural disasters that can be lived in the world. Pains are added to pains, and their intensity grows further. In the 10 provinces of ours in Turkey where the calamity fell and hundreds of settlements, and in the dozens of settlements again inside Syria, people under and above the rubble are awaiting urgent, very urgent help.

The magnitude and gravity of the event are unknown to no one. Not only for those who live the event on the spot, the whole nation feels the pain like a knife wound plunged into its own body, like the weight of a rubble that has collapsed upon itself. It is happening exactly as it should.

In the life it has entered with all its gravity, its reality, its terror, the earthquake has left room for no agenda item other than itself. But this reality has drawn us back to our true reality: Everything is false, death is real.

Whatever we have accumulated in this world, whatever we have wrested from others, what we possess, and everything through which we set ourselves apart from others, all of it has been drawn away. The positions, ranks, goods, properties, identities, languages, characteristics that separate us, whatever there was, has been drawn away. The comforts of advanced life separate people more from one another, tear them away, alienate them from one another. So says sociology. People are left with no common characteristic, become insensitive toward one another, become rivals, enter into fights and tensions over sharing. Yet death comes and reminds us of itself as the real commonality of people who have been left with no common characteristic.

The earthquake shows all of us, together with our own death, the death not of a single individual but of the order we have built. It pulls away, like a curtain, our accumulations that separate us from others, tear us away, make us enemies, and leaves us alone with our plainest, purest reality.

That is why, in the face of death, people embrace one another, in their purest, most helpless, plainest state. Their eyes have been opened, they have been shown a little of the truth.

How beautifully our friend Gökhan Özcan wrote in his article yesterday: "Disasters come upon people without separating them. They put everyone in the same pan of the scale without looking at who they are, make them the subject of the same dramatic sentence. We stay under the same rubble, we wait for rescue with the same hope. In the face of death we are all the same person. It is the world that adds everything that separates us on top of us... While millions of people mobilize spontaneously to help, they think of nothing else, they do what they can to ease this great pain a little, to be a balm on the wound. No one looks at who is under which rubble, no one asks whose voice is the voice coming from under this building. But when the dust and smoke of the rubble begin to clear, the dust and smoke of our daily jostling will once again make invisible the truth of how valuable we actually are to one another."

During the earthquake, the only thing I could see was the solidarity in which people were. As Gökhan Özcan said, I am moved, we are moved, to see how much we actually love one another. From seven to seventy, everyone has become one heart, one body. People who feel the pain in their own bodies have mobilized from every part of the country, rushing to the places of aid, trying to deliver their help. Everyone whatever they can.

The multitude of people rushing to help creates difficulties of coordination in the region. More than 100 thousand search-and-rescue personnel or volunteers are working in the field with great self-sacrifice. At hundreds of points at the same time, search-and-rescue operations in the rubble, pursuing the slightest sign of life they detect, are trying to save a life through delicate, technical and patient work lasting hours. All the institutions of the state, especially its AFAD and its Red Crescent, and all civil society groups are working in the field.

The institutions are on duty, yes, but both these personnel and the people who join them are working with a volunteerism and self-sacrifice far beyond the necessity of duty, trying to extend a helping hand to our people exposed to the disaster of the century. Disasters unite, fuse, move to solidarity, and make into one body even ordinary societies. But not every society has the same capacity to unite in the face of such disasters. Turkey as a nation is without doubt at the most advanced level in this respect.

It comes like a dazzling light striking everyone in the eye; even if it dazzles their eyes, it rescues them from torpor, it opens them: the earthquake. But despite so much energy, power and truth, there can still be people whose consciousness, heart and mind it has not reached.

Unfortunately, we can see opportunists, people whose eyes even death has not opened, in pursuit of plunder over the rubble, at the moment of truth when property, possessions and ownership are false and people would think of nothing but rushing to one another's help. Over the rubble they can covet the goods left lying around of disaster victims who have died or of the helpless.

In fact such cases are seen after every earthquake. Some of these looters, whose eyes even the earthquake could not open, also prey on supermarkets. You look at what they plunder at that moment, things they could never use in their lives. They loot cleaning supplies, televisions.

This is, unfortunately, a baseness that has never had a remedy, in the name of humanity. These looters, who cannot see what the whole world sees with certainty, who may not live what everyone in that environment lives with absolute certainty, seem to come from an entirely different world. Even death cannot form a commonality with these people.

POLITICAL LOOTERS

They also have their political looters. In the midst of this calamity, in which everyone lives feeling the pain of others, in which it is felt that politics, government and opposition alike have lost their meaning and drawn away like curtains, there are political looters wandering about to see whether there is a power left lying around that could be stolen without being noticed, looters of ratings or of likes for their social media. They present a sight as ugly and base as those who wander over the rubble trying to gather plunder.

Ümit Özdağ, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and others, ignoring all the work carried out with so much self-sacrifice and delicacy at hundreds of points, cling with a plundering appetite to the lie that "nothing is being done," with images they give from places where it is not being done. We cannot help wondering in amazement what kind of plunder Özdağ finds in his lie that "only AK Party members are being rescued from under the rubble." What he says only shows how low a person can sink in his own imagination. Humanity has of course not fallen as low as in his imagination; it is not even worth answering.

But I think the looters over the rubble deserve no less than the punishments that they deserve and that we have abundantly witnessed them receive.