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Turkish Authorities Say 18 Miners Are Still Missing Mine Disaster Casts Harsh Light on Turkey’s Premier
(about 4 hours later)
SOMA, Turkey — As grieving families prepared to bury more of the dead from Turkey’s worst mine disaster, the country’s energy minister said on Friday that up to 18 people were still missing and that the death toll could exceed 300. SOMA, Turkey — There was no one to treat in the first aid tents near the entrance to the mine, where nearby an old woman wailed, “Our children are burning!” A man and his wife, dazed from a lack of sleep, walked the muddy grounds, looking for information that no one in the government could provide.
An explosion on Tuesday in a coal mine near Soma, a town in western Turkey, ignited a blaze producing noxious fumes that choked hundreds of miners to death as they were changing shifts. By Friday, the death toll stood at 284, but the energy minister, Taner Yildiz, said in televised remarks to reporters that the final count was unlikely to be more than 302. “This is how they steal people’s lives,” said the grieving father, Bayram Uckun, who like many here has become increasingly angry with the government for its response to the disaster. “This government is taking our country back 90 years.”
“A maximum number of 18 workers are inside,” Mr. Yildiz said, according to news reports. “We expect the toll at around 301 or 302.” The assessment was lower than other accounts suggesting that scores of miners were still unaccounted for. The body of Mr. Uckun’s son, and those of at least 17 other men, was almost certainly still trapped underground, after the deadliest industrial accident in Turkey’s modern history. But with the death toll from Tuesday’s accident expected to rise above 300, this disaster has quickly metastasized from a local tragedy into a new political crisis for the Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Yildiz has been saying for several days that there is little hope of finding more survivors. Further aggravating antigovernment sentiment, security forces shot tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters in Soma on Friday, and protests also took place in Ankara, the capital, and in Istanbul.
The disaster rekindled concerns about safety standards and work conditions at Turkey’s mines, and there have been protests in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and other cities, with demonstrators accusing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government of indifference. Mr. Erdogan, whose Islamist party still holds unrivaled political power after a decade, has recently stumbled from one political crisis to the next, often deepening public outrage with high-handed remarks and an authoritarian determination. That was the case again in Soma, even while the dead were being buried here and bodies were still being recovered.
That perception deepened when Turkish newspapers published photographs on Thursday of a prime ministerial aide kicking a protester who was being held down by the police during a visit to the mine on Wednesday by Mr. Erdogan, who was heckled. Mourners wanted answers when the prime minister visited. They said, instead, they got defiance.
On Friday, a crowd of several thousand protesters who tried to march through Soma to a monument honoring miners was broken up by police officers firing water cannons and tear gas, Reuters reported. “He inflamed the crowd,” said Ozcan, a hotel worker who gave only his first name. Ozcan was referring to an incident on Wednesday when the prime minister visited and the crowd began chanting “murderer.”
Mr. Yildiz said on Friday that he hoped that a reduction in the levels of toxic fumes in the mine would enable rescuers to enter its galleries to retrieve the missing miners. “When he saw people heckling him, he moved on them, which is the worst thing to do,” Ozcan said. “They are angry, they are frustrated, they are sad. If the prime minister is coming to town, he should bear in mind that if he even stepped out of his car, he would face some kind of protest.”
Mourners planned more funerals on Friday after mass burials on Thursday, when, with passport-size photographs of their loved ones fastened to their chests, relatives shuffled toward the cemetery in a mourning ritual repeated for hours. At least 30 miners were buried as gravediggers toiled to make room for the bodies of the men still trapped underground. Instead of turning the other cheek, Mr. Erdogan dared his critics in the crowd to come closer. “It outraged people,” Ozcan said.
Mr. Yildiz’s estimate of 18 miners still missing was lower than had been expected on Thursday, when at least 140 miners were said to be trapped in chambers deep underground, with little hope of survival. On the defensive from the start, Mr. Erdogan suggested that mining accidents were commonplace and occurred in developed countries. He recited a list of accidents in England that occurred in the 1800s, an awkward explanation from a leader who, for the last decade, has projected an image of Turkey as a modern democracy.
For the first time since the disaster, the company operating the mine offered its own comment on the deaths, saying on Friday that there was no negligence on its part and that it still did not know the exact cause of the accident, Reuters reported. When his entourage faced angry hecklers in the town center, an aide to Mr. Erdogan was photographed kicking a protester as he lay on the ground. Seeking refuge from the mob of people, Mr. Erdogan was hustled by his security detail into a supermarket near the local municipal office, where he was apparently captured on video threatening another angry resident.
“We still do not know how the accident happened. There is no negligence of ours in this incident. We all worked heart and soul,” Akin Celik, the plant manager of the mine, run by Soma Holding, was quoted as saying. “He clearly did not think about how to talk about this in public,” said Ziya Meral, a Turkish researcher and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Center in London.
Mr. Yildiz, the energy minister, had said earlier that anyone found to have been negligent would be punished. He added, “Prime Minister Erdogan has clearly failed to communicate a personal and government message of condolence and national unity.”
Mr. Erdogan’s comments, and the stark images from the town center, where a miner statue has been dressed in red flowers and soccer scarves, have reinforced the image many critics have of him as arrogant, temperamental and increasingly autocratic. The crisis comes as Mr. Erdogan is trying to remain in power — an announcement that he would run for the presidency this summer had been expected soon.
Along with the violent street protests last summer in Taksim Square in Istanbul and a continuing corruption inquiry, the mine disaster has laid bare the fragile foundation upon which the image of Turkey as a rising regional and global power was presented to the world over the last decade by Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P.
The protests highlighted the disenchantment of a largely secular, urban class with Mr. Erdogan’s policies, including his push for a greater role for religion in public life. The corruption cases have exposed a dark underbelly of cozy and corrupt relationships between government officials and business tycoons. Now, the mine tragedy, analysts say, underscores the gap between Turkey’s push for prosperity and modernity and its ability to safeguard workers to the same standard of the West and the European Union in particular, which Turkey aspires to join.
The A.K.P.'s power is built on its support from the country’s large numbers of religious conservatives, but many others, including rural blue-collar workers in this largely secular region, bought in to the party’s economic policies, and many now say they feel betrayed by the government they once supported.
Amid Turkey’s rapid industrialization, the demand for energy has increased rapidly. Turkey has few oil and gas reserves, but an abundance of coal. The industry was privatized under the A.K.P., and the mine here was taken over by a pro-A.K.P. businessman who has boasted in public of lowering the costs of the business. Coal has also become closely linked to the A.K.P. at election time, with the party handing out free coal and food to voters.
While it will take time to determine the exact cause of the disaster and whether corners were cut on safety standards, the community here has also directed its anger at company officials, who they say have been unresponsive, and who have given conflicting information on casualties as the tragedy has unfolded.
Mine officials said on Friday that they had followed all required safety precautions in the facility, and they repeatedly denied that there had been negligence on the part of the mine’s administrators.
But they were unable to provide basic answers about why the disaster had occurred. Alp Gurkan, the chief executive of the Soma Holding Company, which owns the facility, said he had not visited the mine since the accident — or, for that matter, in the last three years. “However, in light of things explained to me,” Mr. Gurkan added, “we say that we do not know the cause of the accident.”
Under repeated questioning from journalists about safety measures in the mine, Mr. Gurkan and his colleagues gave contradictory answers about the presence of so-called safe rooms where workers would take shelter in the case of an accident. Finally, they conceded that there were no such rooms in the mine, and said there was no legal requirement to have them.
On Friday, a few miles from the mine, traffic backed up on the road to the cemetery, where the grass in an expansive field was freshly mowed, prepared for many more graves.
At the mine, a solitary man stood on a raised platform near its entrance. A miner from a nearby town, he was looking for equipment so he could join the rescue effort. But there is no hope that there are survivors, only the hope that the remaining bodies can be salvaged so families can bury their men with proper funerals.
He said he considered his profession dangerous in any country, and added: “You have no other option. This is your bread money.”
A mother recalled a visit this week from President Abdullah Gul, seen as a more conciliatory figure than Mr. Erdogan. Mr. Gul met with families, and generally projected more compassion, but in times like these, any amount of government remorse is of little solace for the grieving.
“The president asked us what we wanted,” the woman said. “I want nothing but my child’s body.”