Turkey continues to struggle in the wake of deadly earthquakes, with nearly 50,000 dead and millions homeless in the worst humanitarian crisis in the hundred-year history of the Turkish Republic. The crisis is now threatening to become a political one for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Emergency services rushed to the scene of the latest collapsed building as Turkey's earthquake-hit Anatolia region was struck by another powerful tremor that was felt as far away as Egypt. For the quake survivors, there seems no end to this nightmare.
New tremors
In Hatay city, a rescue team recovered a body from a collapsed building after the most recent deadly earthquake.
Relatives watch and grieve the latest victim. The 6.4 tremor epicenter was close to Hatay. A region already devastated by two massive quakes two weeks ago. The latest quake has further traumatised already deeply shocked people trying to rebuild their destroyed lives.
"I cannot sleep at night. Is the same thing going to happen again," wondered Hatay resident Havva Tuncay. "Are we going to experience another earthquake? We are very scared. I haven't slept for a week. It's reached a certain level that sometimes I cannot feel my feet," she added.
Experts warn of the danger of powerful aftershocks from the latest tremor. However, international aid is still arriving. But from the start of the crisis, criticism of the sluggish response of the emergency services and the lack of large-scale military deployment continues to grow.
"The situation on the ground is dismal, and people are outraged, and we are all mourning, and it's a calamity we are not going to get over very soon," said political scientist Zeynep Alemdag of Istanbul's Ozan University.
'Region has lost ten to twenty years'
"The region has lost at least ten to twenty years," added Alemdag. "But most of the discussions about the accountability of the government's actions and policies will be around why there wasn't an earlier attempt at alleviating the situation."
Visiting the disaster-stuck region, President Erdogan acknowledged shortcomings but insisted the quakes were a once-in-a-century event and that no one could plan for such a catastrophe.
"Despite the fact that we have gathered perhaps one of largest search and rescue teams to the region with more than 141,000 members, unfortunately, it is a fact that we have not been able to respond as fast as we hoped," said Erdogan.
But criticism continues to grow as the crisis unfolds. Government-controlled broadcast regulators have started to slap fines on TV stations that criticise the handling of the crisis.
There are also questions about why so many buildings collapsed. Many were newly constructed and meant to have complied with rigorous earthquake resistance regulations. Under particular scrutiny is a government amnesty four years ago for buildings that failed earthquake regulations in exchange for the constructors paying a fine. The owners of more than 100,000 buildings are believed to have taken advantage of the amnesty in the earthquake-struck region.
Political storm
The response to the crisis and its underlying causes are creating a gathering political storm for Erdogan and his government.
"It seems to me the government has not grasped the magnitude of the catastrophe," warns political scientist Soli Ozel of Istanbul's Kadir Has University.
"The fact that everything emanates from the presidential palace meant that no one could take the initiative, and saving face and rejecting blame seemed to me far more important than saving lives and getting rid of the rubble, and then making the survivors feel comfortable.
"And now we are in the phase of covering the tracks with the president claiming 98 percent of the houses that were destroyed were built before 1999 (the year of the introduction of quake-resistant building regulations) when I guess the entire world knows that is not true," added Ozel.
The questions facing Erodgan and his AKP party are likely to grow as the humanitarian crisis deepens. The country heads towards presidential and parliamentary elections which have to be held by June.
