Erdogan’s new international airport carries a tragic human cost
By Thomas Helm
In Erdoğan’s Turkey, the lives of poor workers have become especially cheap. Martyrs for a development they will never enjoy, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Turkish state is trying to cover up the deaths of hundreds of workers involved in building Istanbul’s new international airport.
Part I. Covering up workers deaths
In a formally luscious but now barren strip of land to the north of Istanbul, 30,000 workers are toiling night and day to build one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s key prestige projects: Istanbul’s new International airport.
Touted as the largest airport in the world, once the 80 million square meter project is complete, it will include 143 boarding bridges and 120 buildings. Some 114 aircrafts will be able to dock at these bridges simultaneously. This is “the greatest project in the history of the republic,” to use the boastful words of the consortium managing the construction.
But for workers employed on the site the new airport has gained a much darker reputation.
“I think this is Istanbul’s biggest graveyard after Zincirlikuyu. There is one difference: at Zincirlikuyu the dead arrive in coffins, but here they are taken away in body bags. Nothing is being said about this,” a 59-year-old truck driver on the site told my co-writer and Cumhuriyet reporter Mehmet Kizmaz.
The truck driver went on to speculate that as many as 400 people had already died building the airport. Kizmaz’s article, published in February 2018, resulted in him and the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet being sued for defamation. But Kizmaz has no regrets. “I’m not opposed to development, but development should be done in a just manner, and not carry such a terrible human cost,” he told this journalist.
According to an official government report released two days after Kizmaz’s initial article, only “27” people have died, though three separate trade unions contest this figure and corroborate the truck driver’s tally of 400 or perhaps even 500 deaths. Unfortunately these numbers, based on informal eye-witness accounts by trade union members working on the site, are practically impossible to verify, due to concerted efforts by the relevant construction companies and the government to bury the issue. The airport is a kind of fortress, and gaining access is especially difficult.
“This airport has been deliberately isolated from the world. Even parliamentary deputies have been forbidden access. Only government employees can enter. The authorities are putting a lot of effort into covering up what is happening here,” a construction engineer represented by the Construction Workers’ Trade Union (İnşaat Işçileri Sendikası) told this journalist.
In addition to contesting the figure of “400” deaths, the Turkish government also blocked access to Kizmaz’s article. Round this time, almost 300 workers in the Akpınar worker’s camp organised a protest to speak out against problems such as bad food, overcrowded accommodation, bedbugs and poor hygiene conditions.
Serkan Yaman, who hails from the Eastern province of Batman, figures among the dead.
On March 1st heavy snow and rainfall seriously impaired visibility and general working conditions. Serkan’s family, who spoke to Kizmaz and myself, claims Serkan should not have been told to work that day.
The digger Serkan was using was deliberately overloaded — a typical practice on the worksite, Yunus Ozgur, who is head of the İnşaat Isceleri Sendakasi (Construction Workers’ Trade Union), told this journalist. Ozgur has said some workers have even been fired for refusing to load their trucks beyond the legal limit.
With all the rain and snow, the digger got stuck in the mud. To free the digger, several workers tied ropes between the digger and a truck, which then began to pull. Serkan died after getting caught in the ropes. There was nobody supervising this procedure. Serkan’s family insists the subcontracted construction company Bayburt Group is guilty of manslaughter and have gone to the courts. Serkan left behind three children, including a three-month old baby.
All three of the trade unions that represent workers on the site have provided similar reasons for the high rate of workers deaths. These include: fatigue-related dips in concentration caused by long working hours, generally poor working conditions, inadequate health and safety training, inadequate safety equipment, a transient, poorly-informed workforce and illegal cost-cutting practices, such as the aforementioned double loading of trucks. The project is also being rushed to meet the scheduled October 29 opening — Turkey’s national republic day.
The Construction Worker’s Trade Union, which was the first to propose the figure of 400/500 deaths, claims the figure of 27 is an outright lie.
“One of our members — an electrician named Suleyman Arıkan — told us that he thought at least 400 workers had died. Since we published this report, two more trade unions that represent workers on the site have corroborated this estimate. This is not simply the word of one dissatisfied truck driver but information based on interviews with dozens of eye witnesses. The government is trying to hide the truth,” Construction Worker’s Trade Union head Yunus Ozgur told this journalist.
Others, such as former employee Cemal Özder, also interviewed by this journalist, have even suggested the figure could be as high as 700 or 800. Without a meaningful investigation, these figures remain hearsay — and this suits the government perfectly. With journalists prevented from pursuing the story, newspapers lack the means to start an authentic national conversation. If the numbers really are as low as 27 or 35 and there is nothing to hide, why does the government continue to withhold access to the site?
Another factor that adds to the silence surrounding the issue is the reported practice of paying off the families of killed workers. Orhan Bingöl originally hailed from the Eastern province of Erzurum. He and his brother arrived on the site on the night of Friday 19th January and were told to start work at 8 o’ clock the following morning.
The brothers complied and finished work at midnight after completing a 16 hour shift. Neither received any kind of health and safety training or even a tour of the site. On Monday, after resuming work, Orhan fell into an 8-foot elevator void and died. Distraught, Orhan’s brother resigned. During the funeral ceremony, the subcontracted construction company offered the family 10,000 TL to keep quiet. The family refused.
“Company officials came to pay their condolences. They offered to pay us ten thousand Turkish Liras. We rejected the money. We will sue the company instead,” Orhan’s brother Recep Bingöl told Cumhuriyet.
10,000 Turkish Liras — approximately 1850 Euros — may not sound like much, but to the family of a worker who is receiving the minimum monthly salary of 1,400 Turkish Liras — approximately 260 Euros — , this tiny sum goes a long way.
Despite his popular support among lower income groups, Erdoğan has a notoriously bad track record when it comes to championing workers’ rights. In May 2014, an explosion at a coal mine in Soma, Turkey, caused an underground fire, which resulted in the deaths of 301 people. When asked to make a statement, Erdoğan said: “These risks go hand and hand with this sort of work.”
The media roundly rebuked him for not taking the matter more seriously. A few weeks prior to the disaster, a demand by the main opposition Republican People’s Party to investigate the mine’s safety was rejected in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey thanks to votes from the ruling Justice and Development Party.
Turkey has the highest rate of workers’ death rates in Europe, though the exact figure is difficult to determine, given the number of unregistered workers and unrecorded deaths. This new airport is merely the tip of iceberg.
PART 2. CENTRALISED CORRUPTION
If the first half of this story treats covering up workers’ deaths, this second part concerns shady backroom deals. Esra Güraker, author of Politics of Favouritism in Public Procurement in Turkey, and one of Turkey’s leading corruption experts, has said Turkey’s current modus operandi of awarding contracts to the private sector is tantamount to a centralised form of crony-capitalism in which businesses with close government ties are given lucrative deals in exchange for loyalty.
Underhand dealings were initially difficult to perceive in the airport tender. The Cengiz-Kolin-Limak-Mapa-Kalyon (IGA) consortium won the auction with an offer to pay the government 22.1 billion euros for the concession over a 25-year period, starting from 2017. The auction appeared entirely open and fair. Although 17 groups qualified to tender, only four showed up at the bidding auction on 3 May 2013. They were: TAV Airports, IC-Fraport Consortium, Cengiz-Kolin-Limak-Mapa-Kalyon Consortium and Makyol İnşaat. You could even follow the bidding live on the websites of media outlets such as Hürriyet.
It was the main opposition CHP lawmaker Aykut Erdoğdu who first cried foul play. According to Erdoğdu, the final contract offered a much more lucrative deal for the winning bidder than the tender document provided at the auction. If in possession of this extra information, certain “preferred” bidders could easily outbid the others, knowing their costs would be lowered later on. In his reckoning, there were two factors that significantly reduced costs in the final deal: the ground level and the operating period.
In the original tender document, the ground level was set at 105m, because the construction area is at sea-level. But in the final contract, the ground level was lowered to 75m — a whole 30m below the original stipulation. According to Erdoğdu, this “detail” generated an extra rent of 2.5 billion euros for the winning consortium. There is a huge difference in construction costs when you build an airport at 105m meters above sea level as opposed to 75m.
Güraker confirmed the accuracy of Erdoğdu’s comments. “When you do public procurement for such huge projects, normally the tender is done with the final project, so that both the state sector and the private sector parties know exactly what is going to happen, how it is going to happen, what the costs are etc… But this MP argues that this standard practice was deliberately circumvented in order to allocate more rent to the winning consortium after the contract was signed,” Güraker told this journalist.
The second major factor was the time period. The consortium that won the tender did not start construction straightaway but waited two years.
A third unfair factor was the subsequent announcement that Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport would be closed once the new airport opened — thus guaranteeing traffic at the new airport and minimizing risk for the consortium. This final disclosure has raised many eyebrows in the Turkish media. How could a new airport be truly necessary if an already functioning airport had to be closed down in order to make it viable? What is the real aim of this new airport? Increasing air traffic capacity or making a few firms with close connections to the ruling party even wealthier?
The winning consortium also benefited from a favourable credit arrangement. After failing to secure credit from foreign banks, six Turkish banks agreed to provide the consortium with 4.5 billion euros, which was enough to cover the lion’s share of the estimated 6 billion euros required to complete the first phase of the project.
Nihat Özdemir, who is the chairman of Limak — one of the firms in the winning consortium — was actually being tried for bid rigging at exactly the same time as the bid for the third airport. The CHP asked whether it was normal for the owner of a company on trial for bid-rigging to be allowed to bid in the most important tender of the country.
The answer was yes, it was.
