Stop saying 'May God have mercy' and start being held accountable

Yesterday morning, all of Turkey woke up to horrific news. The images of the hotel fire in Bolu Kartalkaya made everyone say, "Oh no."

It made us say "Oh no" because when we saw the footage, it was clear that the number of citizens who lost their lives would be high!

At first, our missing count was announced as 3 people... Then it slowly increased. As the night ended, the figure was 66. In the first minutes of the new day, it rose to 76!

As with every disaster, the number increased slowly!

For now, 76 bodies have been recovered from the 350-bed hotel. Nearly a third of those staying there died by burning or suffocating from smoke.

The tragic part of the matter is that while children, families, young people, athletes, professors, and journalists were burning alive, there is no one responsible for the incident!

Throughout the day, there was a fight; the municipality blamed the ministry, and the ministry blamed the municipality, saying, "The responsibility was theirs..."

What do we care, brother, about whose responsibility it is? Is no one responsible for the lives lost?

For example, the municipality... Let's say the responsibility lies with the ministry; why don't you, as the local government, implement extra inspections? It is easy to say, "The ministry was negligent," but why don't you, as the administration of that region, implement extra measures and inspections?

And what about the ministry? How can you leave the responsibility to a local government? The administration isn't even from your party; why don't you inspect more, why don't you pressure them more... Check the permits... Just as you scrutinize tenders, implement strict inspections for human health and safety...

Are we going to hold the ministry, the municipality, the fire department, or the hotel management accountable for the people who died now?

Furthermore, what does it matter if someone is held responsible? Will the lost lives come back? Why are precautions not taken in time?

But the easy way out is to say, "They did it." A new defense mechanism has developed in Turkey like this: not accepting responsibility and shifting it to someone else.

A married man is caught with women, and he explains it by saying, "This is a perception operation, a FETÖ plot." A football team loses, and it becomes, "It's a plot by the structure, the referees burned us." Someone is caught for fraud, and they squirm by calling it "character assassination." As you can see, in this country, no one does anything; it's always others doing it. There is no one taking responsibility.

Do you know Latvia? A small Baltic country... According to 2023 World Bank data, its population is 1 million 882 thousand. Less than one-tenth of Istanbul. In 2013, the roof of a shopping mall collapsed in Riga, the capital of Latvia. It was determined that the accident occurred due to the faulty design of the roof.

Do you know what happened after the accident that claimed the lives of 54 people? The then-Prime Minister of Latvia, Valdis Dombrovskis, announced his resignation, stating that he held political responsibility for the shopping mall accident that caused the deaths of 54 people.

He is not the one who built the shopping mall, he is not the one who gave the permits, and he is not the one who made the faulty design. But he did not say, "The responsibility lies with the municipality, the contractor, the firm, or the subcontractors."

We are not even asking for anyone to resign; we are just saying let's take precautions against negligence so that our citizens in this country, who die not from their appointed time of death but from negligence, do not die. Otherwise, haven't we learned from hundreds of incidents that we cannot prevent disasters by imposing media bans and keeping people uninformed?

Look, I did some research yesterday; in the last 50 years, there is no man in England who died because a sign fell on his head. There isn't one in Germany either!

This is what is called valuing human life. Even when a simple sign is being installed, municipalities or businesses assign an engineer. 6 people come and do a study first. They decide what material the sign should be made of, how it should be mounted, and how it should be secured according to weather conditions... If a tree branch breaks, they put up tape around it and place warning signs for a week so that a new branch doesn't break and harm anyone...

Despite all these precautions, if something happens to someone after an accident, everyone from the firm to the municipality, from the business owner to the team that performed the work, is held responsible, and unimaginably deterrent penalties are applied.

No one can say, "The owner of that business is my fellow townsman, this municipality is from our party, that engineer is my aunt's son..." Whoever is responsible pays the price. When this is the case, no one dares to do their job incompletely. In fact, as in Latvia, even politicians take responsibility.

We will impose a media ban and not learn who the real culprits are, and we will brush it off with "May God have mercy," calling it fate. Even if God has mercy, the souls of the lost lives will not find peace without holding those responsible accountable!