“Time may never be enough to ease the pain of 2023 earthquakes but Türkiye is a nation of resilience and I see people who managed to overcome this hardship and the victory of hope,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Friday.
Erdoğan spoke to a solemn and welcoming crowd in Osmaniye, flanked by rows of brand-new apartments built for the survivors of the devastating earthquakes that struck southeast Türkiye right before dawn on Feb. 6, 2023.
The magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 tremors killed more than 53,500 people, destroyed or severely damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings and caused an estimated $150 billion in economic losses across 11 provinces, including Kahramanmaraş, Hatay, Gaziantep, Adıyaman, Malatya and Şanlıurfa.
“We will mourn but we will not refrain from moving on either,” Erdoğan said.
“We vowed to overcome this disaster and in under three years we have rebuilt and revived our earthquake-hit cities. We have kept our promise to you,” Erdoğan said, adding that the reconstruction of over 455,000 zones has been completed.
Over TL 3.6 trillion ($90 billion) have been used to repair damages and make cities stronger against disasters since Feb 3, 2023, Erdoğan said.
He also hit out at his main opposition, Republican People’s Party (CHP), for claiming his government’s pledge to rebuild homes for the disaster victims would not be fulfilled. Gesturing at the apartments before him, he said: “Here are the completed homes. No matter how much they deny it, our people know what we have accomplished.”
“We have shown the world the best example of state-nation solidarity and recovered from the earthquake together,” he added.
Three years after devastating earthquakes, the government says it has completed one of the largest reconstruction efforts in the country’s history, rebuilding housing, infrastructure and economic networks across the affected provinces while mobilizing billions in domestic and international financing.
