Seeking Survival and More

By Lisa Beyer/Adapazari

Ismail Cimen is the most famous boy in the world just now. The five-year-old sits in his hospital bed in Istanbul, watching the procession of toy-bearing journalists from all over the world who have come to hear his tale. He is the last living soul to be plucked from the destruction of the Aug. 17 earthquake, a boy buried so long that his uncle had prepared a grave for him. Says his sister Aysa, 18: "He was born on June 12, but his real birthday is the day they pulled him out."

Trapped for six days in the remains of his home in Cinarcik on the Marmara coast, with hardly an inch of space above his face, Ismail was withdrawn and hallucinatory in the early days of his recovery. His mother is in a different hospital with a crushed femur. Ismail seems to sense the unspoken news that his father is dead, as are three sisters. Yet despite his troubles, says Nail Yologlu, one of Ismail's doctors, the boy is healing. "In a ferocious way," says the physician, "he is coming to."

All over northwestern Turkey, in the hundreds of square miles savaged by the 7.4-level temblor, people have begun to emerge--slowly, fitfully--from their stupor. Turkish authorities, whose first response was a scandalous paralysis, have moved into action, directing relief where it is needed, working to forestall a second-wave tragedy of infectious disease. Survivors, many of them at first unwilling to budge from outside their fallen homes, hoping to salvage something--if not a loved one, perhaps some hoarded savings--are drifting into tent cities. Amid the uncertainty, both the leaders and the governed seem clear on one thing: the Turkey that emerges from this detritus must not be the same place that crumbled on Aug. 17.

While God's swat at Turkey can be laid at no one's feet, the destruction it wrought was largely man-made. Though most of the larger factories in the region survived the quake, as well-constructed buildings should, many apartments, built in a slapdash rush to accommodate waves of urban migration, collapsed, squashing residents as they slept at 3:02 a.m. At the end of last week, more than 13,000 bodies had been found. The U.N. expected the final toll to climb toward 40,000, based on the number of pancaked dwellings, making this one of the worst natural disasters to touch Europe in this century.

Could it happen again? The devastated region, a densely populated swath that is Turkey's industrial backbone, was built above a well-documented fracture, which will certainly rock again. Given that the area was constructed so recklessly in the first place, there is a real danger it will be put back together just as badly. "This is Turkey," Turks like to say with a shrug, to explain away such absurdities. This time, however, the authorities say they will not make the old mistakes. And Turkey's people, shaken out of their traditional deference to the state, are determined not to let their leaders backslide.

Turks often refer to their country as the devlet baba, or father state. Says Minister of State Sukru Sina Gurel, the government's spokesman: "According to the age-old tradition, the individual belonged to the state and could expect good and evil from it." In the quake zone, people learned that they could expect nothing when, after 48 hrs., no organized authority had come to their aid. In many instances, rescue teams from overseas arrived on the scene first. A collapse of communications was part of the problem--Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit wasn't awakened from his slumber in Ankara until an hour after the 45-sec. tremor.

If ordinary Turks were disgusted by the behavior of their officials, they were gratified by their own. Neighbors banded together to pull survivors and corpses out of the wreckage. Companies and private foundations set up soup kitchens. Looters were often met with mob justice: a stomping. Said a Western diplomat: "Before, people relied on this deified state. This time, for the first time, civil society made an impact. This will bring profound political and cultural changes over time."

Although Ecevit's government had been in power less than three months, it had already begun chipping at a paternalistic state in an effort to push Turkey into the ranks of developed countries. The Prime Minister says he is determined to maintain that momentum despite the new demands of reconstruction. "We have no right to lose our energy or our dynamism," he told TIME in an interview.

Of course, building a country that works is not as simple as just stripping muscle off the central authority. In a time of crisis, especially, the capital has to function. And though Ecevit's government talks about devolving power, it still needs to learn to actually do it. Turks have been talking for years about the importance of learning to do things for themselves, figuring out how to live without the government. Last week, as they buried their loved ones and scavenged their hopes, they were at last working on their own.

--With reporting by Andrew Finkel/Istanbul

With reporting by Andrew Finkel/Istanbul