Plea to my International Network...Support Turkey & Syria

Official death toll from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Southern Turkey and Northern Syria in the early hours of Monday morning (February 6, 2023) is creeping towards a staggering 10,000 lives lost. Like you and I, these people went to sleep the night before expecting to start their new week next morning. Alas, tragedy struck while they were peacefully asleep. And their lives forever changed.

I write this to encourage the international community, mostly my own small, yet powerful international network, to support the organizations that are racing to rescue survivors trapped under the rubble of the many apartment buildings that were recent builds, legally compliant to standards, even stricter than those imposed in Japan.

This event in some ways strikes similar to the 9.1 magnitude earthquake induced Tsunami of 2004, not in the way that it is another natural disaster, but in the way the extent of the human tragedy could have been significantly reduced. The epicenter of that earthquake was near the northern tip of Sumatra, Indonesia and yet the waves caused by the Tsunami travelled at the speed of an airliner to reach such far destinations as Thailand, Sri Lanka and India with no warning to prevent the scale of human loss of 230,000 lives.

In Turkey, we now hear that the new construction build standards were heavily revised in the early 2000s, to the extent that they are even stricter than the standards that exist in Japan. Japan regularly experiences earthquakes and combined with their build standards and strictly practiced emergency measures, are able to avoid massive human tragedies, of the scale we are now seeing in Turkey and Syria.

I am not here to assign blame. Clearly there is a systemic issue and failure. I would hope that an independent body be assigned to review the system in a holistic way to identify root causes that perhaps may have contributed to the unwarranted loss of life. Hopefully what comes from this is a stronger Turkey well prepared for future emergencies.

Now, the more pressing matter at hand is to support the many hundreds and thousands of people displaced by this tragedy. I urge my friends and community to support in anyway possible by contributing to the following Non-Governmental organizations.

1. AHBAP – with 200 philanthropists and 30,000 volunteers on board, AHBAP is a local voluntary network that is currently active in the affected areas. https://ahbap.org/
2. AKUT – a voluntary, non-governmental organization involved in searching, assisting and rescuing the victims of those affected by the earthquake. They are fully transparent about how they spend donations they receive. https://www.akut.org.tr/en
3. Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations – an organization that provided independent and impartial relief and medical care to victims of war in Syria since 2012. https://www.uossm.org/

These are my personal views, and do not reflect those of the company that I represent nor the views of my colleagues and associates. I am a proud Canadian citizen, and a native of Sri Lanka, which was also affected by an earthquake, that induced a Tsunami in 2004 that led to the loss of 35,000 Sri Lankan lives and 235,000 lives in total.