International
Charlie Kirk
ELMADERE, Turkey — At a meadow perched above the red brick homes of the idyllic village of Elmadere, Saniye Kilic kneels over the grave of her son, Huseyin Kilic, who died along with 300 others when a fire ripped through the Soma coal mine one year ago.
“I’m told it's not healthy to come here day after day,” said Kilic, 53, of her tearful morning vigils. “But what is your health when your child’s life is over?”
On a recent spring morning, a convoy of dump trucks edged up the narrow road frequented by Kilic, billowing clouds of dust as they muscled past herders taking their goats to pasture. A pair of concrete mixers followed, hydraulic brakes hissing as they passed a crumbling Roman aqueduct on the outskirts of town.
One year after this community of 550 lost 11 of its men in the Soma catastrophe, a new coal mine is being built right here on Eldamere’s doorstep. The project is evidence of how Turkey's coal-rich heartland remains dependent as ever on the mining industry in the aftermath of Turkey’s worst industrial accident.
Construction on the Polyak Eynez coal mine began on the outskirts of Elmadere eight months ago, growing from a pair of prefab offices pitched in a wheatfield into a vast construction site surrounding the town on three sides.
Majority owned by Istanbul-based Fina Holding, Polyak Eynez is slated to begin coal extraction in 2017, producing 4.5 million tons of lignite annually and generating hundreds of jobs for this hardscrabble region of western Turkey, said Yagiz Engin, a development executive at Fina.
As he peeled off his stiff rubber workboots after a shift at the mine’s dig site, miner Sezai Yildirim acknowledged that jobs at Polyak Eynez are hard to refuse. “Everybody knows what happened in the mines last year,” he said. “But the men of this town are more desperate to work in them than ever.”
Over the past year, Ankara has passed a raft of mine legislation, restricting miners to a five-day workweek, strengthening safety standards and upping fines for noncompliance.
But that legislation has seen hundreds of mines across Turkey close rather than reform, and in Soma, 5,000 miners have lost their jobs since May of last year, said Mehmet Ergin Genc, the general secretary for the Soma Chamber of Industry and Commerce.
“When you consider that just 6,500 now work in privately owned mines in the region, you see the cost,” he said. “The changes were direly needed, but they’ve had a grave impact too.”
Those figures make Yildirim look lucky, but few dread the mines more than he.
On the night of the Soma fire last year, he raced from his job at the neighboring Imbat mine, hoping to participate in the rescue effort underway at Soma. Hoping to find his younger brothers Sami Yildirim and Ilkay Yildirim alive, he instead discovered their bodies days later in a makeshift morgue.
Today Sezai Yildirim watches over Sami Yildirim’s two orphaned daughters between shifts at the mine and complains that Ankara’s promised reparation of 215,000 lire ($82,000) per mine victim remain unpaid and that his brothers’ combined life insurance stipend of 2,100 lire a month hasn’t been enough to care for his extended family.
Sezai Yildirim’s monthly salary of 2,699 lire allows him to make ends meet, “though if I had any choice about my life, I know I would never step near a mine again,” he said.
“After all, you cannot forget what happened,” he added, look at the portraits of his brothers that hang in his modest living room. “Many people will not forgive the mining companies.”
Polyak Eynez
miner
Four houses over, Kilic is one of them. “People who support mines are like dogs,” she said.
Only a year ago, she recalled, Elmadere felt deeply united by grief for its lost sons. Residents descended into the town of Soma to demonstrate against then–Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who dismissed the disaster as “commonplace,” echoing his description of a mining disaster in 2010 as a “work of fate.”
Even today, residents doubt that a trial of Soma mining officials will improve the industry’s woes, pointing out that no government officials have resigned since the tragedy.
But if the town agrees on its distaste for Ankara, “the mine is truly divisive,” said Kilic, with her 1-year-old granddaughter Dilara resting on her lap.
Dilara was just 28 days old when her father died in the Soma mine, perishing along with Kilic’s two son-in-laws. Like Yildirim, Kilic complained that the state still has not given her family financial assistance beyond a monthly stipend of 1,100 lire.
To make ends meet, her family has decided to sell its ancestral farming land to Fina Energy for about what a miner makes in a year. She regrets the sale, recalling a time when the family prospered by harvesting crops of wheat and tobacco in the nearby hillsides.
In 2005, Turkey privatized its state-run tobacco monopoly, a move that sent tobacco prices plummeting and forced Elmadere’s farmers into the mines.
“Now there is not even a hope of returning to that time,” said Kilic, who waved her arms angrily at the dynamited mass of hillside near her home. “I will give no more sons. I will give no more land!” she shouted.
Since it finalized its Elmadere mining contract in early 2014, Fina Holding has sought to win over villagers like her.
It has seized on the town’s majority adherence to Alevism, a Sufi branch of Islam at odds with the Sunni roots of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party. While Ankara refuses to allocate state funds for the construction of cemevis, places of worship for Alevis, the mining company completed a gleaming cemevi on the outskirts of town in August 2014.
It also built a new school and, more controversially, renovated the graves of the miners Elmadere lost in Soma.
That aid has won Fina allies in the town.
“If the state ignores you, you have to find someone to look after you,” said Islami Guven, a worker at the Polyak Eynez mine. “People don’t understand that our community has been handed hundreds of jobs for the next 40 years.”
But even Guven, who swears that “nobody in Elmadere is truly opposed to the mine,” acknowledges its drawbacks. These days, dust sweeps up his street from the mining site, making it impossible for his wife to hang her laundry outside to dry. In his once tranquil garden, the drone of trucks drowns out the sound of the nearby river.
When asked if he believed he could stay here after the mine becomes fully operational, Guven silently shook his head no. “We all know that this is just the beginning,” he said. Rather than live at a way station for the mine, Guven imagines trading his home for a rental house in the nearby town of Kinik.
“Most people have already sold their farmland to the mine,” he said. “We’ve already lost our independence.”
Others are more defiant. Just up the street, Kilic can’t bear the thought of extending the long journey up to the graves of the sons she lost.
She denounces Fina Holding’s recent restoration of the hilltop graveyard, where it installed a set of graves neatly ringed with black and white marble.
“I told them, ‘Don’t you ever touch my sons’ graves. Don’t you ever get close to them with marble the color of coal,” she said. No matter the cost, the family has resolved to renovate the graves themselves, she said.
“We lost our sons in the mines,” Kilic said, “but we will not let the mining companies own their graves too.”
Another 76 people hospitalized after explosion at a coal mine in western Turkey
A protest breaks out as rescuers scramble to try to save more than 100 workers trapped in the coal mine
A mining disaster this week shows that despite his power, the Turkish PM is constantly at risk – from himself
Unions stage protest over workplace safety as excavators dig mass graves in Soma
Mining company executives, employees among those arrested after accident killed more than 300
Error
Sorry, your comment was not saved due to a technical problem. Please try again later or using a different browser.