53. In the first week after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake devastated Turkey and Syria, Erol Elmas worked with the Turkish American Cultural Society of Colorado (TACSCO) and the Denver community to collect and sort enough emergency materials to fill 53 pallets.

Elmas, who is a past president of TACSCO and now sits on the advising committee to the organization’s current president, owns a small framing business on 6th Ave and has lived in Denver for 27 years. Since the initial earthquake on Feb. 6, he has been busy helping coordinate the transfer of pallets and donations to the Turkish embassy in Los Angeles where Turkish Airlines flies them to Turkey.

Over 12 civil society organizations and small businesses in the Denver area have helped to collect donations on behalf of TACSCO. As of Feb. 15, TACSCO is no longer accepting material donations. Instead, you can make a monetary donation to relief efforts here. 

All donations will be distributed by AFAD, Turkey’s national disaster relief organization, and the Turkish Philanthropy organization. Founded in 2007, Turkish Philanthropy is well-established across Turkey and has worked to improve access to education for girls in addition to disaster relief.

While Elmas has drawn on his deep roots with the Colorado Turkish community and experience in the hotel industry to coordinate the logistics of Colorado’s response, he emphasized that this is truly a community effort. “This came organically…we had to do something,” he said. 

Elmas also pointed out that rebuilding involves much more than material repair. “[Rebuilding structures] can be done. That’s just cash and materials and donors. But you’re not going to be able to bring the lives back, you know?” he said.

The lives taken by the earthquake and its aftermath now total over 50,000 in Syria and Turkey. Many critics of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, including Elmas, believe a significant number of deaths in Turkey could have been avoided had Erdogan acted to protect the Turkish people instead of his ego and financial interests.

Despite an initial damage assessment showing the severity of the situation, Erdogan refused to dispatch the army—the organization with the single greatest rescue capacity in Turkey—to assist in relief efforts for 24 hours after the initial quake.

And despite being critical of the government response to the earthquake that devastated Turkey in 1999, Erdogan has shown leniency for building code violations and has leaned into, not cracked down on, local and state corruption.

“They steal from the materials, from the iron beams, from the concrete, from the sand … there is corruption everywhere, from the top to the bottom. And the poor people die,” Elmas said.

Since 2013, Turkey’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)—a metric used to measure public perceptions of government corruption with 10 being “very clean” and 0 being “highly corrupt”—has dropped from 5 to 3.6. In that same time frame, the United States’ CPI dropped from 7.3 to 6.9. The global average is 4.2.

Self-motivated politicians and government corruption were not new to Elmas. He was disgusted by the refusal of American politicians to support mask mandates and vaccines during the pandemic to further their political careers and frustrated at the lack of aid the US government provided to small businesses during the lockdown.

“No one is running the government for the people anymore … it is just too sad, you know,” Elmas said, sounding resigned. 

While corruption may look different here in the US, it is not as absent as we would like to think. 2022 saw a total of $4.09 billion spent by lobbying groups to curry favor in congress and federal agencies, while golf courses and private equity firms owned by the Trump family have well-established financial ties to the Saudi regime.

In the face of government failure in handling disaster, it is community efforts like those spearheaded by TACSCO that give Elmas hope. Of the outpouring of support from the Denver community, especially the Ahiska Turk and Azerbaijani communities, he shook his head and smiled. “They were amazing, god.”