We are reporting from the coordination center we established in Antakya Akdeniz Mahallesi five days ago;
Our Coordination Center is a solidarity center established by the residents of Akdeniz Mahallesi and the surrounding neighborhoods with revolutionaries, students, construction workers, healthcare workers and cooks.
We have been looking for ways to create a collective life and survive with our resources for five days, with actions involving toilet construction to kitchen construction, assembling a search and rescue team, and providing the safety and heating of the area and surrounding buildings.
While the State leaves the destroyed city to its fate with the people in it, we are rebuilding it from the first moment of the earthquake until today. While we go to the destroyed neighborhoods with our digging shovel to save the people in the wreckage and engage in search and rescue, we are looking for ways to provide shelter, heating and many other basic needs with the earthquake victims who survived the winter cold.
We are trying to provide their needs not only to our own region, but also to districts and villages that do not receive the slightest aid. While we did not meet any government officials during these five days, as two of our friends who were walking around in order to ensure the safety of the people living in the car, our coordination center, and those going in and out of the houses, they were stopped and physically harassed by the TEM branch of the police under the pretext of an ID check. During this encounter, our friends were threatened with the statement: “If you don’t leave the area the next day, we will disappear you here and no one will be able to find you.” This threat is a threat to all of us, not just our friends. The TEM branch and the state are responsible for everything that will happen to our friends and all of us.
We respond with anger, not with surprise, that the state, which has not made any effort to find those lost under the rubble from the first moment of the earthquake and is incapable of providing a blanket or a tent to the survivors, attacked the solidarity areas.
Solidarity keeps alive.
10 February 2023
Antakya
