Int’l community should be more generous to Türkiye: UN envoy

A senior U.N. official has reiterated that the international community should be more generous to Türkiye in funding humanitarian assistance and recovery period after the devastating earthquakes of Feb. 6, in a call just days before a donors' conference to be organized by the EU in Brussels.

In an interview with the Hürriyet Daily News, United Nations Resident Coordinator Alvaro Rodriguez has expressed his observations of the post-earthquake national and international efforts for the revival of 11 provinces that were severely hit by the twin earthquakes that killed more than 48,000 people in Türkiye and more than 5,000 people in northern Syria.

"The scale of the devastation was extraordinary. I have never seen anything like that before although I have been involved in other earthquakes," said Rodriguez, describing what he saw in the region as "dramatic."

"It was extraordinarily dramatic. In different places, different types of dramas: In Kahramanmaraş, for example, you see pockets of neighborhoods that have completely disappeared with, of course, thousands of lives and injured. In Hatay, it seems to me that the entire city just stopped at 4.17 a.m. on Feb 6. It is almost all devastated even some buildings remain. So that was dramatic," he said.

The response, both from the Turkish side and the international community, was also dramatic, he underlined, noting "We never had a search and rescue operation as large as this one in world's history. There have never been as many international teams with so many people, so many dogs and technology leading to the highest number of rescues anywhere in the world."

On criticisms that relevant national institutions were delayed in responding to the earthquakes, the envoy underlined that the Feb...