Turkey’s Health Minister, Recep Akdag, on a visit on Monday to the eastern town of Dogubeyazit, home of Turkey’s first bird-flu deaths, was mobbed by residents who accuse the government of neglecting them because they are Kurds.
Accompanied by a delegation of experts from the World Health Organisation, Akdag tried to assure the area’s majority Kurdish population that Ankara has not abandoned them.
The minister, surrounded by a phalanx of police officers separating him from the crowd, told the local people that the government is committed to building a new hospital in the town and will provide advice on how to protect themselves from disease.
However, the mood of the crowd was angry and some booed the minister, shouting ”We need doctors,” and ”Go see our villages with the dead chickens, where no one dares to step.”
While teams from the Turkish agriculture ministry have been in Dogubeyazit for several days collecting and slaughtering poultry, about 80 villages in the surrounding area are still waiting for visits from the exterminators.
”The authorities are not interested in us because we’re Kurds,” said Mehmet Gultekin, a local Kurdish leader. He said they are receiving help only from municipal workers sympathetic to the Kurds in the town of about 56 000 inhabitants.
Gultekin pointed to a group of farmers that had gathered in front of the local agriculture building, clutching bags of chickens.
”Look, people are bringing their chickens here themselves,” he said. They are working while the government workers sleep.”
Earlier on Monday, the health minister went to give his condolences to the father of the three children who died last week, two of them from bird flu.
Dogubeyazit, in an isolated, mountainous region near Turkey’s border with Iran, has little industry. Most people here make a living from raising cattle, a little agriculture and trading alcohol and cigarettes with Iran.
”I come from the village of Buyretti, near the Iranian border,” said Mehmet Salih Demirhan. ”We have 300 or 400 chickens and no official or vet has come to visit us. I learned about the disease on television and I started to slaughter my animals.”
Many people waiting to see doctors said they are not being treated in the same way as their western neighbours.
One man in the hospital queue said the hospital has only four doctors, and they were not all there.
”In the west [where the first Turkish case of the H5N1 strain of bird flu was detected in October], the birds were killed immediately. Here, we had to wait for people to die,” Demirhan said.
Municipal teams struggling to collect the poultry said they are doing their best with limited means.
”We’re doing what we can, but there aren’t enough of us,” said Ibrahim Giglal, a local employee dressed in the increasingly familiar white overall for protection from the deadly bird flu.
He said that 12 teams of three members each have collected 16 000 chickens in the town of Dogubeyazit, and confirmed that none of the 84 surrounding villages has been investigated yet.
While a Kurdish area, Dogubeyzit has not been a flashpoint for clashes between the Turkish army and the separatist rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which have centred mainly on south-east Turkey, nearer the border with Iraq.
Five more people have tested positive for the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu in Turkey, health officials said on Monday, raising to 14 the number of people confirmed as infected with the disease. — Sapa-AFP