UN: Over 3 million people homeless in Turkey one year after devastating earthquakes

2024-02-06 19:05:44, Kosova & Bota CNA

UN: Over 3 million people homeless in Turkey one year after devastating

Turkey must quickly build homes for the millions left homeless by a devastating earthquake last year, a United Nations official said.

"There is a large part of the population that needs housing. Houses are being built there, but they are not enough," the permanent representative of the UN Development Program (UNDP), Louisa Vinton, told the Dpa agency.

The UN estimates that the two powerful earthquakes in February of last year left at least 3.3 million citizens homeless in southeast Turkey.

Adequate shelter and livelihood support for local residents are two pressing needs a year after the devastating earthquakes, Vinton said.

Some people are still living either in tents or in the yards of their damaged houses, they have put up tents, she emphasized.

"We will bring the remaining citizens, whose houses were destroyed or are uninhabitable, to safe houses," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday.

Erdogan had promised that close to 300,000 residential buildings would be built for earthquake survivors within a year after the powerful tremors.

However, his Government has not met this goal and now aims to build 200,000 housing units by the end of 2024.

Earlier on Tuesday, angry residents of the quake-hit Hataj province protested against government and local officials who took part in events marking the earthquake's one-year anniversary.

Many of them complained about what they said was the Government's slow response to remove the rubble and build new houses.

UNDP, according to Vinton, has allocated $10 million in grants to individual businesses in 11 Turkish provinces that were affected by the earthquakes.

The 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck southeast Turkey on the morning of February 6, followed by another 7.6-magnitude earthquake the same day.

These earthquakes killed over 60,000 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria, according to official data and data from monitoring groups./ REL