Over 300 miners have been killed by a system that values fossil fuels and profits above the lives of those who are paid poverty-level wages to dig for coal

by Chris Williams

Chris Williams is the author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, and a founder of the ecosocialist coalition System Change Not Climate Change

Think about the last time you reached the top of a mountain one mile high. Now think about descending that distance below the surface of the earth, foot by dark foot, far below all life, light or oxygen. You go down there to dig.

What you’re digging for, deep in the hot, fetid, bowels of the earth, is carbonized life forms, millions of years in the making, turned to a type of rock that ignites and burns; one that your prime minister and energy analysts tell you will help the economic future of your country.

But you don’t go there primarily to dig or because it’s going to expand the economy. It’s much more personal than that — and much less voluntary. You go there because you have to; because it’s how you survive. Or, in the twisted parlance of the day, in a country where mining deaths are a regular occurrence, it’s how you “make a living.” Digging is just something you do as a means to another end.

How else would there be over 92,000 people from your country, ready to make that descent every day? Knowingly entering such an alien, inherently dangerous environment, where invisible, odorless, colorless, poisonous and explosive gases lurk? Where death and injury are a constant risk, in a country where the death rate among miners is higher than in China; a country where, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute, miners suffered over 13,000 injuries in 2013 alone.

The death toll from Turkey’s latest horrifying mining catastrophe, one of the worst industrial tragedies in recent world history, has risen above 300 — all human beings who were there to “make a living.” The disaster affects every single one of the 100,000 residents of the nearby town of Soma — from which many of the miners hail and where coal mining is all there is left after neoliberal policies devastated agriculture and other aspects of the local economy.

An inhuman response

In the face of such all-encompassing and sudden calamity befalling a community, there are certain responses one could expect from any member of the human species. The first is to express the most basic of human emotions: sympathy, empathy and deep sadness for the tragic loss of life.

To his eternal shame, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP, by its initials in Turkish) — which has connections to private mining interests and companies in the energy and construction sectors — couldn’t even manage that.

Rather than offering his concern to the injured and his condolences to the relatives, friends and comrades of the dead — people desperately searching for glimmers of hope in the darkness and any news of their loved ones, Erdoğan despicably minimized the horrifying loss of life by comparing the Soma nightmare to mining disasters in Britain a century and a half old — in order to claim that “these accidents are usual.”

There’s simply no excuse one can conjure for such cold-hearted contempt for the working people of Turkey. Particularly as Erdoğan was reiterating a similarly callous sentiment from 2010, after 30 miners lost their lives in an explosion in a mine near Zonguldak city: “Death is the destiny of the miners.”

In another display of staggering insensitivity, but further proof of how inconsequential the lives of Turkish miners are to those who rule the country, Energy Minister Taner Yıldız, who heaped praise on the mine’s management only last year, initially said that for the Soma explosion, the “death toll figures are not important.”

The second response, if you’re in a position to do so, is to rush as many resources as possible to the scene of the chaos of an exploding mine that trapped hundreds of miners underground. The one thing you don’t do is minimize the disaster, claiming at first that it was only a minor accident, then dispatching thousands of state security forces — not to help with the rescue effort, but to put down the protests of miners and their families enraged by government insensitivity.

The fury of Turkish workers and their allies is fully justified against a prime minister who had to seek shelter in a supermarket as angry protesters vented their wrath against his visit to the region — and whose parliamentary aide was caught on video kicking a protester as he was held down on the floor by police.

On Friday, as desperate rescue efforts continued, police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon against demonstrators, who carried banners reading, “It was not an accident, it was murder.”

Protests erupted across Turkey, in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Zonguldak, after it was reported that the mine had a history of problems, was short of carbon monoxide detectors, and in some places was using wood instead of metal to shore up tunnel ceilings. Turkish media cited a 2010 report by the Turkish Chamber of Architects and Engineers (TMMOB), which warned of serious safety problems at the Soma mines. Among the issues mentioned were inadequate ventilation systems, a lack of pre-warning mechanisms and faulty wall supports.

Who uses riot police at a demonstration in support of mine safety, after one of the most lethal industrial mining disasters in recent memory and the worst in Turkish history?

Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül was also heckled on arrival when he visited Soma. Interviewed by the Guardian, one miner who refused to give his name asked the key question: “Why does he come here with an army of police and security personnel?… These people come here with their nice suits and their ties, but no compassion for our suffering.”

Collective solidarity

The answer to the Soma miner’s question is this: Because miners, their loved ones and their supporters refuse to be helpless victims who merely accept their fate, as Erdoğan would have them. As a consequence of the precarious and dangerous nature of their work, and the collective solidarity that comes with it, miners around the world fight with the utmost tenacity for one another.

That was illustrated in the mine collapse at Copiapó, Chile, in 2010. The 33 miners, in the most terrifying of conditions and almost without any hope of rescue, organized themselves for survival underground by making detailed plans: how they would cooperate to conserve oxygen, water, food, light and give extra help to the less experienced among them, so that all of 33 emerged alive, after an incredible 69 days buried under 800,000 tons of rock.

For that reason, down through the ages, ordinary people of all nations have rallied to the banner of the miners, in their rage, grief and struggle for justice. We must do so again now, standing shoulder to shoulder — and demand a full independent investigation; financial help and all other assistance needed by the survivors and their families; the prosecution and, if found guilty, jailing of those responsible for the disaster, through negligence or cutting corners on health and safety.

Thus far, while the company that owns the mine has denied any responsibility, highlighting their supposed attention to safety, 18 people, including local executives, have been held by police for investigation into possible negligence. Any investigation must go much further — all the way to the top, including the Turkish state itself — to ensure that no such disaster can ever happen again.

Because after the initial shock and pain — following the horror and heartbreak and the attempts to rescue those who may still be trapped and alive — one begins to ask bigger questions, not just about the immediate cause of the explosion, but the circumstances that led to it. The kind of questions Prime Minister Erdoğan would rather not have people ask, let alone uncover the answers.

To ask these questions, according to Erdoğan, is to “politicize” a supposedly non-political event; something that could not be foreseen; an unfortunate incident of fate. “There are some groups, extreme elements, that want to abuse developments like this one,” Erdoğan said, rebuking the protesters. “I would like to reiterate that for the peace and unity of our nation, it is very, very important not to pay heed to them.”

But according to Professor Bengi Akbulut, a member of the Political Ecology Working Group at BogaziciUniversity in Istanbul, as soon as the rescue mission officially ended, it was followed by a de facto state-of-emergency level of repression.

Progressives — mostly lawyers and journalists who had been active supporters of different mobilizations in the last few years, such as the Gezi Park protests that spread around Turkey last spring, to informal workers’ organizational efforts — were taken into custody in Soma. They were held in the town’s public gym. For Turks, this brings back haunted memories of the 1980 military coup, where in many cities, municipal buildings, schools and gyms were turned into torture chambers, since jails and police stations were already overflowing with the arrested and detained.

On Saturday, Akbulut, commenting on the repression, said: “Some of my lawyer friends were harassed and detained and released yesterday, but today, they have been taken en masse, and I am very, very worried. Everyone from outside of Soma is being forced out of the city, if not detained.”

In a measure of how far the protests are spreading in a country rocked by two years of social upheaval, one of the major engineering schools’ mineral engineering department was occupied by students. This was followed by a wave of student occupations in other schools. Every night, there is a sit-in and forum in front of the mining company’s headquarters in Istanbul. The neighborhood forums that emerged after the GeziPark protests have been key in organizing protests and occupations.

Still, there is much more to be uncovered about the Soma mine disaster, says Akbulut:

“There is so much misinformation or information you would not want to believe is true, but deep down, you know they are true, because capitalism works that way. Like Syrian migrant workers being paid much less, and forced to work in the deepest levels of the mine, where no rescue effort ever reached to them. Like parts of the mine, closed off years ago under state ownership because they were too risky, that were reopened, and these were the parts where the migrants were forced to work in.”

Not just an accident

While we don’t yet know the exact cause of the explosion and fire, the contributing causes of the catastrophe in Soma go far beyond a simple, avoidable tragic incident, or and individual political party.

When one thinks of recent fossil energy-related fatalities in North America — from the BP refinery fire in Texas in 1995, to BP Gulf of Mexico disaster in 2010, to the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in 2010, to the oil train derailment and explosion in the town of Lac-Mégantic, Canada, in 2013, a pattern emerges, irrespective of political leaders or parties.

As Celeste Monforton, of the George Washington University School of Public Health and a leading mine safety expert, told the International Business Times:

“The profit motive that is the foundation of market-based industries can influence the safety behavior of companies… In our most recent major coal mine disaster in 2010 at the Upper Big Branch coal mine [in which 29 miners were killed], the surviving workers said that production pressure played a major role in the disaster. This, despite the company’s claim that safety was their number one priority.”

According to a 2010 report by the Turkish economic research foundation TEPAV, for every 1 million tons of coal extracted from below the surface of the earth, the cost is 7.2 dead workers. The comparable statistic for China, a country notorious for its mistreatment of workers, is 1.3 dead workers per 1 million tons of coal. The Turkish mining industry as a whole was responsible for over 10 percent of the country’s workplace injuries in 2012.

The Soma mine was privatized in 2005, part of a series of government-backed privatizations under which 90 percent of the state sector has been transferred into the hands of private corporations.

Soma Kömür İşletmeleri A.Ş., the Istanbul-based company that employs over 5,000 miners at Soma, has other commercial interests in construction and strong ties to the governing party. The wife of the general director of Soma Holding Company, Melike Doğru, was recently elected as a councilor in the Manisa region, as a candidate of the Erdoğan’s AKP. During previous local elections, sacks of the company’s coal were handed out by the local AKP as “charity coal” — to workers who couldn’t afford the very thing they were sent underground to mine.

Necdet Pamir, an energy expert affiliated with the main opposition party, was blunt in his assessment of why the explosion at Soma is part of a wider pattern exemplifying the culture of profit-at-all-costs business operations: “In reality, the practice in Turkey is that under-qualified companies with ties to the government are winning the [contracts]…They are maximizing profits by cutting wages and safety measures, and this is the cause for tragedies such as Soma.”

A predictable result of deregulation and privatization

Neoliberal orthodoxy dictates, despite all evidence to the contrary, that companies will be more likely to adhere to health and safety regulations if they are free from the restrictions of government oversight, and compliance is made voluntary. The entirely predictable result of the frenzy of deregulation and privatization, along with the ensuing corruption, is a bottom-line culture where cuts in production costs are sought continually in order to keep coal “cheap.”

For capitalists, driven by spreadsheets tabulating corporate profit and loss, one of the most obvious places to start looking for reductions in costs is with the single largest factor in production: workers’ pay and working conditions and spending on the health and safety of the workforce. The same TEPAV report cited earlier shows a clear discrepancy between deaths in publicly owned mines (4.41 miners per 1 million tons of coal extracted) where unions and government oversight are stronger, compared to privately owned mines (11.50 miners per 1 million tons of coal).

Since the wave of privatization washed over Turkey, there has been a 40 percent increase in mining accidents. This grim statistic has been paralleled by truly spectacular savings for Soma Kömür — its costs of mining coal have dropped from $120 to 130 per ton while under state control, to $24 per ton today.

According to the Turkish publication Sendika, the subcontracting of untrained mining labor has been one of the biggest factors in reducing costs. Another factor, according to Sendika, is a 2005 law that legalized a royalty payment system, which increased mining concessions — in the five years between 2005 and 2010, roughly 45,000 mining licenses were distributed — and allowed mine operators to go deeper into the earth.

Only two weeks ago, a measure introduced into Turkey’s parliament by opposition parties to investigate ongoing and repeated safety issues at the Soma mine was rejected by the majority of AKP deputies.

In response to such facts, union leaders in Turkey are calling the disaster in Soma “murder” and a “massacre.” As one woman, a government worker in Soma, declared, “They are lying to us. This was no accident. This was murder, plain and simple.”

Who can say she is wrong? At what point does the culpability for and virtual inevitability of industrial disasters turn tragic accidents into entirely avoidable examples of the costs of doing business and of putting profit before people?

Speaking to the International Business Times, Kenan Dikbiyik, a mining engineer and representative of Turkish mining union Maden-Is, was very clear about the biggest factor contributing to the appalling and worsening safety record in Turkish mines:

“With these mines, you can enter a mine, inspect it, everything is fine, and one hour later, it explodes…This is why you cannot have profit be the main concern when exploiting them. This is why we believe privatizing them was an error. They should be nationalized.”

Threatening all humanity

What kind of system sends men — including minors; the youngest worker to die at Soma was 15 — deep underground for pitiful wages, in bestial conditions reminiscent of the time of Charles Dickens? There is an even larger question about the future development of humanity. The planned expansion of coal mining and its associated costs — for which several hundred Turkish miners have paid the ultimate cost — has longer-term impacts.

Not only will the earth swallow more hardworking sons, husbands and fathers in mining countries around the world at the behest of capitalist priorities, corporate malfeasance and government negligence and corruption, but coal mining threatens the air we breathe and the atmospheric and climate stability of the entire planet. All while we know the answer and have the technology and resources to implement the solution, as yet another recent report illustrated.

As I have written elsewhere, the negative health impacts of burning coal, even without factoring in accidents at the coal face or the wider consequences of climate change, outweigh the economic benefits of mining and burning it.

A 2010 study by the National Academy of Sciences, titled Hidden Costs of Energy, calculated that the damage to human health, grain crops, timber yield, buildings and recreation activities from coal burning in the U.S. was estimated in 2005 to amount to $62 billion. According to the U.S. Labor Department, in 2012, coal mining employed 137,000 workers. Not to say this would necessarily be the best option, but the cost to give a tax-free pension of $50,000 per year to all those miners, comes to $6.8 billion — just 10 percent of the unaccounted-for costs of burning the coal in the first place.

We shouldn’t be mining for coal at all — in any country. For a host of reasons — each one of them underlined once again with the blood of Turkish workers — the single most obvious energy source that should be declared an obsolete vestige of the 19th century is coal — for the deaths of miners, the poisoning of the air we breath and the longer-term impacts of climate change.

However, as elsewhere, there are even bigger forces at work in Turkey than just whether mines are state-owned or privately owned. Mining is set for further expansion from the current 1.2 percent of the economy, worth $2.5 billion. Since 2002, when Erdoğan came to power, the economy has quadrupled in size, catapulting a country with a gross domestic product now over $800 billion into the top 20 largest global economies (ignoring corporations, of course). Erdoğan’s stated aim, as expressed in a confident state visit to the U.S., is to break into the top 10.

In a story similar to many parts of the developing world, while some indicators on poverty and employment have improved in Turkey, the cost of living has also risen significantly, there is a massive and growing informal sector, education remains at low levels of education, massive discrepancies remain between male and female employment, and the quality of life overall has declined for many — all because short-term, unsustainable, growth-boosting measures have taken precedence over all else. There are many examples: New dams being built with little regard for local populations or environmental impact, a giant new airport projected for Istanbul, a new bridge across the Bosporus and a canal to run parallel to the strait.

In February, Turkey was praised as a huge new market to invest in by Daniel Dombey,writing in Foreign Affairs under the title “Where to Bet Now.” In October of last year, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, declared that Turkey should be seen as “an inspiration to many developing countries.”

A murderous thirst for energy

With these and other stamps of official approval from the mandarins of international finance capital, Turkey’s growing economy and its attractive lack of government oversight and neoliberal “flexibility” when it comes to labor and environmental laws suck in plenty of profit-hungry investors — and this is accompanied by a voracious thirst for energy.

For a country that is predicted to require twice as much energy by 2023, but which imports 98 percent of its natural gas and 93 percent of its oil, Turkey’s extensive coal reserves are the obvious place for the governing elite to want to further exploit and develop.

According to Energy Minister Taner Yıldız, the government plans to spend $118 billion on energy infrastructure in the next nine years. Turkey seeks to become a regional energy hub and transit station, as more oil and gas pipelines are laid, construction on nuclear power stations begins, and coal mining continues to expand — all to help offset the $60 billion annual energy bill.

Sitting at the nexus of several geopolitical hotspots, the Turkish elite are well aware of the strategic location of their country, and they want to take full advantage of the oil and gas pipelines snaking through the country, as well as instability in Ukraine and political uncertainty in the Middle East, as they seek closer ties with European capital and integration into the European Union.

The ruling elite is committed to becoming a regional power — one at the epicenter of strategic energy decisions by surrounding global powers. To the north lies natural gas-rich Russia and the former USSR republics; to the east, the oil-rich but volatile Middle East; to the west, the lucrative energy markets of Europe.

There is an alternative to the further burning of coal and the expansion of fossil fuel use, with all the climate-related impacts and geopolitical maneuvering that comes with it. But we will have to fight for that alternative. Part of doing so requires supporting the Turkish miners in their struggle for justice and safety.

Even in a socially just and ecologically sustainable society — the one we so urgently need — people will still have to go underground to furnish the raw materials needed to build wind turbines, solar panels and the other components of a society with higher technological development than the stone age. But the motivation, extent and type of mining and manufacture can and will all be different.

In a society worthy of being called civilized, we can make the health and safety of miners society’s highest priority, rather than its lowest. We can reuse metals from obsolete products rather than simply mine more — not to mention use less in the first place and practice conservation.

We can make mining much more environmentally benign by having the workers themselves and the surrounding community democratically self-manage mines, tailing ponds and the refining and manufacturing process — with the goal of maximizing sustainability and minimizing pollution. We can refuse the false dichotomy between having to choose between state control and private ownership — in order to manage, plan and work in a democratic and socially just, ecologically sustainable economy, by holding all factories, mines and farms in common.

Such a vision would end the kind of horrific industrial “accidents” like Soma that are such a frequent and recurring feature of a society organized around maximizing profit through the unremitting exploitation of people and the planet. We express our solidarity with the miners and people of Turkey.

Published with permission from the author,. This article has also been published by Socialist Worker (U.S.) and System Change Not Climate Change.