The scale of the Turkish earthquake disaster has grown all week and it is now estimated to have killed as many as 40,000 people. It is one of worst natural disasters of this century, as measured by loss of life, the number of injured, and damage to the nation's physical infrastructure. It was a severe earthquake, but it is a human as well as a natural disaster. That is clear from the collapse of poorly constructed buildings, in which the great majority of the victims died, and the utter failure to get rescue equipment to where it was needed on time. Profiteering builders, corrupt bureaucracies, self-serving police and army, helpless politicians and the pathetically slow major international response - all these were exposed by the catastrophe. So too were the wonderful solidarity, co-operation and fortitude shown by ordinary people in the affected areas.
Their frustration and anger at being left so much to their own resources will resonate for a long time in the Turkish political system. It is very much in keeping with their experience as migrant workers, as so many of them flowed to this most industrialised part of the country which in the last 25 years has become home to over one third of its people. Tens of millions left the countryside and flocked to towns and cities for work. They found it with Turkish and multinational companies serving far-flung regional markets in a fast and exuberant economic growth. They settled first in shanty towns and went on to live in apartment blocks thrown up cheaply, profitably, illegally - and lethally, since the necessary building safeguards in an earthquake belt were neither used nor insisted upon.
Turkey's economy has been set back by billions of dollars, while the social, physical and urban environment of the affected areas will take years to rebuild and recover. The country is in urgent need of aid in all these respects as the autumn and winter approach. So far the international response has been patchy and slow. In Europe it throws up the urgent need to develop more effective means of humanitarian relief, using all the mechanisms under discussion in the broad-ranging debate on European security. Turkey is a European state with a huge role to play in its region, economically, politically and in the security domain. It has been shabbily treated by the European Union, despite its undeniably bad human rights record.
The disaster will force a reappraisal of its political and economic priorities. Many of the migrants came from the impoverished Kurdish region of south-west Turkey, for example; they were drawn to the new industrial centres by the promise of work - but also because of the army's hugely repressive and expensive campaign against the insurrection by the PKK, the Kurdish Workers' Party which systematically cleared mountain regions and villages of their populations. Its leader Abdullah Ocalan has been sentenced to death but has offered a ceasefire and political talks. This long war, sustained by such a well-resourced army, will be more difficult to justify after the earthquake and the demands it will make for reconstruction. But popular anger will be directed above all at those considered responsible for turning this dramatic natural event into such a human disaster - the builders who cut safety corners, the officials and politicians who let them do it, the rich industrialists and property owners who profited from such rampant growth and the insouciant armed forces and police who have done so little to relieve the suffering.