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also dying at the airport. On October 21, daily Cumhuriyet claimed that Nepalese workers found a dead body in a storm drain during cleaning works.
It was determined that the worker had probably fallen into the drain around three days before his death. His name and nationality could not be verified, according to local media reports.
On September 14, thousands of airport construction workers protested against poor working and living conditions
on the site. They presented a list of demands. Sufficient and clean food,
an end to alleged arbitrary dismissals and late pay, and action to address workplace safety and a bedbug infestation in workers’ sleeping quarters were among them.
“Behind the glass and steel of President Erdogan's newest mega-project, 30 construction workers and a union leader are sitting in jail for protesting poor working conditions," Emma Sinclair- Webb, Turkey director at Human Rights Watch, said on October 29, adding: “The government advertises Istanbul's new airport as the biggest in the world, but the prestige project has been marred
by reports of accidents and arrests of protesting workers.”
Demir also told the The Associated Press that the rush to meet Erdogan's construction-finish deadline was
a major cause of the endured accidents and deaths at the site, which employs 36,000 people.
Death by truck deadline
This article is finally wending its way to its hard-earned end, but at the risk of unduly marring Istanbul’s – nay, the globe’s – sleek and slick new air travel hub, let’s not overlook a local media report that in February suggested
that some 141 people had been killed and 452 wounded by earth-moving trucks joining the Istanbul traffic with pressing deadlines. CNN Turk looked at the carnage, citing a report prepared by Berdan Dere, who opened a Facebook page to collect data on the issue after he lost his daughter in an accident caused by one such truck that was in a hurry.
"The airport has become a cemetery," Demir also reportedly said, describing the pressure to finish the job as relentless and blaming long working hours for leading to "carelessness, accidents and deaths".
Turkey's labour ministry has denied media reports about the claimed scale of deaths amid, or linked to, the airport construction. It insisted in February that 27 workers had died at the site due to "health problems and traffic accidents". It has not commented since then.
“To complete an airport project of this size in just three and a half years was extremely challenging, not least in terms of ensuring timely operational readiness of all related facilities, systems, proce- dures and equipment needed to run the airport,” CNN quoted a European avia- tion expert as saying on October 31.
“While there will likely be challenges ahead, there are several factors acting in the airport’s favour, including the relatively strong existing domestic air transport market in Turkey (which rivals in the Middle East generally do not
have to the same extent), and the fact that the airport is less likely to face the same degree of potentially constraining environmental legislation, which is generally the case for large airports in Western Europe,” CNN’s chosen aviation expert also said.
Albanian President Ilir Meta, Kyrgyzstan President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov, Moldovan Pres- ident Igor Dodon, Pakistan President Arif Alvi, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Sudan President Omar Al-Bashir, Chairman Denis Zvidzic of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and Chairman Ogtay Asadov of the National Parliament of Azerbaijan also attended the inauguration ceremony of Erdogan’s “largest” airport, according to the Turkish Presidency.
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