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2.0 Politics
2.1 “I’m unemployed, I’m hungry, my children are
hungry”
An unemployed Turkish father, Adem Yarici, on February 7 died after setting himself on fire in Turkey’s southern city of Hatay in front of the provincial governor’s office, soL International has reported.
“I’m unemployed, I’m hungry, my children are hungry,” Yarici reportedly said before his self-immolation.
Security officers intervened with fire extinguishers. Yarici was taken to hospital but then apparently died of a heart attack while he was being transferred to another hospital in the city of Mersin.
The Hatay governor’s office put out a statement claiming that “Yarici has previously attempted to burn himself because of his psychological disorders”.
Turkey takes a neoliberal approach to psychiatry. According to the latest data from the health ministry, 308mn boxes of nervous system drugs —around three to four boxes per capita—were sold in Turkey in 2018.
Boom-to-gloom days. Not surprisingly, suicides attributed to economic despair in Turkey are not at all uncommon in these boom-to-gloom days.
After three families in quick succession committed collective suicide with cyanide last November, Erdogan’s officials implemented a ban on the easy availability of the poisonous compound.
According to daily Sabah, directed by Serhat Albayrak—brother of Erdogan’s minister of finance and son-in-law Berat Albayrak, the monthly social support received by the Yarici family roughly stood at around TRY500.
According to ‘yellow’ union Turk-Is, the minimum monthly expenditure on food of a worker stood at TRY609.71 in January, while the hunger threshold for a four-person family stood at TRY2,219.
Individual suicides, suicidal people who make it on to the roof of the Turkish parliament, people who do not die after setting themselves alight and unpaid construction workers plunging from cranes are such common occurrences in Turkey that they no longer carry any news value.
6 TURKEY Country Report March 2020 www.intellinews.com
