ISTANBUL: With 38 people dead in four days and 26 in intensive care after drinking bootleg liquor in Istanbul, the politically charged debate over Turkiye’s soaring alcohol taxes has swung back into the spotlight.
The rising death toll made headlines in Turkiye, a nominally secular country where alcohol taxes have risen sharply under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Muslim who vociferously opposes drinking.
Since Monday, 92 people have been hospitalized after drinking alcohol tainted with methanol, a toxic substance that can cause blindness, liver damage and death.
More than a third have died.
Some bought alcohol from a business posing as a Turkmen restaurant in Istanbul which was selling it in half-liter water bottles for 30 lira ($0.85) each, local media said.
By comparison, buying a liter bottle of raki, Turkiye’s anizeed-flavoured national liquor, from a supermarket costs around 1,300 lira ($37.20) in a country where the minimum wage recently rose to $600.
Such prices, which are higher than in the European Union and rising, are fueling the production of moonshine.
“We are losing at least 500 lives a year as a result of counterfeit alcohol. It’s a massacre, it’s mass murder and it’s caused by the taxes!” raged Mustafa Adiguzel, a lawmaker from the main opposition CHP party on Wednesday.
“We have to address the exorbitant prices of alcohol,” he told parliament, which is dominated by Erdogan’s Islamo-conservative AKP.
Erdogan, who has said nothing about the wave of deaths, quickly hit back, denouncing the CHP as the party “whose greatest promise it to make raki prices cheaper.”
Poisonings from adulterated alcohol are relatively common in Turkiye, where clandestine and private productions are widespread.
Cagin Tan Eroglu, who co-runs an organization that monitors public policies on alcohol, says the number of deaths “is gradually increasing” as a result of the tax hikes that take place every six months.
His organization relies on figures published in the media to count poisoning cases.
Last year, 48 people died in Istanbul after drinking tainted alcohol, the governor’s office said. Contacted by AFP, the health ministry did not give a national figure.
“The taxes allow the government to collect easy money while politically oppressing a certain lifestyle,” Eroglu said.
“But people are dying because of irresponsible policies that are obviously ideologically driven.”
The tax on raki, brought in when Erdogan’s AKP came to power in 2002, has jumped by more than 2,500 percent since 2010, a spectacular increase that cannot be explained by high inflation alone, which has forced up the price faster than wages.
“Nearly 70 percent of a bottle. This does not happen in any other country,” said Ozgur Aybas, head of the association representing so-called Tekel shops that sell alcohol.
Such is the situation in Turkiye that “today you could be served tainted alcohol in even the most high-end restaurants,” he said.
“The government’s bad policies are entirely to blame for the death of these people,” he told AFP, saying people who drink alcohol “are treated like second-class citizens.”
However such price hikes affect only a minority in Turkiye.
Although alcohol is more widely available in Turkiye than in most Muslim-majority nations, only 12.1 percent say they drink it.
And there is a marked difference between the sexes, with 18.4 percent of men drinking, compared with only 5.9 percent of women, Turkish Statistics Institute figures show.
The government has not reacted publicly to the recent wave of deaths in Istanbul, though several European nations have travel adviseries in place warning of the dangers of counterfeit alcohol in Turkiye.
“We keep increasing the price of alcohol and cigarettes ... but they don’t stop consuming,” Erdogan said in 2022. He has gone to great lengths to promote ayran, a yoghurt-based drink, as an alternative national tipple to raki.
Such remarks and regular diatribes against “drunks” has only served “to widen and exacerbate the sociocultural and political rifts that beset Turkiye,” said Emine Evered, a historian an author of a recent book on alcohol in Turkiye since the Ottoman Empire.
Following several arrests this week over the latest poisoning scandal, the Istanbul governorate said: “Those who cause death by producing or selling counterfeit alcohol are no different than terrorists.”
Bootleg liquor deaths revive debate on Turkiye alcohol tax
https://arab.news/z3tse
Bootleg liquor deaths revive debate on Turkiye alcohol tax
- Since Monday, 92 people have been hospitalized after drinking alcohol tainted with methanol
- More than a third have died
Tunisia’s famed blue-and-white village threatened after record rains
SIDI BOU SAID, Tunisia: Perched on a hill overlooking Carthage, Tunisia’s famed blue-and-white village of Sidi Bou Said now faces the threat of landslides, after record rainfall tore through parts of its slopes.
Last week, Tunisia saw its heaviest downpour in more than 70 years. The storm killed at least five people, with others still missing.
Narrow streets of this village north of Tunis — famed for its pink bougainvillea and studded wooden doors — were cut off by fallen trees, rocks and thick clay. Even more worryingly for residents, parts of the hillside have broken loose.
“The situation is delicate” and “requires urgent intervention,” Mounir Riabi, the regional director of civil defense in Tunis, recently told AFP.
“Some homes are threatened by imminent danger,” he said.
Authorities have banned heavy vehicles from driving into the village and ordered some businesses and institutions to close, such as the Ennejma Ezzahra museum.
- Scared -
Fifty-year-old Maya, who did not give her full name, said she was forced to leave her century-old family villa after the storm.
“Everything happened very fast,” she recalled. “I was with my mother and, suddenly, extremely violent torrents poured down.”
“I saw a mass of mud rushing toward the house, then the electricity cut off. I was really scared.”
Her Moorish-style villa sustained significant damage.
One worker on site, Said Ben Farhat, said waterlogged earth sliding from the hillside destroyed part of a kitchen wall.
“Another rainstorm and it will be a catastrophe,” he said.
Shop owners said the ban on heavy vehicles was another blow to their businesses, as they usually rely on tourist buses to bring in traffic.
When President Kais Saied visited the village on Wednesday, vendors were heard shouting: “We want to work.”
One trader, Mohamed Fedi, told AFP afterwards there were “no more customers.”
“We have closed shop,” he said, adding that the shops provide a livelihood to some 200 families.
- Highly unstable -
Beyond its famous architecture, the village also bears historical and spiritual significance.
The village was named after a 12th-century Sufi saint, Abu Said Al-Baji, who had established a religious center there. His shrine still sits atop the hill.
The one-time home of French philosopher Michel Foucault and writer Andre Gide, the village is protected under Tunisian preservation law, pending a UNESCO decision on its bid for World Heritage status.
Experts say solutions to help preserve Sidi Bou Said could include restricting new development, building more retaining walls and improving drainage to prevent runoff from accumulating.
Chokri Yaich, a geologist speaking to Tunisian radio Mosaique FM, said climate change has made protecting the hill increasingly urgent, warning of more storms like last week’s.
The hill’s clay-rich soil loses up to two thirds of its cohesion when saturated with water, making it highly unstable, Yaich explained.
He also pointed to marine erosion and the growing weight of urbanization, saying that construction had increased by about 40 percent over the past three decades.
For now, authorities have yet to announce a protection plan, leaving home and shop owners anxious, as the weather remains unpredictable.
