They still hear voices under the mountain of rubble. “Nobody comes to help, we can’t take our loved ones out,” a man cries in a video released four days after the earthquake that devastated southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6, leaving a provisional death toll of more than 35,000. A dozen men and women gathered in front of the rubble of their building cry out in despair. At the end of the video, “hear us Haluk Levent”, do they all thunder in chorus to the attention of the Turkish rocker at the head of Ahbap NGO.
In another video, posted on Twitter forty-eight hours after the disaster, the singer is seen debriefing the health minister, Fahrettin Koca, and his defense counterpart, Hulusi Akar, on the relief operations. Faced with the country’s worst natural disaster, and with its government widely criticized for its inaction, Turkey has found in the rockstar the savior it needs.
The artist with 8 million followers on Twitter, voted the most reliable public figure in Turkey for four years according to an Ipsos-MediaCat poll, dispatched the volunteer teams of his NGO to the field in barely two hours. He sent there food trucks, mobile toilets and showers, drinking water, but also first-aiders. A week after the earthquake, he set up a camp to house 3,000 families in Antioch, one of the cities affected. Ahbap’s cryptocurrency wallet raised more than 2 million euros in two days.
The most prominent public figures in the country, but also companies such as McDonald’s or TikTok preferred to give to Ahbap rather than to Kizilay (the Red Crescent) or the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD). On February 12, Haluk Levent estimated all the aid received at more than 49 million euros.
A joke turned into a powerful NGO
The 54-year-old rocker, eighth in a family of nine children, comes from a working-class background. After a failed career in commerce, which earned him a stay in prison for bad checks, the man launched himself into music in 1993. From his first album, he became the idol of a Turkish youth who did not found neither in the watered-down commercial pop then in vogue, nor in the arabesque music of their fathers. Album after album, Haluk Levent has become a national star and a key figure in Anatolian rock where guitar riffs and traditional melodies mix.
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