Kahramanmaraş ( Turkey ) - (AFP) - The earthquake that struck Turkey on February 6 not only caused massive devastation in southern Turkey and caused the deaths of millions of people, but also showed the limitations of a central authority that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed towards.

The Turks discovered with bitterness that the relief and rescue teams needed several days to reach the center of the disaster, with survivors who were left to fend for themselves as they tried to pull relatives out of the rubble with their own hands in the freezing cold, without aid or supplies.

It did not send reinforcements to the powerful Turkish army immediately, as the government, seeking to maintain control of matters, preferred to assign relief operations to the General Authority for Disaster Management (AFAD), which was unable to absorb the situation in the face of the horror of the destruction.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged the existence of "gaps" in the organization of relief operations, attributing this to the tremendous strength of the earthquake (7.8 degrees in an urban area and during the night).

He emphasized that no other party would have done the job better than that.

More than 36,000 bodies have been recovered from the rubble, 11 days after the earthquake, and this toll is likely to rise, or even double, according to the United Nations.

"Centralization affects all institutions in Turkey, including those that should never operate in a centralized manner, such as Avad," explains Htav Rogan, a disaster management consultant in Denmark who follows Turkey closely.

This expert believes that this excessive centralization of power hindered the delivery of aid to the most affected areas, and sometimes the arrival of foreign teams. The authorities tried to remove all other parties from the ground.

Rogan asserts, "For an effective management of relief operations, on the contrary, local teams must be delegated with local means."

Social media is full of testimonies of many volunteers who rushed to help their fellow citizens and had to wait for late arrival permits and equipment.

Crane operators who suggested providing much-needed rescue assistance had to wait for Avad to agree to act.

Agence France-Presse journalists witnessed altercations between volunteers of a non-governmental organization and representatives of AFAD in Al-Bustan in the Kahramanmarsh province, which was subjected to massive destruction, while the nighttime temperature dropped to minus 15 degrees.

"We started working on these rubble while Avad tried to dissuade us. When we heard the voice of a person still alive, the Avad teams pushed us away and took our place," said one of the volunteers, who asked not to be named.

Murad, 48, said that when he was waiting for information about his relatives under the rubble in Kahramanmaraş, he witnessed a similar case.

"When miners from Zonguldak (on the Black Sea) located a living person under the rubble, they were pushed and replaced by people who wanted to be in front of the TV cameras," he recounted.

The "Ahbab" association, which was founded by the famous Turkish singer Haluk Levent, and municipalities run by the opposition, wanting to extend a hand, angered the government because it organized aid in an independent way.

Turkish Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu warned, "Necessary measures will be taken against those who try to compete with the state."

Devlet Bahceli, leader of an ultra-nationalist party and a member of the ruling coalition, accused these parties of seeking to "show the state as powerless."

Turkish media reported that an advertising campaign entitled "The Disaster of the Age" aimed to convince Turks that the loopholes are justified by the magnitude of the disaster.

This advertising campaign, which was prepared by an agency close to the authority, was withdrawn after widespread criticism.

The leader of the main opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, said, "There is no coordination. They were late at the most delicate and critical hours (...) Their impotence cost tens of thousands of our citizens their lives."

Erdogan saw these criticisms as "slander and misleading information to degrade the efforts made with dedication."

It is expected that the two men will face each other in the upcoming presidential elections, if the date remains on May 14.

In the year 1999, after an earthquake struck the northwest of the country, the famous Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand denounced the meagerness of the rescue operations management and wrote at that time, "Turkey, which was proud of its greatness and influence, seemed like a paper tiger."

The authorities then confirmed that they had learned lessons from this failure and strengthened the organization of relief and rescue operations.

"It is too early to say whether or not this attempt to control the national narrative will succeed," Rogan said.

But he added, "There is no doubt that this constitutes a political test for Erdogan before the next elections."