The real killer

Soma was the drug to keep the masses placid in the face of benevolent despotism in Brave New World.  In the last couple of days, Soma is associated with the mining disaster in Turkey where 282 people have died, a figure that could rise to 400.  The private company that owns the mine said it had passed all inspection requirements, yet it would not be a surprise if even these lax rules were agreed by bribe.  Corruption in Turkey is still a plague, yet now Soma has roused the masses to react against the benevolent, increasingly despotic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (ironically many of these would have recently voted for him, ignoring the graft scandal in which he was involved).
It reminds me of the earthquakes that hit Turkey and Greece within a month of each other in 1999.  Though the first Turkish earthquake near Izmit was 7.9 on the Richter Scale compared to the Athens earthquake of 5.9 and Turkey suffered a second earthquake in the same area five days later, the Athens earthquake had a devastating very shallow hypocenter combined with unusually high ground accelerations.  The loss of life and destruction was in no way comparable.  In Greece, 143 people were killed and more than 2,000 injured in the worst earthquake disaster to hit the country in 18 years.  In Turkey, the death toll was an unimaginable 17,127 (some academics say the real total was 45,000) and 43,359 injured.  300,000 people were rendered homeless.  In Greece, 100 buildings collapsed.  In Turkey, 120,000 poorly engineered houses were damaged beyond repair, 30,000 houses were heavily damaged, 2,000 other buildings collapsed and 4,000 other buildings were heavily damaged.  The badly designed and weakly enforced building regulations in Turkey compared to the more stringent standards demanded by the EU of Greece (and implemented) are directly responsible for the differences in the severity of the quakes' consequences.  Effective jurisprudence or lack thereof was the real killer in the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey.  Again, in Soma, the failure of the law and the rule of law has contributed to the worst mining catastrophe in Turkey's history.
What is the response of Erdoğan's team to the public anger?  One aide is seen kicking a prone protestor already being well handled by two policemen.  If crackdown on the innocent is preferred to a crackdown on corruption, horrendous tragedies in Turkey will continue.