MANISA, Turkey
Ahmet Mutluer, who has come to symbolize Turkey’s worst mining disaster after Anadolu Agency photographer Cem Oksuz took his picture just after the incident, has decided to tell his view of events.
The day of the disaster 29 year-old Mutluer, who has been working as a miner for the past eight years, was working the 16.00-24.00 shift. However, he learnt of the incident and went to the mine to see if he could help in the rescue of his friends and colleagues, heading into the mine without thinking of his own safety.
"Some of them were praying, others embraced... then I became ill and hastily I was evacuated and taken to hospital. The moment of the photograph shows my pain. I got out of the mine feeling pain inside. I saw the crowd, families and my kids. I told them I could not reach most of my friends in the mine. I was in the intensive care unit at the hospital for two days.”
- Back to work in the mines?
Mutluer said “I am thinking of working again [in the coal mines] in the future because I have to. I have credit debt and kids. I have to get back to work when I get better. However, my wife is crying all the time, she does not want me to go, but there's nothing else to do.”
“I could have done any job, but I chose to become a miner because you can retire earlier,” Mutluer added.
Mutluer continued saying that every miner receives three tons of coal per year in April or May as a privilege, but this year the coal distribution was delayed.
“We were discussing with our friends that after the coal was distributed we would work for another mine, but it was delayed. I was thinking of leaving the mine after I had received my coal.”
- Not the first accident
According to Mutluer this incident, which claimed 301 miners lives, was not the first disaster he has been through as he has lost colleagues in numerous tunnel collapses previously.
“This is the tenth accident that I had been through. Around 30-35 people died at the mine next to the one I work in. No measures were taken. An inspection could have been done…They’re only concerned about coal; human life is not important for them, one goes one comes.”
The mine accident in the town of Soma, western Turkey, which claimed the lives of 301 people, is the deadliest in Turkey’s history, surpassing an explosion in Zonguldak in 1992 which killed 263 miners.
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