I am asking God Almighty to bless with his mercy the martyrs of the mine, give their relatives patience, and cure the injured.

We have seen the huge gap again between those who are suffering the pain and those who are watching it in the incident of Soma. While we are watching their pain from here and there we have focused more on what we felt. We have been fixated on our own fights.

We generally like to talk our minds without first contemplating on "what should be our priorities? " We like to deal with things not by order of importance but all at once. Our main target is to find someone guilty. So much masochistically drawn into things and then we vent out our angry and leave the topic to be forgotten.

This habit of ours did not change even where 284 people died in a tremendous disaster. We kept talking about it on and on saying "us" and the "other". When I hear these conversations my own words do not target the one side but all sides. In an accident like this what is the use of fighting over identities and politics? What is the point to speculate over the mine"s owner or produce opposition based politics? Is this actually what we need to discuss?

Our more or less developed criteria show that we can neither focus on a thing nor are able to discuss a topic properly.

For the last 4 days, specialists, media reporters, union leaders and politicians have primarily and merely kept talking about their feelings on such a terrible disaster. Isn"t this the way in which we deal with everything?

True. We are a benevolent, charity-minded, good-intended people but when it comes to invest on occupational safety, we suddenly start doing financial analyses. Whether it is leftists, rightists, or conservatives, this picture never changes. When we say "the human comes first" we only mean ourselves by that human being.

I have read the rational comments by two German mine specialists. One of these two specialists is Matthias Stenzel, the Chief of Bonn Branch from the Institution for the Raw Materials and Chemical Industry in Germany, who conducted a preliminary work for five years at TTK in Zonguldak on the request of the Ministry of Turkish Labor in order to improve the safety conditions in the mines of Turkey.

He says "our ongoing work with TTK proves that the Turkish government realizes the necessity for improving the work conditions and worker safety in mines. Could it have predicted the accident in Soma? I would not be able to predict that in a clear and concrete way. However, what is quite scary here is the type of the accident. What puzzles me the most is the explosion of transformers and then the filling of carbon monoxide inside so quickly. I don"t have a logical explanation for that." … Stenzel who states that after the discussions and inquiries with TTK and the Department of Work Condition, certain steps were taken towards improving the safety conditions in mines belonging to TTK and that many courses were to be given and that they were pursuing researches on how to make mines safer. While he states that he is not familiar with the mine that the company operates in Soma, he also says that it would be wrong to have a clear remark.

Another name is Günther Apel who is a mine technician and safety specialist and who knows the mining activities in Turkey very well. In reply to the question whether the disaster in Soma arose from lack of the conditions of safety typically those of mines, he stated that generalizations must be avoided and while in certain mines the conditions of safety lack, in others they do not. "It should be kept in mind that the technique used in extracting coal in Turkish mining is relatively old and simple."

There are 740 business organizations where coal and lignite are extracted. There are 49.000 people working in coal mines. Soma is the largest lignite coal basin with its 600 million ton capacity.

There are 6.200 workers at the mine where the disaster struck. The 4.035 of these workers are registered to the union. The population of the district is 100.000. There are 15.000 people working in 8 different mine organizations. The 23 percent of the power plants in Turkey run by coal. Therefore, all of the following must learn a lesson from this incident: the unionist, boss, inspector, lawmaker, planner, and practitioner.

We have to produce a solution from this disaster and not politics if we don"t want this kind of tragedy to repeat.