About-Face in Turkey
LEHRMAN, HAL
Now firmly entrenched in office, the Democratic party has begun to limit individual and political rights in an attempt to secure its dominant position ABOUT-FACE IN TURKEY By Hal Lehrman Turkish...
...But the stupendous 13-to-I Parliamentary majority the Democrats now possess gives no cause for rejoicing...
...It would be naive to rebuke Turkey for not being a democratic paragon...
...In Istanbul, a double-amputee of World War I dropped the ballot into the box with his teeth...
...Eighty-eight per cent of those eligible voted...
...Kemal Ataturk, their founding genius, died in 1938...
...Then, instead of bringing legal charges against the leaders, it summarily suspended the entire party pending an interminable "investigation" which nicely crippled the group's pre-election machinery...
...But this March a new one was passed which prescribed heavy prison terms and fines for newspapermen publishing "harmful" material...
...The general elections in May were rightly hailed as a democratic victory because the Democrats trounced the once-powerful Republican People's party, whose return after four years' absence would unquestionably have been a disaster for Turkish progress...
...So many judges left the bench to stand as candidates that the courts were virtually shut down...
...The Republicans had ruled Turkey for 27 years...
...In that event, Inonu would be back, perhaps thirsting to cut off their heads...
...They won only 69 out of 487 seats...
...They authorized the police to break up public meetings if anyone "insulted" the Government...
...In rebuttal, the Democrats went after Columbia-educated Kazim Gulek, Republican-party secretary...
...There was a run on war heroes...
...Hal Lehrman, author and lecturer, was the Office of War Information's chief in Turkey during World War II...
...The Democrats actually did not have enough first-rate men groomed to fill the Cabinet, let alone the Grand National Assembly...
...To get them out, the parties used everything from taxis to mules...
...All this brought a handsome "new look" to the Asiatic face of Anatolia...
...His party acquired some younger talent, a few new ideas, and a lexicon of liberal slogans...
...Republican" Turkey-was a dismal one-party state...
...But in 1945 the Western winds of freedom blown in by Axis defeat compelled the Ankara regime to relax its grip and tolerate the existence of an opposition party...
...One picture exhibited him in infidel cap and gown at the commencement exercises of American-endowed Robert College in Istanbul...
...Confirmed by such an absolute mandate, the Government is likely to gather momentum rolling downhill...
...He spoke with quiet dignity in Parliament, mingled with common folk, even did his own marketing...
...instead of masters...
...A third prohibits unaffiliated candidates, or candidates defeated in primaries, from running as independents...
...The grounds for this extraordinary measure were that the Republicans when in power had, as the sole existing party, acted as the Government, freely voting themselves public funds and expending them without distinction between party and public interests...
...The Democrats need an effective Opposition to be kept democratic...
...Even so...
...From here it is always an easy step to becoming scared politicians worried about losing those pleasures...
...with a bow to Vrgeutiua's Peron...
...Indeed, the whole Administration lay paralyzed for months while officials roamed from stump to stump...
...But it does no good, either, to blink the present reversal of direction...
...On the face of it, the May 2 elections were as lively a demonstration of democratic manners as could be desired...
...By then, inspired reformers were undergoing the classic metamorphosis into satisfied politicians enjoying the pleasures of power...
...Very much in his head, however, was the memory of what life had been like under the Republicans who now invited him to embrace them as his saviors...
...Instead, they yielded—the only instance in modern times of a dictatorship voluntarily surrendering power...
...It lies in the Democrats' failure to rise to their historic opportunity...
...But in 1954 the campaign was fought on fulfilment of promises...
...They had the police, the Army, the guns and machinery to falsify the election or suppress its verdict...
...Then followed three major moves, as arbitrary as anything perpetrated by Inonu at the apex of his power...
...This was a catch-all group of religious fanatics, super-patriots and arch-reactionaries, whose mass support seemed to be growing...
...First on line at an Ismir suburb was a blind man aged 107...
...In opposition a fiery champion of free speech, he has been thin-skinned and vindictive in power...
...Instead, the Democrats had the job done by a simple justice of the peace, whose usual jurisdiction is limited to cases involving not more than $357 or six months in jail...
...Inonu consequently found himself the Opposition leader...
...Next time, or the time after that, he may not be able to see any difference...
...Republican propagandists gleefully exaggerated each crisis, even crying that not a grain of gold was left in the Treasury...
...The Turkish voter in 1954 still had the Republicans in mind—and chose the Democrats because they looked different and better than the Old Gang...
...Toward the end of 1952, they won a few provincial council elections...
...In fact, the Turks—who 10 years ago enjoyed scarcely any civil liberties—looked as if they were out to show how fast they had learned...
...The basic indictment, however, is much graver than these petty tricks or even the legislature's excesses...
...Democratic leader Bayar had waved aloft a package of Government-monopoly cigarettes and promised to cut prices by 60 per cent...
...It has just passed a batch of laws ostensibly as democratic reforms but really as insurance against future electoral upsets...
...These arguments, mixing sound and dubious economics with anti-foreignism, were generally over the head of the man with the ballot...
...They barred state university professors from writing political articles or making political speeches...
...One old woman trundled in on her great-grandchild's baby buggy...
...one wife was heard snapping back to her spouse's query as to how, she was going to vote...
...By this time, the inner structure of the party was blatantly authoritarian—so much so that the central directorate could reject many locally-chosen candidates on provincial tickets, replacing them with approved machine stalwarts (unlike the reactionary Republicans, who allowed considerable local autonomy...
...In removing old popular grievances, the Administration had inevitably created some new ones...
...when the Opposition presented an ex-general, the Government retired another general and added him to its ticket...
...Two seats went to independents, 5 to a small nationalist party, 31 to the Republicans...
...His experiences in Eastern Europe after the war led to his widely-discussed book, Russia's Europe...
...are marching straight back toward the one-party state...
...Considering her primitive take-off point, she has made sensational progress with sensational speed...
...That alone would apparently have been enough to make him stick with the Democrats even if their continued administration were likely to provoke a famine...
...the Republicans will surely be back—if a fair contest is still possible...
...The other side distributed presumably sinister photographs of President Celal Bayar at an Ankara ball surrounded by local belles with plunging necklines, and of Premier Adnan Menderes arm in arm with Patriarch Athenagoras, spiritual leader of Turkey's Greek Orthodox minority...
...Electioneering was wide open...
...Menderes tells him to conform or else "go to the mountains"—in other words, turn brigand and become a hunted man...
...This does not mean that no improvement has transpired under the Democrats...
...But the Government, which claimed all the credit, was entitled to only part of it...
...Turks in street and field somehow could not visualize the old Pasha, surrounded by aging satraps from the ancien regime, as a democratic redeemer...
...As the 1954 elections approached, the Democrats grew increasingly high-handed, thanks to their ponderous majority and the mediocrity of the men who made it up...
...Four years later, however, the demand for change was too loud to throttle without risk of bloody upheavals...
...Inonu's regime once tried to destroy them by discriminatory taxes and deportation...
...His associates had pushed generosity even farther, pledging such absurdities as the right to do military service in one's home village...
...The Democrats became panicky...
...A noted free-lance who has contributed to numerous periodicals, Mr...
...The performance contained enough of the superficial aspects of democracy in action, including the artful dodges, to be almost comic...
...Such changes in the rules obviously favor the dominant party, dividing and repressing those who do not agree with it...
...Virtue seems to have begun petering out by the middle of 1952...
...They encouraged press freedom...
...But not enough to persuade the voters this spring...
...3. Freedom of speech...
...Under his direction, the courts have suffered political pressure and there has been no evolution toward a system of checks and balances on Parliament, which (at least the massive Democratic majority) has ridden high and wide above its own laws...
...The pity is that the Republicans have been drubbed too soundly...
...Colonel" Menderes, his antagonists call him...
...In a sense, Ismet Inonu thereby proved himself a better democrat than his successors...
...for at least a year, however, the so-called Democratic party now in power has been backsliding toward arbitrary rule...
...Final tabulation showed that the Government had swept no less than 60 provinces...
...the Republican defeat was crushing enough...
...But Menderes, a millionaire landowner and formidable debater, has muffed the occasion...
...In the Western press, Turkey is regularly billed as democratic...
...the "irresponsible abuse of liberty" which makes the press law necessary is "to a great extent provoked by camouflaged Red agents.' But neutral observers., and even a few candid Democrats, have seen the measures instead as a crude use of Parliamentary power to hamstring electoral foes and suppress newspaper criticism...
...or the concentration of factory inaugural and cornerstone ceremonies in the election period, with full State Radio coverage of speeches by Democratic officials in defiance of guarantees of equal radio time for all political factions...
...True, the farmers?0 per cent of the population—were enjoying bumper prosperity, and production in agriculture and mining had been piling up records...
...Private citizens no longer live in fear...
...In 1950, the Republicans did not fail when confronted by their opportunity...
...In 1950...
...Government supporters put effigies of Opposition candidates in coffins...
...2. The Republican People's parly...
...Its press and people were gagged, its police and bureaucracy omnipotent...
...They declared themselves for private enterprise instead of state ownership...
...It is safe to say that the Democrats looked especially good to the voters because the Opposition looked so bad...
...Nobody, not even the victors, expected such an upset...
...Apologists argue that these outrages constitute a defense of Turkey's tender democracy...
...On the other hand, prices of rural staples had doubled since the Democrats' coming to power...
...Complaints could be heard throughout the land...
...When a party member shows traces of independence...
...All this, too, makes recent Democratic trends all the more lamentable...
...The Democrats laid claim to everything creditable which had occurred in the four years, including participation in the Korean expedition, membership in NATO, Tito's visit to Turkey, and Bayar's visit to America...
...The Democrats arrived in 1950 with a fine burst of reform spirit...
...the urban middle class was restive because of governmental boners in foreign-trade policy and the same errors had damaged Turkey's external credit and internal solvency...
...They returned him to Parliament, but with even less henchmen than before...
...They emancipated foreign trade...
...As late as this winter, I could feel the new atmosphere...
...One measure bars political parties from disseminating "propaganda" on the State Radio, while enabling Government officials to "explain" their own operations...
...This has happened before in Turkish history...
...In 1950...
...The monstrous thought started taking root in Government minds that the nation might throw the Democrats out altogether at the next countrywide reckoning...
...When the Republicans put up a Korean-campaign colonel, the Democrats found a Korean-campaign brigade commander...
...The remaining 503 seats fell to the Democrats...
...In this role, he developed more gra-ciousness than previously as an autocrat...
...Another, too feeble to make it from cab to booth, had the ballot-box brought out to the curb...
...They were directed against: 1. The Nation party...
...Both parties hand-picked their slates to lure the mass vote...
...You can give me orders on everything else—but this is different...
...Last December, the Democrats steamrollered through the Assembly a law confiscating all the fixed property and assets of the old party...
...On the contrary, the contrast with the old Republican bleakness is still dazzling...
...The Menderes regime is already-showing symptoms of increased self-inflation induced by its May victory...
...the Republicans contrived in elections a year later to keep the Democrats down by stuffing ballot-boxes and terrorizing voters...
...the rest went largely to American pump-priming...
...Menderes and Co...
...Instead, the Democrats are now more in command of a puppet parliament than ever, with nothing to block a "dictatorship of the majority...
...The free world is not so strong that it can look with complacency on a decline of democratic vigor at a vital point on its exposed frontiers...
...The Nation party, it is said, struck at the very foundations of Ataturk's anti-clerical revolution: the Republican raid on the Treasury could not have been recovered by court action because of the statute of limitations...
...If so...
...Women defied their husbands and centuries of Moslem tradition: "For the other party...
...They will inherit not the elevation of political tone which the Turkish people had a right to receive from the crusading Democrats, but a legacy of bickering...
...This definition includes anything derogatory of public officials (with the writer prohibited from proving his facts in court) or likely to cause public anxiety (even if true...
...Now firmly entrenched in office, the Democratic party has begun to limit individual and political rights in an attempt to secure its dominant position ABOUT-FACE IN TURKEY By Hal Lehrman Turkish politics sometimes presents a most ingenious paradox...
...Lehrman has just completed a tour of Turkey and the Middle East on a Guggenheim Fellowship...
...The target seemed to be not Islamic holy-rollers or embezzlers or Bolsheviks (Turkey is singularly devoid of the latter), but anything or anybody which might impede the Democrats' drive for re-election...
...On a lower level, this passion for survival at all costs was detectable during the campaign in such whimsical practices as disbursement of 1.5 mil-linn liras ($535,715) by the state-owned Eti Bank for posters supposedly dealing with increased minerals production but actually touting the Government...
...Unaffiliated liberals hoped the Democrats would lose just enough strength in the coming vote to weed out second-raters and give a reinforced Opposition enough seats to exert some restraining influence...
...The only governmental organs functioning full-blast were the High Electoral Councils, headed by a magistrate in each of the 64 provinces and armed with an excellent law against improprieties...
...Under Ismet Inonu, his crotchety, half-deaf lieutenant, the Republicans permitted Ataturk's reformist zeal to atrophy and his legacy of dictatorship to bloom...
...Such drastic action against a recognized Parliamentary group would normally have required the sanction of the highest court...
...In 1950, the Democrats, then in opposition, had campaigned on promises...
...the Democrats got a fair count...
...This was reprehensible enough, but hardly a matter to be settled unilaterally just before an election and through the naked device of an all-out grab...
...Another forbids parties to get together and offer mixed lists in elections...
...Taxpayers get a courteous reception in Government bureaus...
...Democratic Premier Menderes had a chance to carry Turkey's political education forward by matching Inonu's gesture, stabilizing the country's fledgling democratic institutions, making Parliament a truly deliberative and creative assembly, strengthening the courts and the Constitution...
...The Government first passed a law prohibiting the use of religion in politics...
...The first symptoms of their anguish were experimental nibblings at public freedoms...
...They turned their backs on the narrow chauvinism of their predecessors, seeking Western political and economic ties, embarking on great industrial and agricultural expansion programs, cooperating eagerly with American economic-aid missions...
...The Republicans charged that everything for which the Democrats were really responsible—such as the unfavorable trade balance and the new laws encouraging private foreign investment —was either a stain on Turkey's prestige abroad or a treasonable sellout to colonial powers...
...Police and officials have become servants...
...A perfectly good press law against libel and slander was on the books...
...Non-Moslem minorities—the Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities?have full equality...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 34
