Behind the Turkish Crisis:

...On that question there is no disagreement among Turks and on that account they seem to be the only Middle East Moslems not suffering from an inferiority complex...

...The state economy was transformed by major participation of free enterprise...

...Can the American experiment be used, and, if so...

...To be fair, a general freedom of the press does exist, and there is no censorship of news before papers go to press...

...The newspaper Yeni Gun once wrote: "Page one being completely filled with the denials we are forced to print, our readers will find the news on page six...

...For the first time in the many years I have visited the country I found discontent and restlessness among the intellectuals, not only for economic and political reasons, but for intellectual and moral ones as well...

...They impressed me with their astonishing sense of responsibility toward their country's future...

...It is not interested in reviving the old Ottoman mission of leading Islam, and it dreads the mingling of the hodzas in the educational and political life of the country...

...Most novels and stories are published in newspapers first, because literary magazines are few and very poor...

...Moreover, the building of new mosques—more than 10,000 were built in the past few years—when the country desperately needs schools, hospitals and low-income housing terrifies young Turkish intellectuals who see in this a return to the old Ottoman ways...

...Though the West and the Balkan peoples have suffered under Turkish hegemony, and both considered the Turkish conquest of Constantinople the greatest calamity that could have befallen Christianity and the civilized world, retrospectively one must be thankful to the Turks for having kept the keys to the Dardanelles firmly in their hands...

...We never thought," they told me, "that that was the most profound meaning of our historical position in this part of the world...

...In a country like Turkey, faced with Communism on its northern and western frontiers, and with a chaotic Arab world on its southern and eastern borders, the role of the intelligentsia becomes paramount...

...Turkish literature has recently improved enormously, and one writer, Jashar Kemal, who comes from the sturdy, tough Anatolian peasants of Turkey's barren, stony high plateau, has best expressed the present Turkish dilemma: the disruption of an ancient, patriarchal, heroic and legendary peasant society in the face of industrialization and the rapid rise of a new, maladjusted middle class...

...No coup d'etat was required, and no military intervention against the popular will took place, so that democratic rule seemed permanently established...

...The Turkish intelligentsia, in contrast to Moslem intellectuals all over the Middle East, is not interested in the rise of Islam through Gamal Abdal Nasser's Pan-Arabism...

...The Turks seem to feel closest to the Americans, French and West Germans...

...Here Bogdan Raditsa, professor of Modern European History at Fairleigh Dickinson University and a recent visitor to Turkey, examines the causes of the present dissatisfaction against the background of Turkey's varied past...

...Many experts and university professors have been given grants and invited to study in the U.S., but the bulk of writers, journalists and artists are left to their own devices...

...The reason for this moral and intellectual crisis can be traced to recent internal political developments...

...The Balkan Alliance, renewed under Washington's influence after Tito's break with Moscow, is not only dormant but dead...

...The present Democratic party Government, under the leadership of President Celal Bayar and Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, broke the continuity begun 40 years ago by Ataturk's revolutionary dynamism...

...But possibilities for resolving the dilemma exist and it is most urgent to enroll the intellectuals' efforts in doing so...

...Why, suddenly, after that remarkable change in which all political forces in modern Turkey took a constructive part, did the country stop its progress...

...This extraordinary desire on the part of readers for criticisms of those in power irritates the Government, and particularly the Prime Minister...

...Without doubt, Menderes is an intelligent, dynamic man with great personal and national ambition and a keen sense of power...

...The need for a change is loudly demanded by a press that feels itself enslaved and curtailed, and the recent student riots attest to the country's political unrest...

...Imprisoned with Yalman was the young, enterprising publisher of Vatan, Nairn Tirali, and the paper itself was suspended for a month for having reprinted an article critical of the Government written by Engene C. Pulliam, publisher of the Indianapolis Star...

...But the old Empire remained, dormant among the ruins, and today they are afraid that Turkish secularization has been slowed down or halted and that Islam is thriving once more, with a revival of old rituals and increasing power for the hodzas...

...To have a mission in the world seems to have helped them in part to cope with their frustrations...

...Yet every Turk seems to feel instinctively that his country is the last bulwark of the West against Soviet expansion...

...He has sound economic ideas and he has vastly improved economic conditions for farmers...

...Yalman has since been released, but what of the others...

...Though like a new Louis Napoleon, Menderes loves to come and supervise the work personally, he seems unable to convince people of his architectural talent, taste and knowledge...

...Where, then, can Turkish intellectuals find new formulations for dealing with their own social problems and those of their people...

...Nowhere more than Turkey does one feel how a small people in the immediate neighborhood of a giant can develop a superiority complex no threat seems to change...

...Turkey has been a nation without literature and criticism and now, for the first time in its history, thanks to...

...Those who have returned lean toward the Government, or try to survive through various magnanimous American foundations...

...It is much more attracted to the Israeli industrialization experiment...

...In other undeveloped Middle Eastern countries, and earlier in Eastern Europe, the answer would be, "Marxism...

...The sentences given journalists convicted during that period total some 57 years in prison...

...The intellectuals live by the press, both intellectually and economically...

...The Government is allergic to the intellectuals' criticism, and they are isolated from the people, who are still immersed in the old "heroic" past...

...If the same thing should happen once again with the Menderes Government, it would mean that Turkey had grown politically mature...

...He has started an unnecessary and uneconomic beautification of old Istanbul...

...Though 10 years ago the majority of young intellectuals sided with the newly risen Democratic party—encouraged by the way free elections were held for the first time in Turkish history and by the way orderly transfer of power took place—they are now afraid that the Turkish political world is falling back into the old rut: power held firmly in the hands of a group which refuses any possibility of change...

...In another statement, Budakoglu noted that from March 1954 to March 1958, 1,161 trials of press crimes have taken place and 231 have ended in fines or sentences...

...Though in Turkey some Marxists exist, to the majority of Turks, Marxism means Communism, Communism means the Soviet Union—or rather Russia—and they are radically opposed to Russia...

...But to sell newspapers, the reporting must be incisive and critical of the political life...

...The intellectuals ask: "Where do we go from here...

...And why have riots now erupted...

...Inonu is presently the only man who enjoys great prestige among the young...

...The hundreds of years of relations with the Russians have taught them not to be afraid or lose their nerve...

...All the West wants from us," they say, "is to be good soldiers...

...This expensive and superfluous construction is meeting the strong opposition of thousands of those displaced who have no place to live after their homes are torn down...

...It also fears that a revival of Pan-Islamism in Turkey would cause the nation to waste its energies...

...Recently, several outstanding newspapermen were jailed, among them the Nestor of the Turkish free press, Ahmet Emin Yalman, 72-year-old editor of the lively daily Vatan...

...The thing that impresses them most in his record is his graceful surrender of power when he lost the elections—the first time that had ever happened in Turkey...

...If Communism had come from the United States," they told me, "we would probably be Marxists, but since it comes from Russia we can do nothing else but oppose it...

...Thev have little hope for their economic and intellectual survival...

...Answering these questions is not easy...

...Yet the modern generation of The riots which exploded in Istanbul and Ankara last week are manifestations of a deep-seated and long-standing dissatisfaction among students and intellectuals with the economic and political policies of the Menderes regime...

...Political freedoms were strengthened in a civilian life that knew little about civil rights...

...Minister of Justice Esat Budakoglu recently stated that from 1950 to 1958, while the Democratic party has been in power, 2,324 newspapermen have been tried and 811 convicted...

...But what bothers the young is whether this Government will accept the same democratic practices that brought it to power...

...Born and bred of Kemal Ataturk's revolution, the intellectuals look on present Turkish developments with both disillusion and dismay...

...They see in him the heir to Ataturk's tradition and an honest politician...

...Short-story writers, poets, even university professors make their living through journalism...

...Some, who got fellowships to study in the U.S., are now afraid to return to their primitive backgrounds...

...The Balkan Slavs, under the heel of Communism, do not have much to offer and there never has been much cultural understanding between Turks and Greeks...

...Ataturk's revolution, an intelligentsia has grown up, but unhappily in a hostile or indifferent environment...

...Yet those intellectuals who cannot seem to be helped are the crux of the Turkish crisis...

...Turkev has the largest number of newspapers in all the Balkans and the Middle East...

...Why are the Democratic party leaders who fought so hard to gain power democratically now repeating the old mistakes and suppressing the opposition...

...Menderes" major flaw is his passion for unplanned and strange economic ventures...

...Last summer I visited Tirali while in Istanbul and at his home met the most vigorous group of young Turkish writers, novelists and poets...

...The Turks do not see much ideological difference between Moscow and Belgrade, particularly since Khrushchev has assumed, with even greater authority, the position Tito had previously taken...

...But the Government does have the right to demand that papers publish on the front page denials of all news stories it considers detrimental to its policies...

...Freedom of the press, so vital to the Turks, became a reality...

...Though I had met Turkish intellectuals in earlier visits, I had never been so favorably impressed by the extraordinary maturity of these young people...

...They have strong nerves which are not unstrung by Soviet jets, sputniks or nuclear weapons...

...These young men and women who have made a new middle class are sensitive to everything said and written in the West, and they look at their present position with dismal hopelessness...

...If the Turks had not settled on the Bosphorus 500 years ago, Western Europe would now be having an even harder time defending itself against Communist expansion, and the whole Southeast Mediterranean and the Middle East would probably have long ago fallen under the same domination as Communist Southeast Europe...

...The world at large and the Balkans especially (where no free elections or orderly transfer of power have taken place since the prewar years) were greatly heartened by the political transition from the long semi-dictatorial regime of the old Republican party, led by Ismet Inonu, into the hands of a new majority...

...Politically, if the Menderes Government allowed free elections, Turkey would now probably give a majority to Inonu's opposition Republican party...

...When I mentioned this thought to a young Turkish intellectual who was taking me on a tour to the Black Sea, he was so moved and excited by it that he rushed to tell it to all his friends...

...The intellectuals cannot bear to see Ataturk's great work and revolutionary elan dissipated and diverted into a dark impasse...

...In fact, he finds his greatest support in the countryside rather than in urban areas, where the middle class is suffering from his economic reforms...

...Basically, it is a crisis of an intelligentsia which has emerged in a country which has never had an urban middle class, as other Balkan and East European countries have had...

...For them Ataturk's revolution was intended as a progressive, modern social and intellectual change transforming the decrepit Ottoman Empire into a new society...

...Turks is suffering another form of frustration...

...If this change-over does occur, it might even improve economic conditions, since there is a group of economists around Inonu who believe they have a plan which will overcome the present economic crisis by abandoning Menderes' investments in useless public works...

...The idea of Balkan union is not only dead, but Communist control of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania has ended the concept of the Balkans as a political entity...

...To the visible threat of the rising "Red Sea" around them, the Turks respond with patience and forbearance...

...More than ever before they feel isolated from the West and they have begun to believe that not only has the West forgotten them, but that it wants to keep them isolated from the Western intellectual dialogue...

...Menderes' idea seems to be to make Istanbul into the great city of Turkey once again, and opposing this are many of the young people, who take Ataturk's position against making Istanbul important and for whom Ankara is the symbol of new Turkey...

...Though both countries are officially members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, their political cooperation—now and then interrupted by old nationalist flare-ups—remains chiefly a diplomatic necessity...

...In answering a question in the National Assembly...

...But the major conflict between Government and intelligentsia is apparent in the cold war with the press...