From Ataturk to Gursel

...This may well do Inonu an injustice, but it is certainly true that in the heady months of triumph after V-E day there developed a widespread and genuine ardor among enlightened Turks for political freedom...

...there were to be no changes in foreign policy...

...At the outset, disinterested foreign observers were favorably impressed with the caliber and actions of the new Government...

...In Istanbul itself, Menderes would suddenly order whole sections razed to make way for new highways and broadened squares...

...The tragic sequence of events which followed began with the regime's economic troubles, which in turn led to public restlessness and mounting criticism by the press and Parliamentary opposition...

...The effect of such a move would have been to throttle academic freedom at a school whose professors had long criticized Menderes' repressive policies...

...The Grand National Assembly elected Celal Bayar President and he invested Adnan Menderes as Premier...

...The effect of these mass arrests in early June was to lop off the entire leadership of the Democratic party, naturally posing the question as to how fair elections could be held...

...Journalists haled into court on any of these vague charges could not absolve themselves by proving the accuracy of what they had written...

...Menderes' critics had every reason to fear that he was bent on suppressing all opposition party activity, and all press criticism, before the next election...

...The Allied victory in the war coincided with a personal conversion to democracy on Inonu's part, as he tells the story...

...through the fiscal years 1949-60) and its reserves of gold and foreign currency...

...Cynics suggest that a one-party state had become an anachronism solely because Hitler and Mussolini had lost the war...

...Ataturk hardly showed a delicate touch in handling opposition...

...Democracy never struck roots here...

...Their outcome will tell much about the liberal intentions of the new regime...

...Worse was to come during the next four years...

...Ataturk imposed his will through a one-party dictatorship, defended at the time because of the backwardness of Turkey's people...

...The provisional Government quickly reaffirmed Turkey's adherence to the Western alliance...

...Ten years later, when I interviewed him at his pleasant summer home on the island of Heybeli, Inonu insisted that he had always been conscious of the possibility of defeat...

...The Menderes people were simply drugged with power...

...In the meantime, the men who made the bloodless revolution of May 27 should still be given the benefit of the doubt...

...Democracy has difficulty surviving in a land where some 75 per cent of the people are illiterate, where they have been ruled for centuries by despots, where the hangman's noose has been the traditional answer to political dissent, and where a not entirely willing nation—in less than three decades—was force-marched by military dictators from the Middle Ages into the 20th century...

...The military leaders were no group of power-hungry irresponsibles on the South American model, but Western-oriented officers with an evident dedication to democratic principles...

...By 1957, however, the growing strength of the three opposition parties—Republican, Freedom and National—indicated that they might well topple Menderes if they could run joint lists in several provinces...

...Ataturk died in 1938 and was succeeded as President by his old comrade-in-arms, General Inonu...

...I told him that democracy would be safe in Turkey after the Government had been successively changed in three or four elections...

...Despite these personal failings, Menderes was able to retain the loyalty of a large party—a fact which reveals much about the immaturity of Turkish political life...

...The enormous disparity between popular vote and Parliamentary representation was due to an odd feature of the electoral law...

...Their somewhat vaguely defined program made it easy for them to appeal to many and diverse elements...

...The press was shackled...

...He forced a complete divorce of church and state and sought to confine the influence of the priests to the mosques...

...Often a sugar mill or a cement plant would be located in a country district merely with a view to impressing the voters...

...Such was the rationale of his fervent supporters—the Westernized Army officers, civil servants, city merchants, professors and journalists...

...political soundings by deputies who visited their constituencies indicated that the Democrats would probably win but by too slender a majority for comfort...

...The main charge against the leaders of the old regime was that of "altering and abrogating" the Constitution, but the prosecution initially presented two odd diversions: an accusation that ex-President Bayar had defrauded the Government of $2,200 by forcing the Ankara Zoo to purchase an Afghan dog which he had received as a gift, and a charge that ex-Premier Menderes had conspired in the murder of his own newly born illegitimate child...

...In a quieter time, Inonu ruled with less Draconian measures, but for years he did not relax his one-party dictatorship...

...Early this year, a group of Democratic deputies introduced a bill to put the famed political science faculty of Ankara University under the control of the Ministry of Education...

...The independence of the judiciary was undermined by a law allowing the Government arbitrarily to retire judges who had served 25 years or more...

...By 1954, however, the honeymoon was over...

...In July, the new Government changed the penal code to allow the death sentence to be imposed on persons over 65...

...Gursel charged that the losers had wanted "to set up a military dictatorship...

...There was considerable resistance, for example, to the 1925 law banning the fez...

...Bayar had already been formally charged with high treason...

...All of which leaves Turkey's future still unclear...

...To safeguard freedom, the new constitution was to provide for a balance of powers: a two-house legislature, a Constitutional Court which could declare acts of the legislature unconstitutional, and provisions to insure the independence of the judiciary...

...However verbally committed to democracy, by temperament he was an autocrat...

...That year the "Menderization" of Istanbul was estimated to cost $1 million a day...

...He took criticism as a personal affront and became impatient with any effort to impede what he regarded as his high patriotic purposes...

...Indeed, I believe that Inonu would not even have allowed free elections in 1950 had he thought he might lose...

...As time passed, however, not only did most intellectuals go over to the opposition, but their disaffection spread to distinctly non-intellectual circles...

...The new Cabinet (there were some resignations at the end of August) included some of the best brains in the country...

...But it was hardly conducive to the emergence of a beneficent democratic spirit a mere quarter-century later...

...Hundreds of journalists were clapped into jail, a number of them two or three times...

...Menderes, a superb orator, was invariably cast in the role of embattled civil libertarian...

...In Istanbul, for example, the cost of living increased 166 per cent between 1948 and September 1959...

...The police responded with gunfire, a wild riot occurred in Istanbul...

...Lack of foreign raw materials and spare parts often caused factories to shut down...

...A lack of sophistication did not inhibit political excitement in the countryside...

...In Turkey, an alliance between Army officers and leading academicians did not seem strange...

...General Gursel was named head of the Committee as well as President and Premier...

...The most disturbing feature of this change was that, in cases of high treason, it was to cover past as well as future crimes, which made it clearly applicable to two prominent old Democrats—ex-President Bayar and Refik Koraltan, former President of the Grand National Assembly...

...The country overwhelmingly voted for his Democratic party opponents and Inonu unhesitatingly retired from office, thereby treating the world to the rare sight of a dictatorship abdicating power...

...To make way for progress, occupants of condemned buildings were often uprooted with 48-hours notice, with no provision made for housing them elsewhere...

...One of the main ingredients lacking here was the easy give-and-take of Western political life...

...There were no summary executions— and apparently no mistreatment—of the members of the Menderes Government who were taken into custody...

...Even a newspaper picture of people queuing up for coffee was enough to send him into a tantrum...

...By the spring of 1960, Menderes and his colleagues began to fear their fate at the next election...

...A minority of deputies did break with him in 1955 to form the Freedom party, but Menderes had no difficulty maintaining his hold on the bulk of his backbenchers...

...IT WAS ONLY in 1922 that General Mustapha Kemal Ataturk drove out the Greeks and deposed the Sultan...

...and the Government cracked down hard...

...the universities were closed...

...the military elite had long been one of the more progressive forces in the nation...

...CREATION OF THE investigating commission lit the fuse...

...In mid-November, a quiet "coup within a coup" occurred, with General Gursel dismissing 14 of 37 members of the National Unity Committee...

...That is still my view...

...Now it had to be reborn...

...Menderes could point to undeniable achievements...

...Meanwhile, profiteers and land speculators made fortunes...

...Some old hands in Turkey suggested that the military regime, which initially favored leniency, now felt compelled to put on a horrifying series of "show trials" to impress the unlettered peasants who had long admired Menderes and Bayar...

...The average citizen suffered not only from the erosion of the currency, but from the country's lack of foreign exchange, which at times led to the disappearance of the most commonplace consumer goods—knives and forks, ink and writing paper, razor blades...

...the IRWIN ROSS, a staff writer on the New York Post, is a contributor to Reader's Digest and Harper's and the author of Strategy for Liberals and The Image Merchants...

...The electoral law was rigged...

...Menderes then embarked on a bold and, in the end, a self-defeating course...

...the result was a galloping inflation...

...The commission, composed exclusively of Democrats, was a most peculiar body...

...I want to put a stop to them...

...THE TRIALS, long delayed, did not begin until October 14 and are still underway...

...MENDERES WAS PERSONALLY dazzled by the vision of rebuilding Istanbul, which indeed was in a sad state of disrepair but hardly deserved to rank high on any list of economic priorities...

...The press was given to understand that the ex-committee members, characterized as a group of extremist hot-heads who had been responsible for the move against the university professors, had themselves been planning to oust the more moderate members of the Government...

...He raised and then lowered the level of Beyazit Square, having great difficulty getting it to his liking, and in the process ruined a lovely plaza...

...THE RELENTLESS PRESSURE on the opposition surprised old admirers of Menderes, who recalled the vigor with which he and Celal Bayar had campaigned for democratic freedoms in the four years preceding their triumph in 1950...

...Early in 1946, four leaders split off from Inonu's People's Republican party and formed the Democratic party...

...The Committee in turn appointed the executive branch—a non-political group of Cabinet Ministers consisting largely of technicians and professors...

...Menderes' followers often lacked the most rudimentary notion of the meaning of democracy...

...The peasants were equally grateful for the largesse which Menderes distributed...

...What had gone wrong...

...It is of course reassuring that, six months after the revolution, no one has been summarily executed and the legal proprieties are being observed at the trials...

...Martial law was imposed...

...He built factories and modern schools, fought superstition in all forms...

...In an acrimonious debate, Ismet Inonu denounced the Democrats' action as unconstitutional and for his pains was excluded from the next 12 sessions of the Assembly...

...Each of these explanations for the Menderes debacle has a certain validity...

...The universities were opened, some 200 students and nine newspapermen were released from jail, and 14 newspapers were allowed to resume publication...

...his Independence Tribunals ordered the execution of a number of Moslem priests who had agitated against the new law...

...basic reason for the Menderes disaster was that democracy was "a new system" for the Turks...

...What does it matter what the intellectuals of Istanbul think," Menderes once asked, "so long as the peasantry is with us...

...He wanted to hasten industrialization, modernize agriculture, build roads, dams, power stations...

...He kept Turkey neutral until 10 weeks before the end of World War II, when it safely joined the Allies and thereby became a charter member of the United Nations...

...The stated justification for this action was that Government monies had been given to the Republicans during the long period of their one-party rule...

...all communications were censored...

...In Menderes' first nine years in office, Turkey's annual Gross National Product increased over 70 per cent...

...if peasants still living in the 16th century controlled their destinies, they would never have voted for Ataturk's reforms...

...Asking that question in Turkey a couple of months after the coup, I received varying replies...

...These gains were made possible by an investment program which outran Turkey's savings, foreign aid (over $1.1 billion from the U.S...

...With the aplomb of a deposed Prime Minister in Britain, Inonu thereupon assumed the leadership of the "loyal opposition...

...A Constituent Assembly would be established "forthwith...

...It was on May 14, 1950, that President Ismet Inonu, who had long ruled with an iron hand, allowed Turkey its first free elections...

...The opposition, naturally, cried foul and also charged the Government with wholesale fraud in the conduct of the election...

...Gursel has in the past spoken of the possibility of an amnesty...

...He was also a man of great charm—until he was crossed...

...Westernization and modernization were his battle cries...

...The election that year would hardly have satisfied the Honest Ballot Association, but the subsequent election in 1950 was a model of impartiality...

...The Menderes people never even understood the role of the opposition...

...Senate...

...To the throngs which cheered the soldiers on May 27, the Army promised an end to authoritarian rule, a new constitution, honest elections...

...It was also suggested that the officers had reason to be apprehensive if Menderes received a light sentence—for, if he ever returned to power, it could mean their heads...

...But if I had won," he remarked with a chuckle, "nobody would have believed that the elections had been honest...

...The Government denied use of the state radio to opposition parties...

...Some 80 per cent of Turkey's population lives in the countryside, and the peasants always constituted Menderes' most fervent supporters...

...a vast amount of luxury housing was built while the unemployed of Istanbul lived in shanty towns...

...To the professor's amazement, the deputy was utterly straightforward: "I just can't stand the ideas you spread in that faculty...

...One faculty member asked a deputy, who was an old family friend, why he had sponsored such a bill...

...Turkey had to adopt at least the outward form of democracy to win favor in Washington and London...

...For a long period in 1957 and 1958, no coffee was to be had—a grievous deprivation in a land where the thick brew in the little cup is the ubiquitous token of hospitality...

...they were unburdened by taxes, they were paid high support prices for their grain, and a few months prior to the 1957 election they received a one-year moratorium on all debts due the Government...

...Menderes has since been cleared of this charge...

...Three years ago," Inonu recalled, "a student asked me when a democratic regime would be secure here...

...In Istanbul, a foreign correspondent talked about national character: "To have a viable democracy, political passions must know some bounds...

...Guilty newspapers could also be suspended for periods of up to three months...

...On the day of the coup, General Cemal Gursel, the leader of the military junta, told the nation by radio that the armed forces had temporarily taken over to end a "frightening crisis" which was leading to "bloody fratricide...

...Political meetings open to the public were banned except for a period of 45 days before an election...

...They were promised fair trials, open to press and public, after investigations had been completed...

...In April of this year, the overwhelming Democratic majority in the Assembly set up a commission to investigate "the subversive and illegal activities" of the Republican party and a section of the press...

...it is an excellent road but much too grand for the relatively few cars which travel it...

...To the bulk of the peasants, Menderes was a great hero...

...By law, Ataturk substituted the Latin for the Arabic alphabet, required his countrymen to take family names (he became Ataturk, "Father of the Turks," by act of Parliament), gave women the vote, adopted the civil code of Switzerland...

...So bitter was partisanship that when American agricultural technicians visited a village, they normally had to hold one meeting at the home of the Democratic leader, another at the home of the Republican leader...

...From 1948 through 1957, agricultural production increased 32.5 per cent, manufacturing 65.9 per cent, mining 163.8 per cent...

...But he tried to do too much too fast and without rudimentary coordination of needs, resources and financial ability...

...The justification offered was that if the Government announced its plans long in advance, speculators would push up land values...

...What was disquieting, however, was that the new regime arrested not only Menderes, Bayar and their henchmen—but almost every Democratic deputy, some 400 in all...

...It was given judicial powers and had the right to suppress newspapers and summarily jail individuals for three years...

...Ataturk's reforms followed in quick order...

...By the spring of 1960, Premier Menderes seemed bent on perpetuating himself in office by any and all means...

...The applause was loud throughout the free world...

...For the first time, the Gursel Government was roundly criticized in the Turkish press, as a consequence of which the dismissals are now being "reviewed...

...There was no apparent need for the new installation, but one of Menderes' ministers insisted it be located there because it was in his constituency...

...Inonu could not totally ignore public opinion...

...Free speech," he cried, in a typical peroration in 1947, "is such a strong weapon that the secret type of political administration cannot resist it for long...

...Another announcement, broadcast several times, promised "free and fair elections...

...Both the Republicans and the Democrats had tightly knit party organizations down to the village level...

...Thousands of citizens came into the streets to hail the troops...

...The most important domestic change planned was a new constitution, to be drafted by a commission of outstanding legal scholars...

...Legislative power in the caretaker regime was vested in the National Unity Committee, the group of officers who had planned the coup...

...Ex-President Inonu, at 76 a wispy but surprisingly vigorous man who still leads the People's Republican party, was inclined to take a more Olympian view...

...What had caused this tragic reversal...

...There was reason for joy in the streets, but the applause could not hide a bitter irony...

...To pay the bill, the Government kept expanding the supply of credit...

...Ataturk responded by dispatching a cruiser to the Black Sea port of Rize...

...The right of free assembly was severely limited...

...But not to all...

...In the office of the Istanbul newspaper Vatan, a wizened little man named Ahmed Emin Yalman, the 73-year-old dean of Turkish journalism, pointed to the personal failings of the old regime: "Menderes originally seemed like a great liberal...

...Once in power, Menderes did not disappoint the traditionalists...

...There was none of the camaraderie across party lines typical of the cloakrooms of the U.S...

...It resulted in a landslide for the Democrats, who were the beneficiaries of a widespread desire for change after 27 years of one-party rule...

...Only 10 years before Turkey had celebrated the birth of her democracy...

...The Turkish people would also be granted a new freedom, the right to strike never previously allowed...

...Thus a factory to make cement ties for railroad beds was established in Eskisehir...

...In 1950, the religious traditionalists among them rallied in large numbers to the Democrats in the hope that a new regime would undo some of the secular reforms of Ataturk...

...This legislation subjected journalists to as much as three years' imprisonment and heavy fines for publishing "false news which would . . . cause loss of respect and confidence toward authorities" or "insults another's honor, dignity or propriety, or invades his private or family life or threatens to commit any of these offenses...

...For some three years, the new Government observed the democratic proprieties...

...it suspended all political activity for three months and forbade any newspaper accounts of its investigations...

...By 1957, the town was so torn up that foreign visitors thought it had been bombed in the war...

...In 1954, the Democrats' popularity was great enough for them to be re-elected by an even larger majority than in 1950...

...Opposition parties were harassed...

...From the airport to the city he built a six-lane highway with a grass island in the center...

...The fact that the new Government adopted so indefensible a measure reinforced suspicions about the motives behind the trials...

...At the end of April, university students at Istanbul and Ankara staged peaceful protest demonstrations...

...everywhere there were expressions of relief that the crisis was over...

...Having made a revolution, the officers perhaps had to justify it by exaggerating the crimes of the "former and fallen" leaders...

...citizens were ordered off the streets from nightfall to dawn...

...The majority of voters who successively returned Menderes to power were no more sophisticated about democracy...

...Most of them were political neophytes, elected for the first time in 1950, and they tended to a fierce partisanship that took no account of the fact that the opposing side might include a few gentlemen...

...The most drastic effort to muzzle criticism was embodied in the press laws passed in 1954 and 1956...

...These developments were heartening to Turkey's friends, as was the new regime's general emphasis on legal procedures...

...The law was invoked against opposition leaders politicking out-of-season, but Government supporters were untouched...

...So efficient was the coup that only two people lost their lives...

...Whether or not he had anticipated his defeat, he readily adjusted himself to the new order of things...

...Menderes was able to keep an uneasy peace by using tanks and troop patrols—until the Army deposed him, four weeks after the first student demonstrations...

...He once again promised a speedy return to democratic government...

...The main mistake 10 years ago was that we were oversold on democracy in Turkey...

...therefore, the widely broadcast charges that the old regime had planned to cede sections of Eastern Turkey to the Soviet Union in return for economic aid—on the face of it, a preposterous accusation...

...A Western diplomat in Ankara was more cynical: "What went wrong...

...For the visitor to Istanbul or Ankara, watching the girls in their summer dresses from the shade of a cafe terrace, it takes an effort of imagination to realize that less than 40 years ago women went about shrouded in veils, that polygamy was the law of the land and that Turkey was a theocratic state headed by a Sultan who was also the religious leader...

...the Village Institutes began to teach religious courses, and the call to prayer was once more heard in Arabic rather than Turkish...

...The Democrats received 4,242,831 votes and elected 396 deputies to the Republicans' 3,165,096 votes and 68 deputies...

...By daybreak all of Turkey was in the Army's hands and the regime of strong man Adnan Menderes had been swept into the dustbin of history...

...Moreover, truth was no defense...

...When finally drafted, it was expected that the constitution would be submitted to a nation-wide referendum...

...When debate grew heated in the Assembly, fist fights sometimes occurred, ink pots and briefcases were hurled, and once or twice a revolver was displayed...

...As public resentment grew, Menderes sought to safeguard his position by curbing the opposition...

...Even before economic conditions deteriorated, his top-heavy majority in the Assembly rammed through a bill, in December 1953, appropriating the property of the Republican party, including more than 200 branch offices and the printing plant of its official newspaper, Ulus...

...Menderes responded to criticism not by reforms but by ever more vigorous efforts to curb his critics...

...As the years passed, he excluded even friendly critics from the small circle around him and suffered the isolation that comes from maintaining an entourage of yes-men...

...The balloting in each province was for party lists, with the party winning a plurality taking all the seats in that province...

...It was enough to be guilty of perpetrating an insult, however well deserved...

...Opposition parties were further hobbled by "another law preventing them from forming coalition slates at elections...

...The Administration then will be handed over to the winning side, whichever political party it might be...

...I think he was sincere in 1950, but power and flattery corrupted him...

...These bizarre accusations, supported by feeble evidence, caused a good deal of foreign criticism of the new regime...

...Retroactive justice understandably dismays any civil libertarian...

...Even his detractors conceded that Menderes' economic goals were exemplary...

...For some time, new elections have been promised for next year...

...At the outset...

...the following year Turkey became a Republic...

...the police were empowered to fire on unlawful assemblies...

...Determined that Turks dress like Westerners, he not only unveiled the women but outlawed the fez (it is still a crime to wear one...

...Menderes' efforts to restrain free speech, just a few years later, cannot be ascribed only to the economic difficulties in which he became embroiled...

...Equally surprising was the Government's action, late in October, in suddenly dismissing 147 university professors on the vague grounds that they were incompetent, lazy or had devoted too much effort to outside work...

...they knew little and cared less about the democratic reforms which were also promised—and which were taken very seriously by middle-class groups in the cities...

...Turkey's old Constitution had centralized all powers in the Grand National Assembly, a situation which easily led to high-handed rule by the leaders of the dominant party...

...The impression was that the whole purpose of these gambits was to blacken the reputations of Bayar and Menderes, even if the court eventually exonerated them...

...By illegalizing this strategy shortly before the election, the new law kept the opposition divided and the Democrats were able to get back into office with a substantial majority of seats (424 to 186 for the opposition), though reduced from 1954, but a minority of the popular vote (about 48 per cent...

...This was true enough, but Menderes' action seemed unduly punitive...

...This sort of thing did not especially surprise the Turks, for Ataturk's ruthlessness was part of a tradition as old as the Ottoman Empire...

...Over the next decade, however, Turkey's new rulers gradually subverted the democratic system which had brought them to power...

...The new regime moved swiftly to restore normal life...