Category: Regions

  • The United States needs to tell Turkey to change course

    The United States needs to tell Turkey to change course

    By Morton Abramowitz, Eric Edelman and Blaise Misztal, Updated: Thursday, January 23, 6:32 PM

    Morton Abramowitz and Eric Edelman are former U.S. ambassadors to Turkey and co-chairs of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Turkey Initiative. Blaise Misztal is acting director of foreign policy at the center.

    Whatever his achievements over the past decade, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is destroying his country’s parlous democracy. That is a profound problem for Turks and Turkey’s Western allies. Staying silent, out of fear that speaking out would harm some short-term interests, risks Turkey’s longer-term stability.

    Last month police arrested more than 50 people close to Erdogan’s government — including prominent business executives and sons of government ministers — on charges of corruption. While graft has long permeated Turkish governments, these allegations are unprecedented. They reach high levels of government and involve not just domestic transgressions but also sizable evasions of Iranian sanctions.

    Rather than ensuring a meticulous examination of these charges, Erdogan is burying them. He has removed the case’s lead prosecutors and some 3,000 police officers nationwide, sought to increase government control over a weak judiciary,limited the ability of police to conduct independent investigations, prevented journalists from reporting on the case andmounted a media campaign to destroy his enemies — particularly the followers of powerful religious leader Fethullah Gulen, who were once his strongest allies. And, as he did when protests erupted against his government last summer, Erdogan portrays the events as a massive plot against him. He has also implicated other opposition parties and foreign powers and even threatened to expel the U.S. ambassador.

    These are not the actions of a politician simply seeking to stave off scandal. Erdogan is exploiting the allegations to further stifle dissent and strengthen his grip on Turkey.

    His tactics are not new. When challenged, Erdogan has sought to destroy his opponents rather than compromise. After effectively sidelining the military’s political influence , Erdogan went after other centers of power: media, business leaders and civil society; now, the Gulenists, a strong, politically effective community. The prime minister has exploited crises — whether real or manufactured — to undermine the rule of law.

    The protests in Gezi Park last year and the present scandal are neither isolated domestic disturbances nor simple political infighting. Their occurrence and the government’s reaction are symptomatic of a struggle between an increasingly authoritarian government, which seeks to reduce resistance to its rule, and opposition movements ranging from secular liberals to conservative Gulenists.

    That struggle has entered a new phase. Turkey has important local elections at the end of March, followed by presidential and parliamentary campaigns. Erdogan has not yet declared whether he will seek the presidency or reelection as prime minister, but he is intent on continuing to run Turkey. These allegations, and his subsequent actions, could lower his vote tallies; they have given the opposition parties new life.

    Turkey’s democratic decline creates a pressing dilemma for the United States. Erdogan’s current course would take Turkey from an imperfect democracy to an autocracy. Such a fate for a close ally and NATO member would have profound implications for our partnership, the United States’ beleaguered credibility and the prospects for democracy in the region. It would also threaten Turkey’s economy.

    Secretary of State John Kerry, with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in tow, recently made some modest, generalized public references to U.S. devotion to democracy and the rule of law while insisting that the United States would stay out of Turkish domestic politics and rhapsodizing on the bilateral relationship. Not surprisingly, Davutoglu agreed.

    Erdogan’s denunciation of supposed U.S. meddling puts Washington in a difficult position: If the United States weighs in on the scandal, it might give his accusations merit and rally more supporters to his side.

    Yet for much of Erdogan’s rule, the U.S. approach has been mostly public silence on unfavorable developments, with occasional private rebukes. As we argued in a recent Bipartisan Policy Center report, this strategy has not succeeded. It has not influenced important aspects of Erdogan’s foreign policy, which have often diverged from U.S. policy; moderated his confrontational rhetoric; or led to a less antagonistic domestic policy. Indeed, U.S. silence all these years might have encouraged Erdogan.

    U.S. policymakers should lay aside their reluctance to confront the disastrous impact of Erdogan’s dictatorial tendencies and remind the Turkish leader of the importance the United States attaches to Turkey’s political stability and democratic vitality. Particularly as their influence is greater than it appears: While Turks do not trust the United States, neither do they like to be at odds with it.

    Erdogan has exploited Turkey’s partnership with the United States and his close personal relationship with President Obama to burnish his legitimacy. U.S. condemnation of his recent actions — publicly and even more strongly in private — might temper his posturing. However significant U.S. interests with Turkey are, neither silence nor platitudes will help halt its political descent.

    Erdogan is doing great harm to Turkey’s democracy. The United States should make clear, privately and publicly, that his extreme actions and demagoguery are subverting Turkey’s political institutions and values and endangering the U.S.-Turkey relationship.

  • Spain’s Princess Cristina charged with tax fraud, money-laundering

    Spain’s Princess Cristina charged with tax fraud, money-laundering

    Spain's Princess Infanta Cristina (C) smiles she visits Den Do temple in Bac Ninh province near Hanoi November 20, 2009. CREDIT: REUTERS/KHAM
    Spain’s Princess Infanta Cristina (C) smiles she visits Den Do temple in Bac Ninh province near Hanoi November 20, 2009.
    CREDIT: REUTERS/KHAM

    (Reuters) – Princess Cristina, the younger daughter of Spain’s King Juan Carlos, has been charged with tax fraud and money-laundering, piling further scandal on the once-beloved but increasingly unpopular royal family.

    Palma de Mallorca Examining Magistrate Jose Castro said in a 200-page ruling after a lengthy investigation that there was evidence that Cristina, 48, had committed crimes.

    He summoned her to appear in court on March 8, possibly paving the way for an unprecedented trial of a Spanish royal.

    The princess’s defense lawyer, Miguel Roca, told Spanish television he would appeal the summons, saying “I am absolutely convinced of her innocence”.

    Her husband, former Olympic handball player Inaki Urdangarin, was earlier charged with fraud, tax evasion, falsifying documents and embezzlement of 6 million euros ($8 million) in public funds through his charitable foundation, which put on sports business conferences in Mallorca and elsewhere in Spain. Urdangarin has denied any wrongdoing.

    The case is one of many high-level corruption scandals in Spain that have undermined faith in public institutions at a time of economic crisis marked by deep cuts in public spending.

    Opinion of the royal family in particular has sunk to its lowest level ever.

    A Sigma Dos poll published on Sunday showed almost two thirds of Spaniards want King Juan Carlos to abdicate after 38 years on the throne and hand over to Prince Felipe, who is still well regarded and is not implicated in his sister’s case.

    Juan Carlos became king with the restoration of the monarchy in 1975 following the death of the dictator General Francisco Franco. He won respect from Spaniards for his role in the transition to democracy, notably his actions in foiling a coup attempt in 1981.

    But various scandals, shows of extravagance, and incidents such as an elephant-hunting trip to Africa at the height of the crisis in 2012 have tarnished his standing along with the Urdangarin affair.

    While they have been under investigation, Princess Cristina and her husband have ceased to participate in public appearances. She and the couple’s four children moved last year to Geneva where she works for a Spanish bank’s charity. Urdangarin remains in Spain.

    The case is centered on Urdangarin’s non-profit Noos Foundation. He is accused of using his connections to win public contracts to put on events in Mallorca and elsewhere in Spain. Judge Castro has said there is evidence the foundation overcharged for organizing conferences and hid the proceeds abroad.

    In his ruling, Castro detailed dozens of personal items the princess paid for – from Harry Potter books to home redecorations – out of a shell company the judge said was used to launder proceeds from the Noos Foundation.

    “These sums were used on strictly personal spending…And they should have been declared in income tax statements… But it is evident that neither Inaki Urdangarin nor Mrs. Cristina de Borbon ever did so, which means they repeatedly defrauded the tax authority,” he wrote in his ruling.

    However, the judge also said it was not clear whether the princess had evaded more than 120,000 euros in taxes a year, the division between an infraction and a felony.

    The charges brought on Tuesday are known as an “imputacion” in Spanish, and could be thrown out before trial.

    An “imputacion” is not as strong as an indictment that would immediately precede a trial, but it is more significant than a subpoena of an accused party because the judge argues there is evidence of specific criminal activity.

    Castro, who opened his investigation into the royal couple three years ago, has struggled to make charges stick against Princess Cristina.

    In April last year he ruled there was evidence she had aided and abetted Urdangarin. A higher court threw out those charges in May, saying the evidence was not sufficient, but gave Castro more time to investigate alleged tax fraud.

    In bringing the new charges, Castro went against the recommendations of the anti-corruption prosecutor on the case, who has argued there was not evidence she committed crimes.

    In Spain, the prosecutor and the judge on a case carry out separate investigations and may disagree on proceedings.

    Activist anti-corruption group Clean Hands has filed a criminal complaint against Princess Cristina, and is a party to the judicial investigation. The group disagreed with the public prosecutor and recommended the judge bring criminal charges.

    In Spain, civic groups can force prosecutors and judges into action by filing criminal lawsuits known as “people’s accusations”. Clean Hands has spurred action on several ongoing corruption cases in Spain, by filing this sort of lawsuit.

    (Additional reporting by Jesus Aguado; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

  • Canada accused of hiding child abuse evidence

    Canada accused of hiding child abuse evidence

    Documents detailing abuse at schools for aboriginal children taken from their families were withheld, say victims.

    Toronto, Canada – When Edmund Metatawabin was five years old, he was sent to a remote church-run school for aboriginal children in Canada where he, and hundreds of others, say they faced years of abuse and torture.

    Metatawabin spent about 10 years at the school, beginning in the 1950s. One morning, he says, he was feeling ill and threw up while eating porridge. He says he was slapped and told to go upstairs. When he felt better – four days later – he went back to the dining hall and was forced to eat his own vomit.

    Edmund Metatawabin (right) seeks documents on abuse at a church-run school [Kristina Jovanovski/Al Jazeera]
    Edmund Metatawabin (right) seeks documents on abuse at a church-run school [Kristina Jovanovski/Al Jazeera]

    Metatawabin, 66, says at times he and his classmates were forced to sit in an electric chair – either as punishment or as entertainment for the staff at St Anne’s Indian Residential School, which operated from the early 1900s to 1976 in northern Ontario province. 
    “I was given that porridge I got sick on and I had to eat that … And if you don’t eat, then you’re going to get beat up some more, and you’re going to get punished – and if you throw up again you’re going to have to eat that too, so what choice do you have?”

    Residential school students at Fort George cemetery in November 1946 [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]
    Residential school students at Fort George cemetery in November 1946 [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]
    Now, Metatawabin says, the government is hiding information about the school.

    St Anne’s was part of a government-supported school system to “assimilate” aboriginal children. About 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families by the federal government for decades starting in the 1800s and put into church-run “residential schools”.

    Many suffered physical and sexual abuse and squalid living conditions, and a Truth and Reconciliation Committee recently said at least 4,000 died children died – a number that could be much higher.

    Not an isolated case

    Dozens of former St Anne’s students are seeking documents they say will support their claims of abuse to present to private compensation hearings, in which victims tell their stories to an adjudicator.

    Fay Brunning, a lawyer representing about 60 victims, says the Canadian government had been hiding evidence by withholding those documents, which include police files and transcripts from trials of alleged abusers.

    There was such widespread abuse there I think they were afraid of how many claims they would get out of St Anne’s.

    – Fay Brunning, lawyer

    “There was such widespread abuse there I think they were afraid of how many claims they would get out of St Anne’s … they wanted to make sure they paid as few people as they could,” says Brunning.

    In 1992, Metatawabin, who at the time was chief of the community where the school had been located, helped organise a conference of former students where they shared their stories.

    An investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police followed, leading to charges against seven former employees. According to the Canadian Press news agency, five of them were convicted, including for assault causing bodily harm, indecent assault and administering a noxious substance.

    Brunning says many abusers escaped justice because they died before charges were brought. She says the government obtained a significant amount of police files and trial transcripts in 2003, but only admitted it had them in 2013. The government is legally obliged to provide all documents relating to abuse at residential schools, says Brunning.

    She argues having these documents would greatly support a victim’s story during hearings for compensation because the adjudicator would know about convictions of those accused of abuse, the evidence that was provided in court at the time, as well as the allegations made during the police investigation.

    ‘Re-victimisation’

    Brunning says former students are being re-victimised because they are being put into vulnerable positions to face powerful lawyers without all the evidence to support their claims. “There’s an overall recognition [that] what happened to them is wrong – but then it’s happening again. The actual knowledge of proven abuse, proven in criminal courts of law, [has] been covered up … and it’s extremely unfair.”

    Neither the department of justice or department of aboriginal affairs would grant Al Jazeera interviews for this report.

    However, the office of the aboriginal affairs minister emailed a statement, saying: “Our government takes our obligations under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement seriously and we continue to ensure that the government fulfills its obligations under the Agreement. In order to bring clarity to these issues, we are seeking direction from the Ontario Superior Court with respect to the Ontario Provincial Police documents. We look forward to receiving the court’s decision.”

    In a document submitted to the court, the government says the files are unlikely to be useful for claimants seeking compensation. The government has also argued there are privacy concerns in handing over documents detailing abuse.

    I can’t for the life of me in 2013 understand why a government would choose to cover up the horrific abuse that happened at St Anne’s.

    – Charlie Angus, MP

    However, Brunning says the files would be kept confidential during the private hearings of victims.

    New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus, whose constituency includes the community where St Anne’s was located, says there are means in place to keep a victim’s privacy and the government is using such concerns to protect itself.

    “I can’t for the life of me in 2013 understand why a government would choose to cover up the horrific abuse that happened at St Anne’s, why they would side with the perpetrators rather than the victims,” Angus says.

    Metatawabin says aboriginal elders encouraged victims to tell their stories, and the community has not raised concerns of privacy in the government handing over the files. “Did we ever say anything about privacy? The government says that and that’s an excuse, privacy is just an excuse … to hide everything.”

    Ultimately though, once the issue was brought to court in mid-December, the government did not oppose handing over the police files and trial transcripts, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on residential schools, which also requested the documents.

    Brunning says while this was a major victory for victims, trust in the system has now been lost. She is asking the court to order an affidavit from the government – listing all the documents in its possession relating to abuse at St Anne’s – and to set up a neutral body to monitor the process. She says there could be other files the government is hiding.

    Abuse was not limited to St Anne’s. In December, the CBC reported that a former supervisor at another residential school was given three years in jail for sexually abusing boys, drawing criticism from victims that the punishment was too lenient. The prosecutor had asked for 11 years in prison.

    ‘Like little white children’

    In 2007, thousands of lawsuits from former students across the country led to Canada’s largest class-action settlement. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was established to provide compensation to those abused. Between the 1860s and 1990s, 150,000 aboriginal children attended these schools, which were normally run by churches but funded by the government, according to a report by the TRC.

    20141691017216734 20
    Residential school students in Wabasca, Alberta [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]

    It states the widespread physical and sexual abuse – and loss of aboriginal culture – led to the traumatisation of generations of children, high mortality rates, low educational levels, and destruction of aboriginal families.

    Metatawabin says the St Anne’s staff insulted his family and appearance to erode his identity. As was common in residential schools, he was banned from speaking his aboriginal language.

    “We were supposed to come out of [a] residential school like little white children, speaking English and thinking like the way the English people think.”

    All nine of his siblings attended the school, meaning his father had to send a child there every year for 10 years. Each sibling faced similar abuse.

    The abuse at St Anne’s is considered among the worst that occurred within the residential school system.

    “It represents the most extreme examples of abuse that certainly have come to my attention so far, short of murder. It’s obvious the children were tortured in horrific circumstances,” says Julian Falconer, a lawyer for the TRC.

    It is not known when the court will hand down a decision, but Brunning says the judge knows the issue is urgent as some of the claimants are elderly. Time has run out for others, though. Of the 150,000 children sent to residential schools, the TRC estimates just 80,000 are still living.

    As for Metatawabin, he is following the advice of aboriginal elders and sharing his story so that people can better understand the struggles of his people.

    “Every time I do this, it’s not a threat anymore, and it doesn’t get me down anymore. I do it so that [people] will learn about what [we] went through … and that when you see a person on the street, you will know they were treated very badly as a child.”

     

    Source:  Al Jazeera
  • Kemal Pasha by Isaac F. Marcosson, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

    Kemal Pasha by Isaac F. Marcosson, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

    THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

    October 20, 1923
    THERE was a time when Angora was famous solely,
    for cats and goats. Today the shambling, timeworn
    town far up in the Anatolian hills has
    another, and world-wide significance. It is not
    only the capital of the reconstructed Turkish
    Government and the seat therefore of the most
    picturesque of all contemporary experiments
    in democracy, but is likewise the home of
    Ghazi Mustapha Kemal Pasha—to give him
    his full title—who is distinct among the few
    vital personalities revealed by the bitter
    backwash of the World War.

    Only Lenine and Mussolini vie with him
    for the center of that narrowing stage of compelling
    leadership. Each of these three remarkable
    men has achieved a definite result
    in a manner all his own. Lenine imposed an
    autocracy through force and blood. Mussolini
    created a personal and political dictatorship
    in which he dramatized himself. Kemal
    not only led a beaten nation to victory and
    dictated terms to the one-time conqueror, but
    set up a new and unique system of administration.
    Lenine and Mussolini have almost been
    done to death by human or, in the case of the
    soviet overlord, inhuman interest historians.
    Kemal Pasha is still invested with an element
    of mystery and aloofness largely begot of the
    physical inaccessibility of his position. To
    the average American he is merely a Turkish
    name vaguely associated with some kind of
    military achievement. The British Dardanelles
    Expedition know it much better, for he
    frustrated the fruits of that immense heroism
    written in blood and agony on the shores of
    Gallipoli. The Greeks have an even costlier
    knowledge, because he was the organizer of
    the victory that literally drove them into the
    sea in one of the most complete debacles of
    modern times.

    At Angora I talked with this man in a
    critical hour of the war-born Turkish Government.
    The Lausanne Conference was at the
    breaking point. War or peace still hung in the
    balance. Only the day before, Rauf Bey, the
    Prime Minister, had said to me: “If they [the Allies]
    want war they can have it.” The air was charged with
    tension and uncertainty. Over the troubled scene brooded
    the unrelenting presence of the chieftain I had traveled
    so far to see. Events, like the government itself, revolved
    about him.

    In difficulty of approach and in the grim and dramatic
    quality of the setting, Anatolia was strongly reminiscent
    of my journey a year ago to the Southern Chinese front to
    see Sun Yat-sen. Between him and Kemal exists a certain
    similarity. Each is a sort of inspired leader. Each has his
    kindling ideal of a self-determination that is the by-product
    of fallen empire. Here the parallel ends. Kemal is the
    man of blood and iron—an orientalized Bismarck, as it
    were—dogged, ruthless, invincible; while Sun Yat-sen
    is the dreamer and visionary, eternal pawn of chance, and
    with as many political existences—and I might add, governments-
    -as the proverbial cat has lives.

    Turkey for the Turks
    AS WITH men, so with the peoples behind them. You
    have another striking contrast. While China flounders
    in well-nigh incredible political chaos, due to incessant
    conflict of selfish purpose and lack of leadership, Turkey
    has emerged as a homogeneous nation for the first time in
    its long and bloody history, with defined frontiers, a real
    homeland, and a nationalistic aim that may shape the
    destiny of the Mohammedan world, and incidentally affect
    American commercial aspirations in the Near East.
    “Turkey for the Turks” is the new slogan. The instrument
    and inspiration of the whole astonishing evolution—it is
    little less than a miracle when you realize that in 1919
    Turkey was as prostrate as defeat and bankruptcy could
    bring her—has been Kemal Pasha.

    He was the real objective of my trip to Turkey. Constantinople
    with its gleaming mosques and minarets, and
    still a queen among cities despite its dingy magnificence,
    had its lure, but from the hour of my arrival on the shores
    of the Golden Horn my interest was centered on Angora.
    I had chosen a difficult time for the realization of this
    ambition. The Lausanne Conference was apparently
    mired, and the long-awaited peace seemed more distant
    than ever. A state of war still existed. The army of occupation
    gave the streets martial tone and color, while a vast
    Allied fleet rode at anchor in the Bosporus or boomed at
    Kemal Pasha as Field Marshal of the Turkish
    Army. The Autograph Reads: “Ghazi Musta•
    pha Kemal Pasha, Angora, July tith”
    target practice in the Sea of Marmora. The capital in the
    Anatolian hills had become even more inaccessible.
    Every barrier based on suspicion, aloofness and general
    resentment of the foreigner—the usual Turkish trilogy—
    all tied up with endless red tape, worked overtime. It was
    a combination disastrous to swift American action. My
    subsequent experiences emphasized the truth of the wellknown
    Kipling story which dealt with the fate of an energetic
    Yankee in the Orient whose epitaph read: “Here
    lies a fool who tried to hustle the East.”
    To add to all this handicap begot of temperament and
    otherwise, the Turks had begun to realize, not without
    irritation, that the consummation of the Chester Concession
    was not so easy as it looked on paper. The last civilian
    who successfully applied for permission to go to Angora
    had been compelled to linger at Constantinople seven
    weeks before he got his vessica—as a visa is called in Turkish.
    Two or three others had departed for home in disgust
    after four weeks of watchful and fruitless waiting. The
    prospect was not promising.

    When I paid my respects to Rear Admiral Mark L.
    Bristol, the American High Commissioner, on my first
    day in Constantinople, I invoked his aid in getting to
    Angora. He promptly gave me a letter of introduction
    to Dr. Adnan Bey, then the principal representative of
    Angora in Constantinople, through whom all permits had
    to pass.

    I went to see him at the famous Sublime Porte, the
    Foreign Office and the scene of so much sinister Turkish
    history. Here the sordid tools of Abdul-Hamid, the Red
    Sultan, and others no less unscrupulous, lived their day.
    I expected to find the structure almost as imposing as its
    richer mate in history, the Mosque of St. Sophia. It
    proved to be a dirty, rambling, yellow building without
    the slightest semblance of architectural beauty, and
    strongly in need of disinfecting.

    In Adnan Bey I found my first Turkish ally.Moreover,
    I discovered him to be a man of the world with a broad
    and generous outlook. An early aid of Kemal in the
    precarious days of the nationalist movement, he became
    the first vice president of the Angora Government.
    Moreover, he had another claim to fame, for he is
    the husband of the renowned Halide Hanum, the
    foremost woman reformer of Turkey, whom I
    was later to meet in interesting circumstances
    at Munich, and whose story will be
    disclosed in a subsequent article. Adnan
    Bey, however, is not what we would call a
    professional husband in America. Long before
    he rallied to the Kemalist cause he was
    widely known as one of the ablest physicians
    in Turkey.

    He at once sent a telegram to Angora asking
    for my permission to go. This permission
    is concretely embodied in a pass—the aforesaid
    vessica—which is issued by the Constantinople
    prefect of police. Back in the days of
    the Great War it was a difficult procedure to
    get the so-called white pass which enabled
    the holder to go to the front. Compared with
    the coveted permission to visit Angora, that
    pass was about as inaccessible as a public
    handbill, as I was now to discover.
    Adnan Bey told me that he would have an
    answer from Angora in about three days. I
    found that three days was like the Russian
    word seichas which technically means “immediately”
    but when employed in action or
    rather lack of action on its own ground, usually
    spells “next month.”

    Red ,Tape Entanglements
    AFTER a week passed the American Embassy
    inquired of the Sublime Porte if they
    had heard about my application, but no word
    had come. A few days later Turkish officialdom
    went mad. An order was promulgated
    that no alien except of British, French or
    Italian nationality could enter or leave Constantinople
    without the consent of Angora.
    People who had left Paris or London, and they
    included various Americans, with existing credentials,
    were held up at the Turkish frontier,
    despite the fact that the order had been issued
    after they had started. Thanks to Admiral Bristol’s
    prompt and persistent endeavors, the frontier ban was
    lifted from Americans. Angora became swamped overnight
    with telegraphic protests and requests, and I felt that
    mine was completely lost in the new and growing shuffle.
    Meanwhile I had acquired a fine upstanding young Turk,
    Reschad Bey by name, who spoke English, French and
    German fluently, as dragoman, which means courier and
    interpreter. No alien can go to Angora without such an
    aid, because, save in a few isolated spots, the only language
    spoken in Anatolia is Turkish. Reschad Bey was really an
    inheritance from Robert Imbrie, who had just retired
    after a year as American consul at Angora. Reschad Bey
    had been his interpreter. Much contact with Imbrie had
    acquainted him with American ways and he thoroughly
    sympathized with my impatience over the delay. He had
    a strong pull at Angora himself and sent some telegrams
    to friends in my behalf.

    At the expiration of the second week Admiral Bristol
    made a personal appeal to Adnan Bey to expedite my permission,
    and a second strong telegram went from the Sublime
    Porte to Angora. Other Turkish and American individuals
    whom I had met added their requests by wire. Of
    course I was occupied with other work, but I had only a
    limited amount of time at my disposal and when all was
    said and done, Kemal was the principal prize of the trip
    and I was determined to land him. Early in July therefore
    I sent Reschad Bey to Angora to find out just what
    the situation was. He departed on the morning of the
    Fourth. When I returned to my hotel from attending the
    Independence Day celebration at the embassy I found a
    telegram from Angora addressed to Reschad Bey in my
    care from one of his friends in the government, saying that
    my permission to go to Angora had been wired nine days
    before! Yet on the previous morning the Sublime Porte
    had declared that Angora was still silent on my request.
    Upon investigation I found that in the tangle of red
    tape at the prefecture of police the coveted telegram had
    been shoved under a pile of papers and no one knew anything
    about it until a long search, instigated at my request,
    had disclosed the anxiously awaited message. It was a
    typically Turkish procedure, and just the kind of thing
    that might have happened at an official bureau anywhere
    in China. Before Reschad Bey reported to me after his
    return I had the ressica in my possession and was getting
    ready to start.
    THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 9
    Difficult as was this first step, it was matched in
    various handicaps by nearly every stage of the actual
    journey. Again I was to run afoul of Turkish official
    decree.
    In ordinary circumstances, if I had been a Turk I
    could have boarded a train at Haidar Pasha, which is
    just across the Bosporus by ferry from Constantinople
    and the beginning of the Anatolian section of the
    much-discussed Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway, and gone
    without change to Angora in approximately twentyseven
    hours. It happened, however, that the whole
    Turkish Army of considerably more than 250,000 men
    was mobilized beyond Ismid and along the railroad
    right of way. No alien was permitted to make this
    journey. Instead of the comparatively easy trip by
    rail—I say ” comparatively ” advisedly—he was compelled
    to go by boat to Mudania, then by rail to Brusa,
    and subsequently by motor all day across the Anatolian
    plain to Kara Keuy, where he would pick up the
    train from Haidar Pasha. Instead of twenty-seven
    hours, this trip—and it was the one I had to make—
    took exactly fifty-five hours.
    Going to Angora these days is like making an expedition
    to the heart of China or Africa. In the first
    place you must carry your own food. There are other
    preliminaries. One of the most essential, even if it is
    not the most esthetic, is to secure half a dozen tins
    of insect powder. The moment you leave Constantinople—
    and for that matter even while you are within
    the storied precincts of the great city—you make the
    acquaintance of endless little visitors of every conceivable
    kind and bite. Apparently the average Turk
    has become more or less inured to the inroads of vermin,
    but even long experience with trench warfare
    does not cure the European of aversion to it.
    It was on a brilliant sunlight Monday morning that
    I left Constantinople for Angora. Admiral Bristol
    had placed a submarine chaser in command of Captain
    T. H. Robbins at my disposal and we were therefore
    able to dispense with the crowded and none too clean
    Turkish boat. Accompanied by Lewis Heck, who had
    been the first American High Commissioner to Turkey
    after the Armistice, and who now had a business mission
    at Angora, and the faithful Reschad Bey, I made the
    journey to Mudania across the Sea of Marmora in
    four hours, arriving at noon. Until November, 1922,
    Mudania was merely a spot on the Turkish map. After
    the Greek debacle, and when the British and Turkish
    armies had come within a few feet of actual collision at
    Chanak, and war between the two powers seemed inevitable,
    General Sir Charles Harington, commander of the
    British forces in Turkey, and Ismet Pasha—the same Ismet
    who led the Allied delegates such a merry diplomatic chase
    at Lausanne—met here and arranged the famous truce
    that was the prelude to the first Lausanne Conference.
    Madame Brotte and Her Hotel
    OVE RNIG HT the village became famous. The small stone
    house near the quay where the conference was held is now
    occupied by a Turkish family and is overrun with children.
    Instead of making the forty-mile journey to Brusa in the
    toy train that runs twice a day, we traveled in a brand-new
    Kemal With His Puppies
    Madame Kama!
    American flivver just acquired by a
    Brusa dealer, which had been ordered
    by telegraph and which awaited us
    at the dock. The hillsides were dark
    with a mass of olive trees, while in
    the valleys tobacco and corn grew in
    abundance. The Anatolian peasant
    is a thrifty and industrious soul and
    apparently had got back on the job
    of reconstruction even while the Greek
    transports were fading out of sight.
    Long before the muezzins sounded
    from the minarets their musical calls
    to sunset prayer we arrived in
    Brusa, the ancient capital of Turkey,
    and still a place of commercial importance.
    Here we stopped the night
    at the Hotel d’Anatolie, where I bade
    farewell to anything like comfort and convenience until
    my return there on my way back to Constantinople.
    This hotel is one of the famous institutions of Anatolia.
    It is owned by Madame Brotte, who is no less
    distinguished than her hostelry. Out in her pleasant
    garden, where we could listen to the musical flow of a
    tiny cataract, this quaint old lady, still wearing the
    white cap of the French peasant, told me her story.
    She had been born in Lyons, in France, eighty-four
    years ago, and came to Anatolia with her father, a silk
    expert, when she was twenty-one. Brusa is the center
    of the Turkish silk industry, which was founded and is
    still largely operated by the French. Madame had
    married the proprietor of the hotel shortly after her
    advent, and on his death took over the operation.
    Wars, retreats and devastations beat about her, but
    she maintained her serene way. She had lived in Turkey
    so long that she mixed Turkish words with her
    French. Listening to her patter in that fragrant environment,
    and with the memory of the excellent French
    dinner she had

    Untitled - 2
    served, made it difficult for me to realize
    that I was in Anatolia and not in France.
    Anatolia, let me add, is bone-dry so far as alcohol is
    concerned. The one regret that madame expressed was
    that the Turks sealed up her wine cellar, and only heaven
    and Angora knew when those seals would be lifted. It
    is worth mentioning that during the eight days I spent
    in Anatolia I never saw a drop of liquor. It is about
    the only place in the world where prohibition seems to
    prohibit. Constantinople is a different, and later, story.
    In Madame Brotte I got another evidence of a curious
    formula of colonial expansion. When you knock
    about the world, and especially the outlying places,
    you discover that certain races follow definite rules when
    they are implanted in foreign soil. The first thing that
    The Kemal Home at Angora
    I now had my first contact with what has been well
    called the Anatolian qxcart symphony. It is the weirdest
    perhaps of all sounds, and is emitted from the ungreased
    wood-wheeled carts drawn by oxen or water buffalo, which
    provide the only available vehicle for the Turkish farmer.
    There has been no change in its noise or construction since
    the days of Saul of Tarsus. It is a violation of etiquette
    for the driver of one of these carts—the roads are alive with
    them—to be awake in transit, incredible as this seems when
    you have heard the frightful noise. He awakes only when
    the screech stops. Silence is his alarm clock. These carts
    do about fifteen miles a day. When the Greeks had the
    important Southern Turkish ports bottled up, all of Kemal’s
    supplies were hauled in these carts for over two hundred
    miles to Angora.
    The farther we traveled the more did the country take
    on the aspect of Northern France after the war. Hollyhocks
    were growing in the shell holes, and there were always
    the gaunt, stark ruins of a house or village sentineling the
    landscape. We passed through the village of In Onu, where
    the Greeks and the Turks had met in bloody battle, and
    just as the sun was setting we drew up at Kara Keuy,
    which is merely a railway station flanked by a few of the
    coffeehouses that you find everywhere in Turkey. A contingent
    of Turkish troops was encamped near by. Before
    we could get coffee we had to submit our papers for examination
    by the police.
    An hour later the train that had left Haidar Pasha that
    morning pulled in. We bagged a first-class compartment
    and started on the final lap to Angora. Midnight found
    us at Eski-Shehr, once a considerable town, where the
    Greeks and the Turks were at death grips for months.
    After the Turkish retirement in 1921 the town was burnt
    by the Greeks. No sooner was I on the train and trying
    (Continued on Page 14I)
    the English do is to start a bank. The Spanish invariably
    build a church, while the French set up a café.
    So it was in Anatolia.
    It was with a certain regret that I bade farewell the
    next morning to the dear old French dame. In the
    same flivver that brought us up from Mudania we
    started on the all-day run to Kara Keuy. At the outskirts
    of Brusa I saw the first tangible signs of the
    Greek disaster. Ditched along the roadside were
    hundreds of motor trucks—unwilling gifts from the
    Greeks—which the Turks had not even taken the
    trouble to remove or salvage. As we swung into
    the open country ruined farmhouses met the gaze on
    every side. Whole villages had been wiped out when
    the Greeks had pressed on for what they had fondly
    believed to be the capture of Angora. They came
    back much faster than they advanced.
    Travel by Oxcart
    WE WERE in the real Anatolia. This mellifluous
    name, rivaled in beauty of sound only by Mesopotamia,
    means “the place where the sun rises.” It had
    long shone on people and events bound up in the
    narrative of all human and spiritual progress, for we
    now skirted what might be called the rim of the cradle
    of mankind. Across these plains had stalked the
    stately and immortal figures of Biblical days. Here
    the armies of Alexander and Pompey had camped,
    and the famous Gordian knot was cut. Here, too,
    passed the mailed crusaders on the road to Jerusalem,
    and amid the green hills that rose to the left and right
    the civilization of the Near East was born.
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    THE SfITURDAY EVENING POST 141
    TEZETEL PZOIEZ
    (Continued from Page 9)
    to get some sleep on the hard seat, for Pullmans
    are unknown in Turkey, than I began
    to make the acquaintance of the little travelers
    who had put the itch into Anatolia.
    They are the persistent little Nature guides
    to discomfort.
    For hours the country had become more
    and more rugged. The fertile, lowlands
    with their fields of waving corn and grateful
    green were now far behind. As we
    climbed steadily into the hills we could see
    occasional flocks of Angora goats. It was a
    dull, bleak prospect, but every inch of
    ground, as far as the eye could see, and beyond,
    had been f ought over.
    At nine o’clock the next morning we
    crossed a narrow stream that wound lazily
    along. Although insignificant in appearance,
    like most of the other historic rivers,
    it will be immortalized in Turkish song and
    tradition. In all the years to come the
    quaint story-tellers whom you find in the
    bazaars will recount the epic story of what
    happened along its rocky banks. This
    inconsequential-looking river was the famous
    Sakaria, which marked the high tide
    of the Greek offensive and the place where
    Kemal Pasha’s army made its last desperate
    stand. Very near the point where we
    crossed, the Greeks were hurled back and
    their offensive broken. What the Marne
    means to France and the Piave to Italy,
    that is the Sakaria to the new Turkey. It
    marks the spot where rose the star of hope.
    Almost before I realized it a pall of
    smoke, the invariable outpost of a city,
    loomed ahead. Then I saw scattered
    mosques and minarets stark and white in
    the sunlight, and before long we were in
    Angora. The railway station is in the outskirts
    of the town and I had to drive for
    more than a mile to get to my lodging.
    Despite the discomforts of the trip I
    must confess to something of a thrill when
    I stepped from the train. At last I was in
    a capital without: precedent, perhaps, in
    the history of civilization. After their
    temporary sojourn first at Erzerum and
    then at Sivas, the Kemalists had set up
    their governmental shop in this squalid,
    dilapidated and half-burned village at one
    railhead of the Anatolian road. It was not
    without its historical association because
    once the crusaders camped here, and later
    Tamerlane the Terrible had overwhelmed
    the Sultan Bayezid in a famous battle and
    carried him off to the East as prisoner.
    Angora, the Strange Capital
    Almost overnight the population had
    grown from ten thousand to sixty thousand.
    With the advent of the Grand National
    Assembly, as the Turkish parliament is
    called, came the cabinet, all the members
    of the government, and the innumerable
    human appendages of national administration.
    Until the overthrow of the Greeks
    last year, Angora was also the general headquarters
    of the Turkish Army and its chief
    supply base.
    Then, as now, Angora was more like a
    Western mining town in the first flush of
    a boom than the capital of a government
    whose future is a source of concern in
    every European chancellery. Every house,
    indeed every excuse for a habitation, is
    packed and jammed with people. Imbrie,
    the American consul, was forced to live for
    a year in a freight car which was placed at
    his disposal by the government. Moreover,
    he had to struggle hard to hang on to
    this makeshift home. The shops are primitive,
    and there are only two restaurants
    that a European could patronize.
    Hotels as we know them do not exist.
    The nearest approach is the so-called han,
    which is the Turkish. word for house.
    The average Turkish village han for travelers
    is merely a whitewashed structure
    with a quadrangle, where caravan drivers
    park their mules or camels at night and sleep
    upstairs on platforms. It is full of atmosphere,
    and other things more visible.
    If you have any doubt about the patriotism
    which animates the new Turkish
    movement you have only to go to Angora
    to have it dispelled. Amid an almost indescribable
    lack of comfort you find high
    officials, many of them former ambassadors
    who once lived in the ease and luxury of
    London, Paris, Berlin, Rome or Vienna,
    doing their daily tasks with fortitude.
    ‘ Happily I had taken out some insurance
    against the physical discomfort that is the
    lot of every visitor to Angora. After
    Kemal’s residence, about the only one fit
    to occupy is the building remodeled for
    the use of the Near East Relief workers,
    which had lately been acquired by the
    representatives of the Chester Concession.
    Before leaving Constantinople I got permission
    to occupy this establishment, and
    it was a godsend in more ways than one.
    By some miracle, but due mainly to the
    three old Armenian servants whom I kept
    busy scrubbing the floors and airing the
    cots, I had no use for my insect powder.
    In fact I carried it back with me to Constantinople
    and exchanged it for some other
    and more aesthetic commodities.
    This reference to the Chester Concession
    recalls a striking fact which was borne in
    upon me before I had been in Angora half
    a day. Everybody, from the most ragged
    bootblack up, not only knows all about the
    concession but regards it as the unfailing
    panacea for Turkish wealth and expansion.
    Ask a Turkish peasant about it and he will
    tell you that it means a railroad siding on
    his farm next month. There is a blind, almost
    pathetic faith in the ability of the
    Chester concessionaires to work an economic
    transformation. This is one reason
    why in Angora as elsewhere in Turkey the
    American is, for the moment, the favorite
    alien. But the whole Chester matter will
    be taken up in a later article.
    Reasons for the Choice
    By this time you will have asked the
    question, Why did the Turks pick this
    unkempt apology of a town as their capital?
    The answer is interesting. The first consideration
    was defense. Angora is more
    than two hundred miles from the sea, and
    any invading army, as the Greeks found
    out to their cost, must live on the country.
    Even in case of immediate attack there is
    a wild and rugged hinterland which affords
    an avenue of escape. But this is merely
    the external reason.
    If a Turk is candid he will tell you that
    perhaps the real motive for all this isolation
    is to keep the personnel of the government
    out of mischief. At Constantinople the
    official is on the old stamping ground of
    illicit official intercourse. The Nationalist
    Government is taking no chances during its
    period of transition. It was Kemal Pasha
    who selected Angora, and in this choice
    you have a hint of the man’s discretion.
    Although the Turks maintain that Angora
    is the permanent seat of government and
    that the unwilling foreign governments
    must sooner or later establish themselves
    there, it is probably only a question of
    years until Constantinople will come back
    to its own as capital. Meanwhile Angora
    will continue to be the Washington of the
    new Turkey, while Constantinople will be
    its New York.
    The principal thoroughfare of Angora is
    unpaved, rambling, and the fierce sun beats
    down upon its incessant dust and din. At
    one end is a low stucco building flying the
    red Turkish flag with its white star and
    crescent. Here, after the personality of
    Kemal, is what might be called the soul
    of the Turkish Government. It is the seat
    of the Grand National Assembly. In it
    Kemal was elected president, and here the
    Lausanne Treaty was confirmed.
    Over the president’s chair hangs this
    passage from the Koran: “Solve your
    problems by meeting together and discussing
    them.” In Kemal’s office just across
    the hall is another maxim from the same
    source, which says: “And consult them in
    ruling.” In this last-quoted sentence you
    have the keynote of Kemal’s creed, because
    up to this time he has carefully avoided the
    prerogatives of dictatorship, although to all
    intents and purposes he is a dictator, and
    could easily continue to be one, for it is no
    exaggeration to say that he is the idol of
    Turkey. His picture hangs in every shop
    and residence.
    The Grand National Assembly is unique
    among all parliamentary bodies in that it
    not only elects the president of the body,
    who is likewise the executive head of the
    nation, but it also designates the members
    of the cabinet, including the premier. By
    this procedure a government cannot fall,
    as is the case in England or France, when
    the premier fails to get a vote of confidence.
    If a cabinet minister is found undesirable
    he is removed by the legislative body, a
    successor is named, and the business of the
    government goes on without interruption
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    THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

    October 20,1923
    The delegates to the Assembly are, of
    course, elected by the people.
    But all this is by way of introduction. I
    was in the ken of Kemal and the job now
    was to see him. I had arrived at noon on a
    Wednesday and promptly sent Reschad
    Bey to see Rauf Bey, the premier, to whom
    I had a letter of introduction from Admiral
    Bristol. The cabinet was in almost continuous
    session on account of the crisis at
    Lausanne, and I was unable to see him
    until the following morning at nine.
    I spent three hours with him in the
    foreign office, a tiny stucco building meagerly
    furnished, but alive with the personality
    of its chief occupant. Rauf Bey is
    the sailor premier—he was admiral of the
    old Turkish Navy—and has the frank,
    blunt, wholesome manner of the seafaring
    man. He is the only member of the cabinet,
    by the way, who speaks English, and he
    told me that he had visited Roosevelt at the
    White House in 1903. He was one of the
    prominent Turks deported by the British
    to Malta in 1920. In exile, he said, his
    chief solace was in the intermittent copies
    of THE SATURDAY EVENING POST which
    reached him through friendly naval officers.
    He had read these magazines so thoroughly
    that he quoted long extracts from them.
    He had been particularly interested in an
    article of mine about General Smuts, whose
    ideal of self-determination has helped to
    shape the new Turkish policy.
    It was Rauf Bey who made the appointment
    for me to see Kemal Pasha at his
    house on the following afternoon at five
    o’clock. The original plan was for both of
    us to dine there that evening. Subsequently
    this was changed because, as Rauf
    Bey put it, “The Ghazi’s in-laws are visiting
    him, and his house is crowded.” By
    using the term “in-laws” you can see how
    quickly Rauf Bey had adapted himself to
    Western phraseology.
    The premier’s reference to the Ghazi requires
    an explanation. Ordinarily Kemal is
    referred to in Angora by the proletariat as
    the Pasha. The educated Turk, however,
    invariably gives him his later title of
    Ghazi, voted by the assembly, which is the
    Turkish word for “conqueror.” Since that
    fateful day in 1453 when Mohammed the
    Conqueror battered down the gates of Constantinople
    and the Moslem era on the
    Bosporus began, the proud title has been
    conferred on only three men. One was
    Topal Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna;
    the second was Mukhtar Pasha, the conqueror
    of the Greeks in the late ’90’s, while
    the third was Mustapha Kemal.
    Friday, the thirteenth, came and with it
    the long-awaited interview with Kemal. He
    lives in a kiosk, as the Turks call a villa, at
    Tchau Kaya, a sort of summer settlement
    about five miles beyond Angora. Motor
    cars are scarce in Angora, so I had to drive
    out in a low-necked carriage. Reschad Bey
    went along. He was not present at the
    talk with Kemal, however.
    The Ghazi’s Residence
    As we neared Kemal’s abode we began
    to encounter troops, who increased in numbers
    the farther we went. These soldiers
    represented one of the many precautions
    taken to safeguard Kemal’s life because he
    is in hourly danger of assassination by some
    enraged Greek or Armenian. Several attempts
    have already been made to shoot
    him, and in one instance his companion, a
    Turkish officer, was seriously wounded by
    the would-be assassin.
    Two previous Turkish leaders, both of
    them tools of the Germans, the notorious
    Talaat Pasha and his mate in crime, the no
    less odious Enver Pasha, met violent deaths
    after the World War. But Kemal represents
    a different kind of stewardship.
    Soon an attractive white stone house,
    faced with red, surmounting a verdant hill,
    and surrounded by a neat garden and
    almond orchard, came into view. At the
    right was a smaller stone cottage. Reschad
    Bey, who had been there before, informed
    me that this was Kemal’s establishment,
    which was the gift of the Turkish nation.
    I might have otherwise known it because
    the guard of sentries became thicker. When
    we reached the entrance we were stopped
    by a sergeant and asked to tell our business.
    Reschad Bey told the man that I had an
    appointment with the Ghazi and he took
    my card inside.
    In a few moments he returned and escorted
    us into the little stone cottage, which
    Kemal uses as a reception room. Here I
    found the Ghazi’s father-in-law, Mouammer
    Ouchakay Bey, who is the richest
    merchant of Smyrna and who incidentally
    was the first Turkish member of the New
    York and New Orleans cotton exchanges.
    He had visited America frequently and
    therefore spoke English. He told me that
    Kemal was engaged in a cabinet meeting
    and would see me shortly.
    Meanwhile I looked about the room,
    which was filled with souvenirs of Kemal’s
    fame and place in the Turkish heart. On
    one wall was the inevitable Koran inscription.
    This one read, “God has taught the
    Koran.” There were various memorials
    beautifully inscribed on vellum, expressing
    the homage of Turkish cities, and also magnificent
    jeweled gift swords. But what impressed
    me most was the life-size portrait
    of a sweet-faced old Turkish woman that
    had the most conspicuous place in the
    chamber. I knew without being told that
    this was Kemal’s mother. It was on her
    grave that he swore vengeance against the
    Greeks, who had once driven her out of her
    home. I had heard this tale many times,
    and Mouammer Bey and others confirmed
    it. Happily for the mother, she lived long
    enough to see her son the well-beloved of
    the Turkish people.
    Kenzal’s Steely Eye
    I had just launched into a discussion of
    the Turkish economic future with Mouammer
    Bey when Kemal’s aid, a well-groomed
    young lieutenant in khaki, entered and said
    that the Ghazi was ready to see n e. With
    him I crossed a small courtyard, went
    down a narrow passage, and found myself
    in the drawing-room of the main residence.
    It was furnished in the most approved
    European style. In one corner was a grand
    piano; opposite was a row of well-filled
    bookcases, many of the volumes French,
    while on the walls hung more gift swords.
    In the adjoining room I could see a group
    of men sitting around a large round table
    amid a buzz of rapid talk. It was the Turkish
    cabinet in session, and they were discussing
    the latest telegrams from Lausanne,
    where Ismet Pasha, minister of foreign
    affairs, and the only absent member, had,
    only the day before, delivered the Turkish
    ultimatum on the Chester Concession and
    the Turkish foreign debt. Economic war,
    or worse, hung in the balance.
    As I advanced, Rauf Bey came out and escorted
    me into the room where the cabinet
    sat. There was a quick group introduction.
    I had eyes, however, for only one person.
    It was tke tall figure that rose from its
    place at the head of the table and came
    towards me with hand outstretched. I had
    seen endless pictures of Kemal and I was
    therefore familiar with his appearance. He
    is the type to dominate men or assemblages,
    first by reason of his imposing stature, for
    he is nearly six feet tall, with a superb chest,
    shoulders and military bearing; then by the
    almost uncanny power of his eyes, which
    are the most remarkable I have ever seen
    in a man, and I have talked with the late
    J. P. Morgan, Kitchener and Foch. Kemal’s
    eyes are steely blue, cold, stony, and as
    penetrating as they are implacable. He has
    a trick of narrowing them when he meets a
    stranger. At first glance he looks German,
    for he is that rare Turkish human exhibit, a
    blond.
    His yellow hair was brushed back straight
    from the forehead. The lack of coloring
    in his broad face and the high cheek
    bones refute the Teutonic impression. He
    really looks like a pallid Slay. Few people
    have ever seen Kemal smile. In the two
    hours and a half that I spent with him his
    features went through the semblance of relaxation
    only once. He is like a man with
    an iron mask, and that mask is his natural
    f ace.
    I expected to find him in uniform. Instead
    he was smartly turned out in a black
    morning coat with gray striped trousers
    and patent-leather shoes. He wore a wing
    collar and a blue-and-yellow four-in-hand
    tie. He looked as if he was about to pay his
    respects to a fashionable hostess at a reception
    in Park Lane, London, or Fifth Avenue,
    New York. Kemal, I might add, has always
    been a stickler for dress. He introduced the
    calpac, the high astrakhan cap which has
    succeeded the long-familiar red fez as the
    proper Turkish headgear, and which is a
    badge of Nationalism.
    Rauf Bey introduced me to Kemal in
    the cabinet room. After we had exchanged
    the customary salutations in French he
    said, ” Perhaps we had better go into the
    next room for our talk and leave the cabinet
    to its deliberations.” With this he led
    (Continued on Page 144)
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    (Continued from Page 142)
    the way into the adjacent salon. With Rauf
    Bey at my right and Kemal on the left, we
    sat down at a small table. A butler, no less
    well groomed than his master, brought the
    inevitable thick Turkish coffee and cigarettes.
    The interview began.
    Although the Ghazi knows both French
    and German, he prefers to talk Turkish
    through an interpreter. After I had expressed,
    again in my alleged French, the
    great pleasure I had in meeting him, Rauf
    Bey interposed the statement that perhaps
    it might be best for the great man to carry
    on in his own language. This was agreed
    upon, and henceforth the premier acted as
    intermediary.
    Kemal had somehow heard of the difficulties
    and delays which had attended my
    trip to Angora. He at once apologized, saying
    that in the handicaps that beset administration
    in such a place as Angora such
    things were liable to happen. Then he
    added, “I am very glad you came. We
    want Americans in Turkey, for they can
    best understand our aspirations.”
    Then, straight from the shoulder, as it
    were, and in the concise, clear-cut way he
    has of expressing himself —it is almost like
    an officer giving a command—he asked,
    ” What do you want me to tell you?”
    “First of all,” I replied, “can you give
    me some kind of message to the American
    people?”
    There was method in this query because
    I knew that he felt friendly toward Americans
    and that it would immediately loosen
    the flow of speech. It is a maneuver in interviewing
    taciturn people that seldom
    fails to launch the talk waves.
    Rdmiration for Washington
    Without the slightest hesitation—and
    I might add that throughout the entire
    conversation he never faltered for a reply—
    he said:
    ” With great pleasure. The ideal of the
    United States is our ideal. Our National
    Pact, promulgated by the Grand National
    Assembly in January, 1920, is precisely
    like your Declaration of Independence.
    It only demands freedom of our Turkish
    land from the invader and control of our
    own destiny. Independence, that is all.
    It is the charter and covenant of our people,
    and this charter we propose to defend at
    any cost.
    “Turkey and America are both democracies.
    In fact the Turkish Government at
    present is the most democratic in the world.
    It is based on the absolute sovereignty of
    the people, and the Grand National Assembly,
    its representative body, is the
    judicial, legislative and executive power.
    Between Turkey and America as sister
    democracies there should be the closest relations.
    ” In the field of economic relations Turkey
    and the United States can work together to
    the greatest mutual advantage. Our rich
    and varied national resources should prove
    attractive to American capital. We welcome
    American assistance in our development
    because, unlike the capital of any
    other country, American money is free
    from the political intrigue that animates
    the dealings of European nations with us.
    In other words, American capital does not
    raise the flag as soon as it is invested.
    “We have already given one concrete
    evidence of our faith and confidence in
    America by granting the Chester Concession.
    It is really a tribute to the American
    people.
    “All my life I have had inspiration in the
    lives and deeds of Washington and Lincoln.
    Between the original Thirteen States and
    the new Turkey is a curious kinship. Your
    early Americans threw off the British yoke.
    Turkey has thrown off the old yoke of empire
    with all the graft and corruption that
    it carried, and what was worse, the selfish
    meddling of other nations. America struggled
    through to independence and prosperity.
    We are now in the midst of travail
    which is witnessing the birth of a nation.
    With American help we will achieve our
    aim.”
    Then leaning forward, and with the only
    animation he displayed throughout the
    whole interview, he asked:
    “Do you know why Washington and
    Lincoln have always appealed to me? I
    will tell you why. They worked solely for
    the glory and emancipation of the United
    States, while most other Presidents seemed
    to have worked for their own deification.
    The highest form of public service is unselfish
    effort.”
    “What is your ideal of government?”
    I now asked. ” In other words, do you still
    believe in Pan-Islam and in the Pan-
    Turanianism idea?”
    “I will tell you briefly,” was the response.
    ” Pan-Islam represented a federation based
    on the community of religion. Pan-
    Turanianism embodied the same kind of
    community of effort and ambition, based on
    race. Both were wrong. The idea of Pan-
    Islam really died centuries ago at the gates
    of Vienna, at the farthest north of the Turkish
    advance in Europe. Pan-Turanianism
    perished on the plains of the East.
    “Both of these movements were wrong
    because they were based on the idea of conquest,
    which means force and imperialism.
    For many years imperialism dominated
    Europe. But imperialism is doomed. You
    find the answer in the wreck of Germany,
    Austria, Russia, and in the Turkey that
    was. Democracy is the hope of the human
    race.
    ” You may think it strange that a Turk
    and a soldier like myself who has been bred
    to war should talk this way. But this is
    precisely the idea that is behind the new
    Turkey. We want no force, no conquest.
    We want to be let alone and permitted to
    work out our own economic and political
    destiny. Upon this is reared the whole
    structure of the new Turkish democracy,
    which, let me add, represents the American
    idea, with this difference—we are one big
    state while you are forty-eight.
    “My idea of nationalism is that of a people
    of kindred birth, religion and temperament.
    For hundreds of years the Turkish
    Empire was a conglomerate human mass in
    which Turks formed the minority. We had
    other so-called minorities, and they have
    been the source of most of our troubles.
    That, and the old idea of conquest. One
    reason why Turkey fell into decay was
    that she was exhausted by this very business
    of difficult rulership. The old empire was
    much too big and it laid itself open to trouble
    at every turn.
    “But that old idea of force, conquest and
    expansion is dead in Turkey forever. Our
    old empire was Ottoman. It meant force.
    It is now banished from the vocabulary.
    We are now Turks—only Turks. This is
    why we want a Turkey of the Turks, based
    on that ideal of self-determination which
    was so well expressed by Woodrow Wilson.
    It means nationalism, but not the kind of
    selfish nationalism that has frustrated selfdetermination
    in so many parts of Europe.
    Nor does it mean arbitrary tariff walls and
    frontiers. It does signify the open door to
    trade, economic regeneration, a real territorial
    patriotism as embodied in a homeland.
    After all these years of blood and
    conquest the Turks have at last attained a
    fatherland. Its frontiers have been defined,
    the troublesome minorities are dispersed,
    and it is behind these frontiers that we
    propose to make our stand and work out
    our own salvation. We propose to be
    masters in our own house.”
    Kemal’s Constructive Program
    Again he leaned toward me and said in
    his sharp staccato fashion:
    “Do you know what has obstructed European
    peace and reconstruction? Simply
    this—the interference of one nation with another.
    It is part of the selfish grasping nationalism
    to which I have already referred.
    It has led to the substitution of politics for
    economics. The German reparations tangle
    is only one example. The curse of the world
    is petty politics.
    “There are nations who would block our
    hard-won Turkish independence; who decry
    our nationalism and say it is merely a
    camouflage to hide the desire for conquest
    of our neighbors on the east, and who maintain
    that we are not capable of economic
    administration. Well, they shall see.
    “The first and foremost idea of the new
    Turkey is not political but economic. We
    want to be part of the world of production
    as well as of consumption.”
    ” What specific aid can the United States
    render this new Turkey of yours?” I asked.
    “Many things,” came from the blond
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    pastoral land. We must stand or fall by
    our agriculture. In the program for regeneration
    three main activities stand out.
    They are agriculture, transportation and
    hygiene, for the death rate in our villages is
    appallingly large.
    “First take agriculture. We must develop
    a whole new science of farming, first
    through the establishment of agricultural
    schools, in which America can help; second
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    THE SJITURD.RY EVENING POST

    145
    through the introduction of tractors and
    other modern farm machinery. We must
    develop new crops, such as cotton, and
    expand our old ones, such as tobacco. The
    motor, whether on the highway or the farm,
    will be our first aid.
    “Transportation is equally vital. Before
    the World War the Germans had laid out a
    comprehensive scheme of transportation for
    Turkey, but it was based upcn economic
    absorption of the country by them. Happily
    we are rid of the Germans, and so far
    as I am concerned, they will never get back
    to authority. We look to America to develop
    our much-needed railroads. This is
    one reason why we gave them the Chester
    Concession. I hope that the Americans
    realize what this concession means to us.
    It is not only the hope of adequate transport,
    but the building of new ports and the
    exploitation of our national resources,
    principally oil.
    “In the matter of hygiene we have already
    installed a ministry of sanitation as
    part of the cabinet and every effort will be
    made to prevent the infant mortality. Here
    America can again help.
    “While I am on the matter of economics
    let me deal with another question of vital
    importance to the new Turkey. The
    tragedy of Turkey in the past was the
    selfish attitude of the great European
    powers towards one another in respect of
    her commercial development. It was the
    inevitable result of the great game of concession
    grabbing. The powers were like
    dogs in a manger. If they failed in their
    desires they made it their business to keep
    rivals out as well. It is precisely what has
    been going on in China for years, but they
    will make no China out of Turkey. We
    will insist upon the open door for everybody,
    as it was enunciated by John Hay, and
    equality of opportunity for all. If the European
    powers do not like this procedure
    they can keep out.”
    “What is your panacea for the present
    world malady?” I next asked.
    “Intelligent cooperation and not unintelligent
    suspicion and distrust,” was the
    swift retort.
    “Is the League of Nations the remedy?”
    I continued.
    “Yes and no,” came from Kemal. “The
    League’s error lies in that it sets up certain
    nations to rule, and other nations to be
    ruled. The Wilsonian idea of self-determination
    seems to be strangely lost.”
    When I asked Kemal if he was in favor of
    allying Turkey with the League of Nations
    he answered:
    “Conditionally, but the League as at
    present operated remains an experiment.”
    On two significant subjects Kemal has
    views of peculiar interest. They are Germany
    and Bolshevism.
    II Subtle Game
    I am betraying no confidence when I say
    that long before the Great War, which
    proved so costly to his. country largely because
    of German conspyacy, he persistently
    opposed the German intrigue at Constantinople.
    It was his violent objection to
    everything German that caused Enver
    Pasha, who with Talaat Pasha divided the
    mastery of government during the war, to
    seek to break him in the army service and
    get him out of the way.
    Instead of ending Kemal’s career Enver
    provided him with the means of redeeming
    Turkey and making himself the national
    hero. Kemal’s antagonism to the Germans
    today is no less pronounced.
    With the Bolshevists Kemal played a
    subtle and winning game. In the early days
    of the Nationalist movement he had urgent
    need of arms and munitions. He angled
    with Moscow until he got what he wanted
    in the shape of supplies, and then gave
    them the cold shoulder. At that time the
    Bolshevists looked upon the new Turks as
    heaven-born allies for the red conquest of
    the whole Near East. They were the first
    to recognize the Angora Government, and
    still maintain an elaborate mission there.
    Kemal and his chief colleagues are convinced
    that Bolshevism has passed the peak
    and is on the down grade. If the ” Bolos ”
    think that they have a willing tool in
    Kemal they have another guess coming.
    Upon one subject of universal interest,
    the emancipation of Turkish women, Kemal
    has definite opinions. He not only favors
    the ultimate banishment of the veil but
    wants woman to be part and parcel of the
    public life. His views run in this wise:
    “Our women ought to be the equal of
    men in education and activity. From the
    earliest times of Islam there have been
    women savants, authors and orators, as well
    as women who opened schools and delivered
    lectures. The Moslem religion even
    orders women to educate themselves to the
    same standard as men. In the war with the
    Greeks Turkish women replaced the absent
    men in all kinds of work at home, and
    even undertook the transport of munitions
    and supplies for the army. It was done in
    response to a true sociological principle—
    namely, that women should collaborate
    with men in making society better and
    stronger.
    “It is supposed that in Turkey women
    pass their lives in inactivity and in idleness.
    That is a calumny. In the whole of Turkey,
    except in large towns, the women work
    side by side with the men in the fields, and
    participate in the national work generally.
    It is only in large towns that Turkish
    women are sequestered by their husbands.
    This arises from the fact that our women
    veil and cloister themselves more than their
    religion orders. Tradition has gone too far
    in this respect.”
    During the whole interview, save for the
    two occasions when he leaned forward to
    emphasize his points, Kemal had sat erect
    in his chair, smoking cigarettes continually.
    The only time there was the slightest
    indication of a break in those stony features
    was when we started to discuss more or less
    personal affairs at the end of the talk, and
    when I told him that I had not married
    because ‘I traveled so much and that no
    wife would stand such incessant action.
    He thereupon said: “I have only lately
    married myself.”
    Madame Kemal
    This naturally leads to the romance in
    Kemal’s life. Like other men of iron he
    has his one vulnerable point, and having
    met Madame Kemal I can understand why
    he succumbed. I heard the whole story at
    first hand and in this fashion:
    While we were in the midst of the interview
    the butler entered and whispered
    something in Kemal’s ear. Instantly he
    turned and said, not without pride, “Madame
    Kemal is coming down.”
    A few moments later the most attractive
    Turkish woman I had yet met entered—I
    should say glided—into the room. She was
    of medium height, with a full Oriental face
    and brilliant dark eyes. Her every movement
    was grace itself. Although she wore
    a sort of non-Turkish costume—it was dark
    blue—she had retained the charming headdress
    which is usually worn with the veil
    and which, according to the old Turkish
    custom, must completely hide the hair.
    The veil, however, was absent, for madame
    is one of the emancipated ones, and some
    of her brown tresses peeped out from
    beneath the beguiling cover. A subtle perfume
    emanated from her. She was a visualization
    of feminine Paris literally adorning
    the Angora scene.
    Kemal presented me to his wife, employing
    Turkish in the introduction. I addressed
    her in French and she replied in
    admirable English; in fact, she had a British
    accent. The reason was that she had
    spent some of her school life in England.
    Later she studied in France. Madame
    Kemal at once took her seat at the table
    and listened to the cross examination of
    her husband with interest.
    Shortly after her arrival Kemal was summoned
    into the next room, where the cabinet
    was still in session, and during his
    absence she told me the story of her life,
    which is a charming complement to the narrative
    of her distinguished husband’s more
    strenuous career.
    Her father, as I have already intimated,
    is the richest merchant of Smyrna, which
    has been for years the economic capital of
    Turkey. Her name is Latife. To this must
    be added the word hanum, which in Turkey
    may mean either “Miss” or ” Mrs.” Thus
    before her marriage she was Latife Hanum.
    If she employed her full married name now
    it would be Latife Ghazi Mustapha Kemal
    Hanum.
    During the early days of the Greek war
    she was alternately in Paris and London.
    In the autumn of 1921 she returned to
    Smyrna, which was then in the hands of
    the Greeks, who had imprisoned her father
    and who eventually arrested her on the
    charge of being a Turkish spy. She was
    sentenced to detention in her own home
    with two Greek soldiers on guard before
    the door. Here she spent three months.
    One day the Greek sentries suddenly
    vanished. There was the bustle and din of
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    146

    THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

    October 20, 1923
    hasty retreat, and early the next morning
    the conquering Turks rode into Smyrna. A
    few days later Kemal entered in triumph
    at the head of his victorious army. Let me
    tell the rest in madame’s own naïve words,
    which were:
    “Although I had never met Mustapha
    Kemal I invited him to be our guest during
    his stay in Smyrna. I admired his courage,
    patriotism and leadership, and he accepted
    our invitation. I found that we had common
    ideals for the reconstruction of our
    country, and later we discovered that we
    had something else in common. Not long
    afterwards forty to fifty of our friends were
    invited to the house for tea. The mufti, as
    the Turkish registrar is called, was summoned,
    and without any previous announcement
    we were married. Our wedding ring
    was brought to us later from Lausanne by
    Ismet Pasha.”
    Madame Kemal spoke with f rank admiration
    about her husband. “He is not only a
    great patriot and soldier but he is also an
    unselfish leader,” she said. ” He has built a
    system of government that can function
    without him. He wants absolutely nothing
    for himself. He would be willing to retire
    at any time if he were convinced that his
    ideal of the self-determined Turkey will
    prevail.
    “I am acting as a sort of amanuensis for
    him. I read and translate the foreign
    papers for him, play the piano when he
    wants relaxation, and I have started to
    write his biography.”
    ” What are your husband’s diversions?”
    I asked.
    He loves music and when he does find
    time to read he absorbs ancient history,”
    was the reply. Then pointing to three playful
    pups that gamboled on the floor at our
    feet she added: “I have also provided him
    with these little dogs, to whom he has become
    much attached.” The snapshot of
    Kemal reproduced in this article shows
    the pups.
    Education Before Suffrage
    Madame Kemal has definite ideas about
    the future of Turkish women. Like Halide
    Hanum, she is strong for emancipation.
    Along this line she said:
    “I believe in equal rights for Turkish
    women, which means the right to vote and
    to sit in the Grand National Assembly. I
    maintain, however, that before suffrage
    and public service must come education.
    It would be absurd to impose suffrage on
    ignorant peasants. We must have schools
    for women eventually, conducted by
    women. It is bound to he a slow process.
    I am in favor of abolishing the veil, but
    this will also be a gradual development.
    We want no quick changes. It must be
    evolution instead of revolution.
    “On one subject I have strong views:
    Education and religion in Turkey must be
    separate and distinct. This is my ideal of
    the mental uplift of the women of my race.”
    We began to discuss books. Much to my
    surprise I found that Madame Kemal was
    a great admirer of Longfellow. She quoted
    the whole of the Psalm of Life. I was
    equally interested to find how well she
    knew Keats, Shelley and Byron. I referred
    to the fact that in the old days Byron’s
    books were forbidden in Turkey on account
    of his pro-Greek sentiments, whereupon
    she remarked vivaciously, “All such procedures
    are now part of the buried Turkish
    past.”
    At this juncture Kemal returned, and
    the threads of the interview with him were
    picked up. When we concluded, twilight
    had come and it was time to go. I had
    brought with me a photograph of the Ghazi
    that I had obtained in Angora. It was
    taken in the early days of 1920. As he
    looked at it he said wistfully, “That reminds
    me of my youth.” He signed it and
    then gave me two others at my request.
    The farewells were now said, and I left.
    As I drove back to Angora through the
    gathering night, hailed at intervals by cavalry
    patrols, for the watch on Kemal increases
    with the dark, and with bugle calls
    echoing across the still air, I realized that I
    had established contact with a strong and
    dominating personality, a unique leader
    among men.
    It remains only to reveal the somewhat
    brief and crowded span of Kemal’s life so
    far. He is the son of an obscure petty government
    official and was born forty-three
    years ago at Saloniki, which was then under
    the Turkish flag. The fact of his birth here
    has given rise to the widespread belief that
    he is a Jew, which is not true. The surmise
    was natural because during the Spanish
    persecutions Saloniki became the haven
    of innumerable oppressed Israelites. Here,
    as elsewhere in the Turkey that was, and
    is, they have become important factors in
    both the commercial and the political life.
    The Turks are a mixed race, however, because
    of the old itch for conquest, and
    Kemal’s mother had a strain of Albania
    in her.
    Kemal was destined for the army and at
    the proper age entered the military school
    at Monastir. Once in the army, he impressed
    his colleagues by a real love of
    soldiering. Then, as now, he was a nationalist.
    In those days this was heresy, because
    Turkey was in the grip of a corrupt stewardship
    which combined control of both church
    and state in the sultanate. In other words,
    the sultan was not only ruler but as grand
    caliph was also defender of the faith.
    A comrade of Kemal’s early soldiering
    days told me in Constantinople that when
    the Committee of Union and Progress,
    which was controlled by Enver Pasha, and
    which brought about the revolution of 1908
    and the counter revolution of 1909, was at
    the height of its power, the future emancipator
    of his country said: “These politicians
    are bound to fail because they
    represent a class and not a country. Their
    motives are purely political. Some day I
    shall help to redeem Turkey.” Like Napoleon,
    he believed that he was a man of
    destiny, and his subsequent achievements
    have confirmed that early belief.
    Kemal at the Dardanelles
    It is interesting to add that at a time
    when smart officers in Turkey had brilliant
    prospects in politics Kemal stuck to his profession.
    He fought in Tripoli against the
    Italians, but it was not until the World
    War that he emerged from the more or less
    anonymity of the average officer’s life.
    With his antipathy for the Germans, he
    naturally opposed Turkey’s entrance into
    the war on the side of the Central Powers.
    At once he incurred the bitter enmity of
    Enver Pasha, and this hostility became
    more acute during the years of the conflict.
    Enver tried in every way to humble him,
    but he was too good a soldier to be sacked.
    At one time he temporarily left the front
    to accompany the future Sultan Mohammed
    VI, then the crown prince, on a state
    visit to Germany.
    Prior to the Dardanelles campaign Kemal
    was a colonel of infantry. Even before the
    British and French made their ill-fated
    landing he had been given a command on
    Gallipoli. Soon after, he was made a
    brigadier general- –this gave him the title of
    Pasha—and he took over the 19th Division.
    When the notorious Liman von Sanders
    fell from favor he became one of the chief
    ranking Turkish officers on the peninsula.
    Most people do not know that it was
    largely through Kemal’s quick judgment
    that the Dardanelles expedition failed. On
    the day that the Australians made their
    historic attack at Anzac Beach, Kemal
    had ordered the two best regiments of his
    division on parade, fully equipped for a
    maneuver against the very heights where
    the Anzacs, as the Australians were known,
    were about to operate. When the news of
    the landing and of the defeat of the Turkish
    troops along the coast first reached him it
    was coupled with the information that the
    movement was merely a feint, and with a
    request that he would detach only one
    battalion to deal with it.
    Kemal judged from the firing, and from
    the direction of the advance, that this was
    no mere feint but a serious attack. He
    took it on himself at once to order all three
    battalions standing on parade to carry out
    their prearranged maneuver. They were
    followed by the whole of a second regiment
    and by a mountain battery which Mustapha
    himself posted and directed. He had committed
    the commander of the other division
    as well as his more cautious superiors, and
    had, in fact, saved the situation.
    At the close of the World War Turkey
    lay prostrate. The British Fleet was in the
    Bosporus, and the Sultan and his advisers
    were under the thumb of the Allies. When
    the Armistice of Mudros was signed in 1918
    and the Turks surrendered, Kemal had just
    returned from Palestine, where, after a
    heroic struggle, he saved the Turkish rearguard.
    He was now made inspector-general
    of the remnants of the Turkish forces in
    Asia Minor with a view to bringing order
    out of the chaos into which the defeated
    Turkish Army had been plunged.
    (Continued on Page leg)
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    Radio clear
    or radio”chatter”
    How to make your
    radio set work better
    EVERYWHERE, tens of thousands
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    The results have been marvelous.
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    THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 149
    (Continued from Page 146)
    In May, 1919, the Greeks occupied
    Smyrna, which they had long coveted.
    This ill-advised procedure was due almost
    entirely to Lloyd George, and, although the
    British premier did not realize it at the
    time, was the first of the events that hurled
    him from power.
    Just as it marked the beginning of ultimate
    disaster for the Greeks, and the final
    overthrow of Lloyd George, so did it at the
    same time mean that Kemal’s great hour
    had come. The occupation of Smyrna by
    the Greeks, together with the brutal way
    they imposed their will, was the spark, as
    it were, that started the flame of the new
    nationalism in Turkey.
    Far up beyond Erzerum was Kemal
    with the remnants of an army which he had
    been sent to demobilize and disarm. As
    news of the Greek outrages in and around
    Smyrna, and accounts of the deportation of
    many of his Constantinople colleagues by
    the British filtered in, he realized that the
    time to strike was at hand. Instead of
    demobilization and disarmament he sent
    out a call for arms and volunteers with
    which to resist what he believed was the
    inevitable extinction of his country. He
    began to organize a counter government
    whose platform was the liberation of Turkey
    from foreign domination. Since he was the
    head and front of the movement his followers
    came to be called Kemalists. The
    first capital of this new nationalist movement
    was Erzerum, in what was Turkish
    Armenia. Later it was moved to Sivas, and
    early in 1920 to Angora.
    Meanwhile the Sultan’s government at
    Constantinople, at Allied dictation, had
    sent peremptory word to Kemal to return.
    When he refused he was outlawed and sentenced
    to death. This only added to his
    growing popularity.
    Kemal’s task was twofold: One phase was
    to “Drive out the Greeks,” as the slogan
    became; the other was to perfect the Nationalist
    Government. Both consummations
    were achieved. They required the
    genius and strategy of military leadership
    on the one hand, and keen, organizing
    statesmanship on the other. Kemal combined
    all these necessary qualities in himself.
    There is no space here to recount the
    story of those two years of fighting in which
    the Greeks advanced as far as the Sakaria
    River, which means that they were forty
    miles from Angora, and how under Kemal
    and the no less astute Ismet Pasha, who is
    a soldier and not a diplomat by training,
    the invaders were driven back into the sea.
    It is an oft-told tale.
    Turkey’s New Constitution
    What concerns us mainly is the system of
    government that Kemal created amid the
    hardship and discomfort of Angora, and
    with every alien hand except ours raised
    against him. It is really a striking adventure
    in democracy. Although not so technically
    designated, it is for all practical and
    working purposes a republic.
    Under the so-called National Pact adopted
    by the Grand National Assembly in Angora
    in 1920 the Turks paralleled the American
    Declaration of Independence. It declared,
    among other things, that “it is a fundamental
    condition of our life and continued
    existence that we, like every country, should
    enjoy complete independence and liberty in
    the matter of assuring the means of our
    development, in order that our national
    and economic development should be rendered
    possible.”
    The -new Turkish Constitution is embodied
    in what is known as the Fundamental
    Law, which decrees that the sovereignty
    of the nation rests with the nation as
    exercised by the Grand National Assembly
    elected by the people. This assembly alone
    can declare war or make peace. It elects its
    president—the office now held by Kemal
    Pasha—who is the first official of the state.
    As I have already pointed out, the assembly
    also chooses the members of the cabinet.
    Far more significant than these innovations,
    when you consider the past history of
    Turkey, is the absolute separation of church
    and state. The sultan business is finished,
    and the head of the Moslem faith reposes
    in a caliph named by the Grand National
    Assembly. He continues as spiritual chief
    of the Mohammedan world but has no
    influence upon Turkish affairs. In brief, he
    is the pope of the Moslems.
    This separation of church and state has
    a big meaning for the foreigner and his
    business interests. Until the Nationalist
    movement a sort of extraterritoriality under
    the name of capitulations existed. These
    were necessary under the old regime because
    religion and law were closely related.
    The church throve upon the ignorance and
    superstition of the masses. The Pious
    Foundation—the Evkaf, as it is called—
    which controls all church property, is one
    of the richest trusts in the world. Hence,
    as in China, the alien had to have his own
    courts. One of the first things that Kemal
    did was to abolish the capitulations. With
    the courts purged of religious influence the
    alien now has a square deal.
    Personal Characteristics
    By this time you will have realized that
    Kemal is no ordinary person. When you
    study} the man and his method you discover
    that two qualities underlie his astounding
    performance. One is doggedness of purpose
    which marches at the behest of an iron will;
    the other is his profound respect for public
    opinion. Although the adored of his people,
    who have implicit faith in his judgment,
    he has, from the start, consulted
    them in every step. When he wants to put
    over a proposition he goes to the masses
    and through the agency of what we should
    call a town meeting states his case. So in
    his relations with the Grand National Assembly.
    Although he is a stickler for smart
    clothes and etiquette his whole life has been
    marked by a direct simplicity. When he
    went to the front to lead the last stand of
    the Turks against the advancing Greeks
    the only document that he left behind was
    the following brief note fr- Dr. Adnan Bey,
    who was then vice presider’, of the Grand
    National Assembly:
    To the Vice President of the Grand National
    Assembly: I am leaving for the front and I ask
    you kindly to take care of my affairs during my
    absence.
    MUSTAPHA KEMAL
    President of the Grand National Assembly.
    Compare the failure of Enver Pasha with
    the success of Kemal Pasha and you can
    see how they differed in strategy. Enver
    went straight ahead to the fulfillment of his
    purpose. If he struck a stone wall he tried
    to batter it down. Eventually he succumbed.
    Kemal, when he meets an obstacle,
    waits patiently until he can get
    around it, and he usually gains his ends.
    The patience to which I have just alluded
    stood him in good stead at Sakaria, which
    represents the peak of his military career.
    For days the outlook was desperate. Regiment
    after regiment had been hurled
    against the Greeks, who fought them back
    with terrible loss. Three divisional generals
    were killed in the first day’s fighting. Turkish
    disaster seemed inevitable. An orderly
    dashed up to Kemal saying that another
    position had been lost. Turmoil raged all
    round him, but the commander in chief
    stood unmoved and without the slightest
    expression on that sphinxlike face.
    At the critical hour he gave a quiet word
    of command and five thousand picked
    troops, which he had kept in reserve and
    under cover, leaped into action. Their
    instructions were not to fire until they saw
    the whites of the enemy’s eyes. They turned
    the tide and the Greek retreat began.
    For the moment Kemal is secure on the
    dizzy eminence where the tide of his accomplishments,
    aided by the almost frenzied
    acclaim of his people, has landed him.
    On August fourteenth last he was reelected
    president of the Grand National Assembly.
    Only one vote was cast against him. It was
    for Ismet Pasha, and the impression is that
    Keinal so honored his eminent associate.
    Thus for two years his post is safe.
    Meanwhile his troubles will begin. Just
    now he dominates—in fact he is–the
    so-called Defense of Rights Party, whici is
    the People’s Party, and which has practically
    no opposition. Another wing must
    eventually develop and the inevitable
    political division will arise.
    More immediate is the task of translating
    that kindling formula of economic and
    political self-determination, the Magna
    Charta of the new Turkey, into cold and
    practical reality. The tumult and shouting
    have died out. Peace is signed. The
    wounds of conflict must now be bound up.
    Kemal’s real test as national leader, therefore,
    will be to bring order and prosperity
    out of the rack and ruin wrought by twelve
    years of almost continuous warfare.
    Whether as economic messiah he will
    duplicate his astounding record in field and
    forum remains to be seen. Whatever fate
    holds out for him, he has already written
    himself large in the history of his time.

    kemal-pasha-october-1923[1]

  • The Turkish protests and the genie of revolution

    The Turkish protests and the genie of revolution

    by Jerome Roos on June 3, 2013

    While the outcome remains uncertain, a closer look at the Turkish uprising reveals its intimate connection to the global struggle for real democracy.

    ge·nie
    noun
     /ˈjēnē/
    genies, plural; genii, plural

    A spirit of Arabian folklore, as traditionally depicted imprisoned within a bottle or oil lamp, and capable of granting wishes when summoned.

    In 2011, a rebellious genie was let out of the suffocating bottle of the neoliberal world order. Ever since, world leaders have been struggling to put it back into place. This weekend, right when they started to feel that the genie had finally been contained, the revolutionary spirit arose once again in an unexpected location: in rapidly developing Turkey, a regional success story and darling of global capital and the neoliberal West. What began as a local struggle over the last green space in Istanbul’s urban landscape has now escalated into the biggest challenge to Erdogan’s 10-year rule and, according to some, “the most widespread civil unrest in Turkish history.” In an irony of historic proportions, the democratically elected leader who famously called on Mubarak and Assad to listen to their people and step down is now defying protesters with the same short-sighted authoritarian machismo of the dictators from whom he so avidly sought to distance himself.

    For four days, Istanbul has been shrouded in thick clouds of tear gas as violent clashes between protesters and police have left the city’s streets resembling a war zone. On Saturday, police were forced to retreat from the iconic Taksim Square, which has since been occupied by tens of thousands of protesters. Violent demonstrations quickly spread to the capital, Ankara, and 70 other cities throughout the country. After Amnesty condemned the government’s brutal response to the initially peaceful protests, which left thousands injured and at least two dead, the protesters have become increasingly determined to push Erdogan from power. In a sign of their radical determination, protesters in Beşiktaş erected massive barricades and even commandeered an excavator, breaking through police lines in an attempt to reach the prime minister’s Istanbul office. Between the indignant roar of the protesters, the ominous hissing of the tear gas cannisters and the deafening sound of police sirens, one can slowly start to discern the revolutionary whispers of a newly empowered people.

    The Seeds of a ‘Turkish Spring’?

    But what do the protests really mean for Turkey, the region and the world more generally? In recent days, a heated debate has been raging in the leftist blogosphere over what to make of the spontaneous popular uprising that began on May 27. Do the protests hail the start of a Turkish Spring, as Richard Seymour was quick to claim in The Guardian? Or will they merely be a flash in the pan — the last convulsion of the white, urban and secular elite, which is bound to extinguish itself in a matter of days — as Zihni Özdil of Erasmus University Rotterdam argues in a critical analysis for Muftah? Are the struggles of Tahrir and Taksim connected? Can they even be compared?

    To begin with, we need to reject not only the simplistic conflation of the Turkish uprising with the Arab Spring, but also the very notion of the “Arab Spring” as such. At the 2013 World Social Forum in Tunisia, the Arab revolutionaries deliberately refused to use the term Arab Spring, considering it an orientalist narrative invented by the Western media. Instead, they referred to the Arab revolutions, both to highlight their commonality as Arab uprisings, their nature as complex long-term processes, and their great diversity in terms of different national contexts and outcomes. In this sense, the Arab revolutionaries remind us that we cannot simply conflate the Syrian civil war with the “clean-cut” democratic transition in Tunisia, the failed uprising in Qatar, or the stalled revolution in Egypt. Similarly, we should refuse the simplistic orientalist impulse of heaping non-Arab Turkey onto the pile of “Arab Spring” uprisings.

    Clearly, the political economic background in Turkey is very different from that of its revolutionary and war-torn Arab neighbors, as well as the crisis-stricken context of neighboring Greece and Cyprus. Unlike stagnant Egypt and collapsing Greece, Turkey’s economy has been booming for the past decade, and unlike war-torn Syria and most other authoritarian regimes in the region, Turkey has had relatively stable and democratically elected governments for decades. Both the Arab revolutions and the European anti-austerity protests clearly failed to resonate with the Turkish citizenry. In fact, back in 2011, while the entire Mediterranean was convulsing with social unrest, Erdogan’s Development and Justice Party (AKP) easily won free and fair elections with 50 percent of the vote and no serious electoral contestants.

    Unity in Diversity: The Struggles Are One

    And yet these obvious differences should not blind us to the hidden but critically important similarities between the different struggles. Despite the economic growth and the seeming popularity of Erdogan, anger and frustration has quietly been brewing underneath the surface of Turkish society, bubbling up most recently in the massive May Day riots and in violently aborted attempts to stop pro-capitalist urban development projects and to contest the increasingly authoritarian and fundamentalist nature of Erdogan’s government. To truly understand the roots of the ongoing uprising, therefore, and to uncover the hidden similarities between the struggles of Taksim Square and those of Tahrir and other squares, we first of all need to understand the multiple dimensions to the civil unrest shaking Turkish society.

    Only when we take into account the local, the national, and the global dimensions to this unrest can we truly begin to recognize the fact that these protests are about much more than a couple of trees in Istanbul or the threats to secularism in Turkey more generally. While the Western media and Turkey’s Kemalist parties like to portray the protests as an internal clash of civilizations between Turkey’s Islamic identity on the one hand and its more European secular identity on the other, the core claims of protesters actually revolve much more around the increasingly authoritarian and neoliberal form of government pursued by Erdogan’s AKP. At rock bottom, as the activists themselves have loudly proclaimed over the past couple of days, the outrage has to do with democracy — or rather the lack of it. Seen from this multi-dimensional perspective, the Turkish protests have their own local and national particularities that cannot simply be subsumed under the orientalist nomer of a “Turkish Spring” — but they are nevertheless intimately connected to the transnational wave of contestation that emerged on the world’s squares in 2011 and that Leonidas Oikonomakis and I have referred to as the Real Democracy Movement.

    Rather than being blinded by the differences, therefore, we should take a closer look at the multiple dimensions of the Turkish uprising to understand how the claims being made by protesters resonate so strongly with activists around the world, eliciting expressions of concern and solidarity from Greece to the United States. The outcome of the Turkish uprising, of course, remains wide open — and the emergence of a truly revolutionary movement is by no means guaranteed. But ultimately, whether the mass protests lead to a Tahrir-style revolution, a Syntagma-style uprising, or an Occupy-style “flash in the pan”, a closer look at the multiple dimensions of the Turkish uprising reveals that, at rock bottom, the struggles are one — and the potential for revolutionary upheaval in Turkey can by no means be excluded ex ante.

    A Local Rebellion: Fighting for the Right to the City

    It all began with a peaceful sit-in in Gezi Park on the edge of Taksim Square, where some seventy protesters gathered on May 27 to prevent the destruction of one of the last-remaining green spaces in central Istanbul and its transformation into a shopping mall. The sit-in, quickly dubbed #OccupyGezi, was never simply an environmentalist protest about the trees or the park. Although the Greens featured prominently among the broad coalition of protesters — which also included socialists, anarchists, liberals and LGBTT activists — the sit-in was essentially a ‘Right to the City‘ protest: a notion first coined by Henry Lefebvre in 1968, who described it as a demand for “a transformed and renewed access to urban life.” The Marxist geographer David Harvey, who has written extensively on the subject in his latest book, describes the Right to the City as follows:

    The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

    As it turns out, over the past decade of his rule, prime minister Erdogan has increasingly neglected this most precious of human rights. As part of its neoliberal modernization program, the AKP has increasingly drawn the ire of citizens by ripping down one beloved site after another: from the destruction of the historic Emek movie theater and the port areas of Karaköy, Beşiktaş and Kadıköy, to the uprooting of up to 2.5 million trees for the construction of a widely unpopular third bridge across the Bosphoros. Almost all the historic and green sites facing destruction are making way for massive new shopping malls and other urban development projects that narrowly serve the interests of domestic and foreign businessmen. Most importantly, these projects are run through very unaccountable processes, favoring AKP cronies while leaving citizens with no voice whatsoever in the decisions that will shape the urban environment in which they live.

    In other words, the #OccupyGezi protests did not just fall out of the sky. In a powerful article for Jadaliyya, Jay Cassano notes that “this protest is the latest manifestation of a movement that has been stirring for some time now. The shopping mall is only one component of a plan to entirely redesign Taksim Square into a more car-friendly, tourist-accommodating, and sanitized urban center.” What the protesters in Gezi Park were contesting is not so much the uprooting of the trees, but rather the relentless neoliberal drive towards the privatization of public space and its subsumption into a sanitized, denaturalized and dehumanized capitalist urban geography. Once we recognize this most basic element of the protesters’ claims, we are forced to jump a level to the national dimension of their grievances: the increasingly authoritarian means by which the Turkish state is seeking to complete this neoliberal drive towards the privatization of public space.

    A National Revolt: Contesting Authoritarian Neoliberalism

    The #OccupyGezi protests turned out to be a detonator sending a shockwave of popular indignation throughout Turkish society. When the police began their violent crackdown on the peaceful protesters assembled in the park, the images of brutality resonated powerfully with segments of the population that would never have considered camping out in a park or playing Beatles songs underneath Istanbul’s last-remaining trees. What the crackdown on #OccupyGezi revealed, in short, was the increasingly anti-democratic means by which Erdogan, his government and his fellow party members at the municipal level are pushing through their neoliberal agenda. On May 29, Erdogan said that “we have made our decision and we will implement it; you cannot do anything about it” — a statement that many took as a reflection of the prime minister’s increasing unwillingness to seek compromise and popular input on his policy decisions.

    From the very beginning of the local #OccupyGezi protest, therefore, it was clear that there was something more at play than just the Right to the City. As Cemak Bural Tancel put it in an excellent piece building on his PhD research at the University of Nottingham, while resistance to the destruction of the city’s last remaining green space is crucial, “the meteoric rise of the occupation and the subsequent public outrage against the government signifies discontent with a broader trend that underpins the AKP’s reign since 2002: authoritarian neoliberalism.” This is where the so-called success story of Turkey as Europe’s fastest growing economy suddenly hits a wall and reveals its ugly face. Tancel notes that “while neoliberal policies have become part and parcel of Turkish economic administration since the 1980s, the AKP amplified the existing drive to an unprecedented extent.” Before 2003, for instance, the state implemented privatizations to the tune of $380 million per year; since Erdogan’s three terms in office, this has jumped up to an overwhelming $6 billion per year.

    Despite widespread labor opposition and grassroots activism, Tancel observes that the government has single-mindedly “maintained its neoliberal onslaught on services, communities and the environment.” In the wake of the 2011 elections, the AKP’s neoliberalism took an even more “ferocious and disciplinarian form”, highlighted by unprecedented state repression of students, activists, journalists and lawyers. A report by a Turkish student platform claims that 771 students are currently locked up in prison on terrorism-related charges once concocted to crack down on separatist Kurdish activists, while a leading US journalism watchdog recently proclaimed Turkey the “world’s worst jailer” of journalists. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the current legal framework “makes no distinction between an armed PKK combatant and a civilian demonstrator,” providing the government with virtually unlimited juridical opportunities to crack down on any form of peaceful political dissent. Meanwhile, Amnesty International has complained that “promised constitutional and other legal reforms did not occur. Instead, the right to freedom of expression was threatened and protesters faced increased police violence.”

    At the same time as it pushed through this increasingly authoritarian neoliberal agenda, the AKP government has sought to legitimize its pro-elite and market-friendly rule by recourse to a quasi-fundamentalist cultural agenda pandering to the religious propensities of the country’s large and poor rural population. Attempts to limit the consumption of alcohol, ban the public display of affection, overturn the right to abortion, and many other infringements on basic civil liberties are seen by Turkey’s secular population as evidence of a creeping ‘Islamization’ of society. These fears have recently been stoked by the decision to name the third Bosphorus bridge after an Ottoman Sultan who virtually exterminated the country’s Alevi (i.e., non-Sunni Muslim) population, as well as the destruction of Gezi Park and the ‘modernization’ of Taksim Square, which will make way for the resurrection of an old Ottoman barracks complex that was once a base for the bloody persecution of Turkey’s sizeable secular population.

    Of course, these fears and grievances play an important role in fomenting public discontent among secular Turks, but as Jay Cassano notes in his piece for Jadaliyya, “there is no indication that this is what ultimately brought thousands of people out into the streets.” The cultural politics of religious piety must therefore be firmly located within the government’s embrace of authoritarian neoliberalism as a guiding ideology and set of practices. In this sense, the current protests are less about the social cleavage between religious and secular Turks and much more about the global capitalist class cleavage that was so powerfully exposed during the 2009 demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund. In fact, the original Twitter hashtag for the Gezi protests was #DirenGeziParki, a resonant meme that was directly based on the name of the anti-IMF demonstrations that rocked Istanbul in 2009, which were publicly referred to as Diren Istanbul, or “Resist Istanbul” protests — later shortened to ResIstanbul.

    A Global Uprising: The Struggle for Real Democracy

    At this point, we clearly have to confront the unmistakable global and anti-capitalist dimension to the ongoing protests. The 2009 anti-IMF demonstrations that preceded the #OccupyGezi protests and that helped to shape the broad-based popular coalition that underlies the current uprising arose in a highly globalized context of financialized capitalism. Turkey’s 2001 financial crisis, occurring at the same time as Argentina’s, forced it to apply for a large IMF bailout, which inevitably came with all the usual neoliberal strings attached: from massive labor market reforms and firesale privatizations to the crackdown on trade unions and labor rights and the now familiar cutbacks in social spending. After ten years of IMF-imposed neoliberal reform and AKP-sponsored authoritarian implementation, the Bretton Woods Project concluded that, “over its long decade with the IMF, Turkey managed to replace public deficits with a democracy deficit.”

    It is here that we finally arrive at the crux of the protesters’ broader claims — and the connection with ongoing struggles in Cairo, Madrid, Athens, New York, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City and Frankfurt. The Turkish protests are not just a local rebellion against the destruction of a park, nor just a national revolt against increasing authoritarianism and creeping Islamic fundamentalism. Much more than this, the Turkish uprising appears to be a local and national manifestation of a global struggle for real democracy. As Agnes Czajka and Bora Isyar wrote for Jadaliyya this weekend, “the protesters are adamant that theirs is the cause of democracy.” No surprise, then, that the Turkish struggle is resonating so strongly with the concerns of people in widely divergent geographical, political and socio-economic contexts; people who at first sight may share nothing in common — and who may not even know about or be in direct contact with another — but who upon deeper inspection are embedded in the same suffocating structure of global capitalism, and who confront the same crippling legitimation crisis of traditional political institutions.

    The critical structural factor is simply the rise of global finance and transnational production networks, combined with the increasing authority of international financial institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the European Central Bank, which have been quietly chipping away at the ability and willingness of nation states — and the governments that administer them — to look after the interests of their own citizens. Indeed, a systemic imperative has emerged that forces governments of any political conviction to dance to the tunes of global markets or to face the repercussions in the form of reduced growth, rising unemployment, and an increased likelihood of being ejected from power by disaffected voters or rebellious social forces. In this context, the manoeuvrability of national governments has been greatly constricted through limitations on monetary and fiscal policy options, leaving policymakers with symbolic politics to gain and maintain the support of voters. This is the context in which authoritarian neoliberal populism thrives, while democracy suffers.

    As I pointed out in a recent conference paper, these dynamics of diminishing state control over global flows of investment and transnational networks of production have fed into a widespread crisis of representation. In some countries, the crisis of representation was already obvious: Ben Ali and Mubarak were dictatorial puppets of global capital and the neoliberal West — they retained their power through the manipulation of election results and the violent suppression of popular opposition. They clearly did not represent the average citizen. In Europe and the United States, by contrast, the anti-democratic nature of government was more difficult for people to see at first, but since the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent debt crisis, the crisis of representation has spread through the West like a wildfire. As people around the world are losing faith in traditional political processes, a gaping democratic deficit is exposed at the heart of all capitalist states: from pre-revolutionary Egypt to crisis-ridden Greece, and from the “free” United States to nominally democratic Turkey.

    Will Taksim Square Become Erdogan’s Tahrir?

    Here emerges a clear connection between the Taksim protests and the Tahrir revolt. While Mubarak’s regime was in many ways the opposite of Erdogan’s, Mubarak ultimately faced the same structural limitations. Forced by the IMF and global markets to liberalize the economy, privatize state assets and reduce state subsidies for the poor, Mubarak found himself increasingly unable to legitimize his regime. Unlike Erdogan, the secular regime in Egypt refused to resort to the politics of religious piety to stabilize its cultural hegemony over society — and eventually paid the price in terms of a popular uprising led by a curious revolutionary coalition of secular middle-class activists and poor Muslim workers and slum-dwellers. The restored balance of power that subsequently aborted the revolutionary process under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood in fact repeated many of the strategies of Erdogan’s AKP: in order to re-legitimize the globally-integrated capitalist state and the dominant military-industrial complex, corporate and military elites had to compromise on cultural politics in order to retain their economic predominance and their privileged political position, in turn providing new political space to the religious fundamentalists.

    In this sense, those who hail the Turkish uprising as the advent of a “Turkish Spring”, like Richard Seymour, are getting reality the wrong way around: in many ways, the uprising in Turkey is an Arab Spring in reverse — it starts from the premise of a nominally democratic but factually authoritarian regime that legitimizes its rule through the cultural politics of religious piety, just as post-revolutionary Egypt does under the Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike the Egyptian revolution, therefore, it will be much more difficult for the Turkish protesters to craft a revolutionary coalition between secular middle class activists and poor Muslims — just as the secular revolutionaries of Tahrir find themselves politically isolated in the current post-revolutionary constellation of social forces in Egypt. This difficulty is further compounded by the Turkish state’s clampdown on the media (state and corporate TV are massively downplaying the protests) and the removal of police from Taksim, both of which serve to reduce the public visibility of the protests and therefore lessen the likelihood of poor Muslims joining the rebellion.

    At the same time, those who therefore presume that the “objective conditions for a popular uprising are not present” in Turkey — as Zihni Özdil does — are equally wrong. According to Özdil, Erdogan remains immensely popular among the country’s poor and deeply religious majority while organized labor is barely involved in the protests; two factors that prohibit the emergence of a genuine revolutionary coalition that could contest the structural power and cultural hegemony of Erdogan and the AKP. These two observations, however, are no guarantee that disaffected social groups will continue to abstain from joining the burgeoning protest movement at a later point. Here we have to remember how the Egyptian revolution itself unfolded: the initial protests of #25J largely started out as a rebellion of young, highly-educted, and secular middle-class radicals — most importantly those associated with the April 6th Youth Movement — with years of experience in anti-capitalist activism. It was only through days of teeth-grinding grassroots organization that these protesters managed to mobilize Cairo’s slum-dwellers and religious poor to give volume to the protests, as well as football hooligans to fight in the front-lines.

    The Working Class as the Key to Revolution

    While this is by no means guaranteed, a similar coalition may yet emerge in Turkey. It all depends on whether the current coalition of protesters on the streets manages to actualize the hidden potentialities for revolt that already lie hidden within the marginalized segments of Turkey’s population, which in turn relies on active grassroots organizing among the country’s working class and disaffected poor. As Zeynep Gambetti notes in her ROAR article of this weekend, the constituency of the protests is already characterized by a “curious coalition” made up of a great variety of social forces, mostly middle-class leftists, liberals and anarchists, but also including the football hooligans that Egyptian revolutionaries only managed to mobilize at a later stage in their revolutionary process. The key to the further escalation of the uprising is now the large-scale mobilization of the working class.

    According to Özdil, labor mobilization is a practical impossibility as the “objective conditions” for it are absent. This assumption seems to me like a simplistic and premature conclusion. Indeed, in a crucial article, Sungur Savran informs us that there are actually two major strikes waiting in the wings: first, the Federation of Public Employees’ Unions had already (independently of the ongoing protests) declared a sector-wide strike for June 5, which, if successful, could paralyze large parts of the Turkish state apparatus. It is the second strike, however, that poses the greatest threat to the government: metal workers have also previously and independently called a strike due to start in June, which may now coincide with the massive unrest on the streets. These 100,000 metal workers, if they mobilize in sufficient numbers, just happen to have the power to completely shut down the main export engine of Turkey’s manufacturing sector, with potentially catastrophic implications for the government.

    In this already explosive situation, the possible confluence of these two strikes shutting down both the public sector and the country’s main export engine would open up a host of unpredictable consequences. As Savran notes, “the present moment witnesses a people’s revolt in the face of the arrogance and repressive practice of the government. Should this be combined with an insurgent working-class movement, Turkey would become open to all kinds of revolutionary change.” Clearly, Taksim is not (yet) Tahrir, and it is unclear whether it can ever become another Tahrir, given the radically divergent political-economic context. But that does not mean that the Turks cannot craft their own path to revolutionary social change if they play the game right, crafting a broad-based popular coalition involving massive workers’ mobilization — and putting enough pressure on the economy to destabilize and pry open the governing coalition of the Islamic AKP and the secular army.

    None of this is guaranteed, and no one can at this point claim with any certainty what the outcome of the uprising will be. But one thing is for sure: just a week ago, few people would have dared to predict that the once stable economic giant on the bridge between the East and the West would reach such a dramatic state of social unrest. Two years after the Arab revolutionaries and Greek anti-austerity protesters first kicked off the Real Democracy Movement, the global cycle of contestation has finally come full circle in the Bosphorus. The revolutionary spirit of 2011 has resurrected itself — and today it is the brave young Turks who are carrying it forward. Whatever world leaders may try, the rebellious genie that animated the global uprisings of the past two years just won’t go back into its suffocating neoliberal bottle. In these times of grave social upheaval, revolutionary change is no longer just a far-fetched ideological abstraction — it is once again a distant but very real possibility.

    Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute and the Founding Editor of ROAR Magazine.

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  • Turkey lashes out at EU ‘interference’ in corruption scandal

    Turkey lashes out at EU ‘interference’ in corruption scandal

    Recip Tayyep Erdogan’s embattled government rejects EU criticism of its handling of investigation

    Turkish women protesters shout slogans against the government in Istanbul Photo: EPA
    Turkish women protesters shout slogans against the government in Istanbul Photo: EPA

    By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent

    Turkey’s government, engulfed by a corruption scandal, hit out at the European Union on Sunday for “interfering”, as the crisis widened the fault lines between the country and its neighbours and former allies.

    The cabinet of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has looked increasingly isolated by the scandal, and has accused both the United States and Gulf countries of plotting against him.

    The EU left it till Friday to issue a mild statement calling for “transparency” in the investigation, which has led to the resignation of three ministers whose sons were arrested in the inquiry.

    The EU commissioner for enlargement, Stefan Füle, had also praised a court decision to suspend a new cabinet order which would have changed the way the police and the judiciary handled such investigations, intended to ensure they were reported to their political masters.

    Mr Erdogan was furious that the corruption investigation against his ministers had been underway for 14 months without his knowledge.

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    Mr Füle said the order had “undermined the independence of the judiciary and its capacity to act”. Elmar Brok, the German MEP who heads the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee, also accused Mr Erdogan’s government of trying to influence the judiciary.

    In return, Turkey’s EU Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu, suggested the EU was suffering from “preconceived convictions” and urged it to be more “vigilant” in its comments.

    The corruption investigation focuses on payments to ministers’ sons, believed to be connected to business dealings channeled through the state-owned Halkbank, including a major gold-for-oil trade with Iran used to circumvent western sanctions.

    The scandal has united Mr Erdogan’s secular opponents with his former allies, including the Islamist Hizmet movement led by a charismatic religious leader, Fethullah Gulen.

    Critics say the EU’s ambivalent attitude to Turkey’s attempts to join over the last decade have driven Mr Erdogan away from the West and towards closer relations with neighbours such as Iran, and heightened his sense of political alienation.

    via Turkey lashes out at EU ‘interference’ in corruption scandal – Telegraph.