Military Intervention and a Crisis of Democracy in Turkey: The Menderes Era and its Demise 9780755607631, 9781848857780

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would never have come to be if it were not for the many institutions and individuals who have supported me. I am most grateful to the Carlsberg Foundation whose generous support enabled me to launch the project and turn it into the present book. Further thanks go to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, and to my own institution, the Saxo Institute, that have supported my work on a daily basis and never hesitated to offer me sabbaticals when I needed it. I am most indebted to the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University and to the Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University for hosting me as a visiting follow and to the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund that made my last visit possible. I owe particular thanks to Brady Kiesling who offered invaluable suggestions to revise the manuscript and to Isa Blumi for sharing his immense knowledge with me and for his support. Finally, my thanks go to my editor Maria Marsh who readily accepted my book proposal and made this book possible.

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INTRODUCTION

On 17 September 1961, the military regime in Turkey hanged Adnan Menderes – the country’s first elected prime minister. The day before, two of his close colleagues, the ministers of foreign affairs and finance, suffered the same fate. The sentences were meted out by a tribunal set up by the military following a coup d’état on 27 May 1960. Among the chief accusations raised against Menderes was that he had infringed on Turkey’s constitution by undermining the principles of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, and had exploited religion for political purposes. Menderes’ advent to power in 1950 marked a watershed in the history of the Turkish nation state: the old elite’s monopoly over state and society was seriously challenged when the new government took power from Atatürk’s political heirs, the Peoples’ Republican Party (CHP). The transition was the result of the first free elections held in Turkey. Menderes’ Democratic Party (DP) won a preponderant victory by mobilizing the peasants, the bulk of the population constituting about 80 per cent of all Turks, and Menderes triumphed on a ticket deliberately addressing a new commercial and industrial middle class who objected to the dominant doctrine of étatisme and those who had never really forgiven the CHP for the enforced secularism, namely religious leaders, artisans and small shopkeepers. The latter attitude, in particular, was nurtured by the fact that only 25 years had passed since Atatürk had launched his sweeping campaign against Islamic institutions and the Ottoman order: he abolished the Caliphate, repressed the Sufi brotherhoods, certain aspects of Islamic tradition, attempted to erase the memory of Ottoman past and set in motion a series of reforms to Westernize state and society.

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Menderes’ overwhelming success in the 1950 elections was repeated in 1954 and 1957. It was against this background, as well as because of a fear that he would use extreme political methods to extend his hold on the government into the 1960s, that relations with the CHP and its supporters deteriorated beyond repair. This, in turn, contributed to severe cleavages between the elites and finally to polarization that left Menderes facing opposition from the most powerful and prestigious institution in the country: the Turkish armed forces. Although it is not quite clear when relations between the prime minister and the armed forces reached the point of no return, it stands as fact that on 27 May 1960, the military toppled Menderes in a coup d’état. The armed forces’ intervention marked the end of a unique era in Turkey’s history when governments for the first time were elected by popular vote and ruled without being subject to the control of nonelected institutions. When handing over power to the politicians in the following year, 1961, the military made sure that it was transferred to the CHP, relying on Atatürk’s heir and former president, Ismet Inönü, who would head the first post-coup government. The armed forces also supervised the enactment of a new constitution in 1961 that, in the words of the military regime, was meant to ‘preclude abuses of civil power’ and guarantee ‘against the danger of party oligarchy’, in other words a repetition of DP-rule. In practical terms, these intentions were reflected in the creation of a second chamber of elected and appointed members, the senate, to counterbalance the elected national assembly and an independent constitutional court to ban legislation which it regarded as unconstitutional. As a means to ensure its own continued influence in the political process, the army also created the National Security Council, which had a strong military representation and whose advice no civilian government dared to ignore. In this way, the 1960 coup also inaugurated a new epoch, which would see the military as a major player in the political process and significantly weaken the role of the elected politicians.

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The officer corps claimed that the army was the lawful guardian of Kemalism and had the right and duty to intervene again whenever it deemed the values of Atatürk and the spirit of his reforms to be in danger. Although the Turkish officer corps had inherited a long Ottoman tradition of identifying state authority with military power and while it tended to see itself as a modernizing political force and a separate class in Turkish society, we should remember that, in the words of Robert Cover, for every constitution there is an epic.1 The self-proclaimed role of the armed forces as the guardian of Kemalism was intimately connected with the recent experiences from the Menderes era of free elections and independent government. In other words, it is primarily in the Menderes era that we shall expect to find the specific dynamics that prompted the 27 May coup and the self-proclaimed role of the officer corps as the guardian of Kemalism. This perception did not come out of thin air, of course, and its genesis must be related to the activities of rising opposition to DP-rule in the one-party era elites. In the same way, the hanging of Menderes must also be seen as a final act in a process whose origin was verbal and took the shape of a systematic mode of framing Menderes as a threat to Kemalism. This book examines conflict and interaction among the political elites, and the role of the armed forces in this process. It investigates the issues that alienated Menderes from the old elite and the extent to which the one-party era elite contributed to this development. It also examines how they framed him and what role Islam played in the relations between the DP and the old elite. Furthermore, it studies the unfolding of relations between the armed forces and the political elites, the CHP as well as the DP. Finally, it discusses what effect – if any at all – it had on the conduct of Menderes’ foreign policy that Turkey in the 1950s was the strongest independent power among the successor states to the Ottoman Empire – and whether the change of government from CHP rule to DP rule affected Ankara’s interaction with these nations. Chronologically, this book focuses on the time span between the 1950 elections and those in 1965, i.e. on the period from the formation

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of the first DP government to the juncture when the Justice Party, the successor party to DP, took over the parliamentary leadership from Ismet Inönü. Such a framework will allow us to examine not only the whole period of DP-rule, the 27 May coup d’état and the military regime, but also the full transition from military government to civilian rule. And I believe that, in order to grasp all the aspects of the course of transition and its bearing on recent Turkish history, it is imperative to examine the entire process from 1961 to 1965 during which the armed forces finally came to accept a government formed by Menderes’ heirs. This book posits that Kemalism was more than just a selfproclaimed progressive ideology to facilitate change in a traditional society and to reform mentalities ‘rooted in the past and in superstition’ as well as a strategy to give Turkey a place among the nations. Kemalism was also used by the old elite of the one-party era, hence also called the Kemalists, as an instrument to disqualify and fight competing elites that would not recognize its supremacy. This implies that Kemalism must also be analysed as a specific pattern of symbols conveyed, among other things, through legislation and bureaucratic practice as well as a rhetorical tool to define what was ‘progress’ and what was ‘reaction’. Because such symbols are expressions of specific intentions, the Kemalism of the 1950s, which – like any other ideology – is basically a certain arrangement of norms, also has to be analysed as a definite set of rules for community and order based on certain expectations about behaviour that makes it possible to distinguish between those who belong to the community and those who do not. All this information was transmitted in various narratives. Because narratives have a powerful effect on human behaviour and because human behaviour proceeds through the creation or selection of alternative narratives, it is crucial to investigate the process through which a certain policy or development in society is represented as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘legitimate’. It is against that background that this book also will examine the process by which certain aspects of Islamic tradition and Ottoman institutions became represented as darkness and reaction and Kemalism as

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progress and enlightenment, and likewise the process by which certain political actions of the DP were cast as reactionary and as efforts to exploit religion for political purposes. This, in turn, means that Kemalism must also be analysed against the background of Kemal’s attitudes towards the ancient regime, while, in the same vein, Menderes’ policies must be examined in the light of his efforts to take control of a state that was dominated by an elite that owed its position to Kemalism. Finally, we shall also examine to what extent Menderes’ policies can be seen as a reflection of the efforts by various groups to disentangle themselves from the norms that the rulers of the one-party era had established and attempted to make govern their activities.

Design of the study The book is divided into three parts. Part One: The Democratic Party Versus the Kemalist Regime focuses on circumstances that enabled Menderes’ advent to power. It discusses the motives of the Kemalist leadership in accepting the holding of free elections, the role of Turkey’s position vis-à-vis the great powers and the reasons for Menderes’ domestic success. It also focuses on the rising confrontations between Menderes and the Kemalists, on the process of polarization that led to military intervention and on the role that Islam was seen or claimed to take and on Menderes’ way of handling opposition. Part Two: Menderes’ Foreign Policy discusses Turkey’s regional ambitions in the shadow of the Cold War, in particular in relation to Greece and the Middle East. It analyses the emergence of a Turkish policy vis-à-vis Cyprus and the deterioration of relations between Turkey and Arab nationalism in general, and Syria in particular. It examines the role of Turkey’s pro-Western policy in this process and discusses Ankara’s possible role in an American plan to effect a regime change in Syria. Part Three: The Military Versus the Democratic Party and the Role of the CHP focuses on the relations between the armed forces and Menderes, on the conspiracy against the government and the 27 May coup d’état. It discusses the relationship of the CHP, in particular, to the military

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government and its role in the transition from military rule to civilian government. It discusses the cleavage between senior and junior officers and it focuses on the unrest in the armed forces that continued after the 1961 – and among other things manifested itself in two attempted coups d’état. It particularly discusses the process that led to the execution of Menderes and the issue of the amnesty for former DP politicians as well as the rapprochement between the armed forces and the Justice Party, the successor to Menderes’ DP, culminating in the formation of a Justice Party government in 1965.

Sources I rely, in particular, on archival material from Turkey’s two most important allies among the great powers, the USA and West Germany. Unlike memoirs penned long after the events they purport to describe, diplomatic reports reflect contemporary observations and perceptions. Even if their conclusions sometimes may turn out to be wrong, their observations and perceptions are fresh, unaffected by the filter of time and, not least, unaffected by a desire to justify the actions of their authors (often in contrast to the memoirs). Intended to assist policymakers at home to comprehend Turkish conditions and actions and thereby to formulate effective responses, diplomatic reports focus on accuracy in description of conditions, events and conversations. A potential problem with diplomatic reports, however, is their external provenance. While the US and West German archives contain considerable material of Turkish provenance, such as official communiqués, speeches, press clippings, transcriptions of court cases etc., their main narrative of Turkish motives or the intentions of the various actors on the local political scene constitutes an interpretation based on what the original Turkish sources were telling the US and West German interlocutors. What Turkish actors on the political scene told diplomats clearly represented an account tailored to defend, influence and persuade. At the same time, however, we must assume that the diplomats who were in contact with the political world of Turkey were experienced and aware of the game in which they were involved and

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capable of filtering and evaluating the information they received. This, of course, does not exclude that they sometimes failed. In addition to the correspondence among the embassies, Auswärtiges Amt, State Department and other relevant ministries, I have also used reports from the US Air attachés, the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the State Department. The CIA reported to the president and the National Security Council but not to the State Department. In this way, separate lines of communication developed between Ankara and Washington. A good number of the CIA reports that I rely on are field reports which contain detailed information about what was going on in the Turkish armed forces. Although the names of the informants providing these observations have been erased, it transpires from the context that some, at least, were Turkish officers. These are unique sources because we have no other contemporary accounts of a similar quality. I have also relied on some CIA research reports and analyses. The INR was, like the CIA, a legacy of the wartime Office of Strategic Studies, the OSS. Its main task was to provide analysis and research to support the secretary of state and his top aides by coordinating and analysing all incoming information from sources of intelligence. Regarding material of Turkish provenance, the documents concerned are translations into English and German of newspaper articles, reports from meetings in the Grand National Assembly, from political parties as well as court trials, including the courts martial established to investigate the September 1955 Riots in Istanbul and Izmir against the Greek minority which related to the Cyprus issue. Regarding press clippings, one should keep in mind that they are selected according to what was deemed to be significant or important by contemporary observers who were not a direct party to the controversies between the DP and the CPH. The same goes for official communiqués, speeches, press clippings and transcriptions of court cases.

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CHAPTER 1 THE DEMOCR ATIC PART Y

On 7 June 1945, four members of the ruling CHP party – former Prime Minister Celal Bayar, Adnan Menderes, Fuad Köprülü and Refik Koraltan – submitted a proposal to CHP’s parliamentary group. Known as the ‘Proposal of the Four’, it was a demand for democracy and the introduction of a multiparty system. In their wording, they were careful to not to offend Atatürk or the constitution, putting the blame for the continuation of the restrictions on the constitution on external circumstances, namely the Second World War. They mentioned the democratic nature of the Turkish constitution, Atatürk’s attempts to give a more liberal character to the government and they expressed their understanding that ‘fear of reaction’ had made it necessary to impose restrictions on the constitution. It is difficult to tell if these observations were really heartfelt. After all, the group was vulnerable and stood unprotected in its opposition to the one-party regime; and what they were demanding would mean no less than a total reversal of the political practices of more than two decades: a restoration of effective powers of control of the government to the Grand National Assembly, the granting of rights and freedom to individuals and the development of political activity based on more than one party. According to the group, the intellectuals and the peasants were ready for democracy.1 On 12 June, the parliamentary group of the CHP rejected the proposal.2 During the winter of 1945, the four men severed their relations with the CHP and on 7 January 1946

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the Democratic Party was formally established under the leadership of Bayar.3 Thus, the party originated from within the National Assembly and was constituted by former members of the CHP. Although the DP had not developed from the people, there were clear signs that public opinion was in sympathy with the efforts to criticize the CHP and a common opposition front was created around the newspapers Vatan and Tan.4 Regarding the background and careers of the four, we know, among other things, that Celal Bayar was born in 1883 in a provincial town not far from Bursa. His early career was in banking while he joined the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) before 1908. At the time of the 1909 counter-revolution, he led a unit from Bursa to Istanbul to support the Young Turks. Around 1909, Talat Pasha appointed him secretary in charge of the CUP Izmir branch instead of Rahmi Bey. In the wake of the Greek landing in 1919, Bayar organized resistance in the Aegean under the name of Galip Hoca and was so successful working in the irregular militia that it launched his career as a deputy in the Ottoman parliament. In 1920, he caught the eye of Mustafa Kemal and in 1923, he was elected to the executive board of the People’s Party. He served as government minister in various departments and in 1924, he began his career in the Is-Bank. He became a rival of Inönü and it was not until after the death of Atatürk that Inönü got the upper hand in this feud: in November 1937, Bayar was appointed prime minister by Atatürk and then in January 1939 Inönü, in his capacity as president, accepted Bayar’s resignation.5 Menderes was born in 1899 into a notable family in Aydin. He attended the Ittihad ve Terakki Idadisi School established by CUP and then the American College of Izmir. In 1916, he was drafted into the army and sent to Syria but got sick on the way and was returned. During the Greek occupation of Izmir, he formed a small resistance band near Aydin to fight the invading Greek army. Soon his gang joined a larger guerrilla force and he remained engaged in partisan activities until 1922. Between 1922 and 1930, he earned his livelihood as the proprietor of the large family farm near Aydin. Marriage connected him to important political personalities including, among others, Tevfik

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Rüstü Aras, Atatürk’s minister of foreign affairs. In 1930 be became chairman of the newly formed Free Republican Party in Aydin. According to Bayar, Menderes’ respect for his religion impressed him, and it has been said that Menderes was impressed by the role religion played in the mass support for the Free Republican Party. After the demise of that party, Menderes joined the CHP and, in 1931, he was elected to the National Assembly from Aydin. Menderes would remain a backbencher during the 1930s.6 By this juncture, he had met Atatürk. Refik Koraltan was born in 1889 in the area of Sivas. He entered public service as an assistant prosecutor and became the attorney general of Karaman in 1915. He was appointed police inspector and soon became chief of police of Trabzon, in 1918. While engaged in this duty, he facilitated the establishment of the ‘Society of Defence of the National Rights to Counteract the Pontus Rum Organizations’, which aimed to fight the Greek Orthodox groups in the Black Sea areas that had started to appear after the end of First World War. He was elected as the deputy of Konya and later served briefly as governor of that province. Thus, all three men had done their bit for the national cause, albeit on a much less spectacular level than a number of prominent CHP personalities who had been leading officers in the War of Independence – some even war heroes. It was only Bayar who had a high profile political career in the one-party era while the DP’s other powerful profile, Menderes, was a homo novus whose political persona was formed during the 1950s. Fuad Köprülü was born in 1890 in Istanbul and was a renowned historian before he founded the DP.

Elections and supporters The Democratic Party won all the elections during the 1950s with its share of the votes ranging between a high of 58 per cent in the elections in 1954 to a low of 48 per cent in 1957. In the 1950 elections, its share was 53 per cent. CHP’s total remained more stable, swinging between a low of 35 per cent in 1954 and a high of 41 per cent in 1957,

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while its share was 36 per cent in elections in 1950 and 37 per cent in the 1961 elections.7 Due to the nature of the electoral law, the DP completely dominated the parliament in terms of seats – holding 402 seats against the CHP’s 63 in the period 1950–54; 505 against the CHP’s 31 in the period 1954–57 and 424 against the CHP’s 178 from 1957 until the 27 May coup.8 The ‘secret’ of the DP’s success, lay in its attention to the welfare of the peasantry.9 During the one-party era, the CHP took over the social and economically dominant role in countryside from the Agas of the prerepublican era. The party had branches in every rural centre of Anatolia and attempted to guide the peasants by means that varied from persuasion to compulsion. While the CHP representatives were agents of the Kemalist revolution, and seen as such, the DP’s nationwide organization in the countryside had no desire to exercise the same kind of surveillance and direction. This and the reduction of the CHP’s network created a vacuum that allowed for a rapid return of the magnates (or Agas), something that only added to rally the peasant behind the Democrats. The DP was also supported by a new commercial and industrial middle class who objected to the dominant doctrine of étatisme that the one-party regime had practiced in conducting the national economy. Finally, there were the religious leaders, who had ‘never really forgiven’ the CHP for the enforced secularism. These, in turn, commanded a strong support among the peasants, the artisans and small shopkeepers.10 According to a report from the US Embassy in 1965 on the support of the DP and the Justice Party, the DP’s support was strongest in the populous fertile, agricultural regions of the Aegean and Black Sea as well as the Mediterranean, including the Adana Plain. In these areas, the peasants were doing well economically by Turkish standards. They were no longer ‘supine’ and responsive to the control of the gentry, the Agas, which historically had controlled most of the countryside. In areas where the Agas retained their traditional control over the peasantry, as in the Eastern provinces, this class was still able to produce the vote for the CHP. The DP’s support was based on the above-mentioned emerging and relatively prosperous peasants and an expanding, but still small,

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commercial, industrial and newly wealthy farmer class, such as cotton planters for example. The DP also appealed to the urban lower class that was primarily composed of Anatolian peasants crowed in the gecekondu – the squatter areas around the large cities. Many of these kept ties with their home villages and tended to maintain their former voting pattern. The bulk of this group came from the relatively prosperous areas of Western Turkey and the Black Sea, not having been forced off the land by poverty, but having been drawn by the allure of city life. For example, when a typical peasant arrived in the gecekondu, he immediately went to a district populated by people from his home village. The local DP man would help him to settle, help with problems vis-à-vis the authorities and function as an employment agency or a marriage bureau. In contrast to CHP men, who typically were outsiders, the local DP representative was always a resident of the district.11 Furthermore, the DP had some people in their ranks who were described as very sophisticated, such as representatives of the Istanbul business community, and a minority of high-level civil servants whose careers were tied to the DP. Finally, there were signs that the DP attempted to ameliorate its image in the eyes of the intellectuals and army officers, feeling the need to cast itself in a more progressive style.12 All this leaves us with a picture of the DP’s main constituency that was composed by provincial magnates, the rural majorities of peasants, small business holders and all those who had reason to loath the republican state.

Reaching out to the world of the Turkish peasant The Democratic Party launched a campaign to improve the conditions in the world of the peasant, seeing Turkey’s total agricultural output rise by 50 per cent between 1950 and 1958.13 The new administration built paved roads that linked thousands of villages to the market for the first time in history, and in that way also brought the peasant into the main stream of Turkish life. Based on a shift of economic priorities from those of the one-party era, which had focused on industry and urban development, the new administration placed rural interests and

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those of the province and private business above urban interests: the government used Marshall Aid monies to buy 40,000 tractors for farmers, at a time when only around 25 per cent of a total of 2.4 million ploughs were made of iron, while a considerable amount of the rest of the US aid went to other capital-intensive farm equipment like mechanical harvesters; dams were constructed, electricity provided to small towns and peasants were granted tax-exemptions. Some see Menderes as the first ruler to give the rural population ‘a rudimentary sense of citizenship’.14 These policies spurred a commercialization of agriculture that made Turkey the world’s fourth-largest exporter of wheat during the Korean War. In fact, between 1950 and 1955, the expansion of the fortunes of agriculture was so closely tied to the advent of the DP to power that the period has been labelled the ‘Menderes Boom.’ These years of unequalled growth came to an end in 1955 due to bad weather and failed harvests. In order to mend the situation, the government turned to state borrowing and, in 1958, Turkey entered a serious financial crisis including rapidly rising inflation, balance of payment problems and a huge foreign debt, something that, among other things, led the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to intervene and attempt to raise new loans.15 Bayar and Menderes went to small towns and the countryside because they wanted to cultivate a new power-base and decided to espouse a policy of less government control of culture. For the first time in the history of Turkey, a political party made a direct appeal to the world of the mass of the citizens. However, this new policy required what observers have called a sacrifice of some modernizing reforms and that the principle of secularism take a backseat. This development, in turn, caused alarm among the intelligentsia, the bureaucrats and the officer corps.16 Before we examine the effects of these reactions, we shall attempt come to grips with some of the cultural content of the heterogeneous world of the Turkish citizen. By identifying what was disregarded, repressed, or banished by the one-party regime, we will get a better understanding of the hopes of the voters who carried the DP to its successes and of the power of the resentment directed against the CHP and the one-party era elite.

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CHAPTER 2 THE KEM ALIST R EVOLUTION AND THE OTTOM AN PAST

During the night of 1–2 November 1918, eight top leaders of the CUP regime secretly boarded a German torpedo boat calling at Sebastopol in the German-controlled Ukraine. While Enver Pasha headed for the Caucasus, the rest of the party was taken to Berlin. The CUP leaders were preparing for resistance against an impending occupation, and a ‘second round’ to assert Istanbul’s independence. While Enver invoked his recovery of Edirne during the Balkan Wars as an inspiration for the future, Talat set up a paramilitary underground (Karakol) equipped with arms and funds from the Teshkilat-i mahsusa, the special organization. In Istanbul, the Karakol was funnelling a flow of agents and arms into the interior, where plans had already been laid during the war to move the centre of power. Eastern Anatolia remained beyond the range of any occupation because the October revolution had removed Russia from the ranks of the Entente powers. Furthermore, while the Ninth Army was left intact under CUP command, local groups sprang up across Anatolia calling themselves ‘Defence of Rights and Rejection of Annexation Societies’. Resistance to the partition of Anatolia took the most vigorous shape in the north-central highlands that were neither occupied by foreign troops nor inhabited by a substantial non-Turkish population in revolt.1

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In the first half of 1919, the Karakol sent Mustafa Kemal to the Black Sea area and in the mid summer of 1919 the local societies were pulled together under his leadership. The Turkish nationalists defined and redefined the principles of their organization at its constituent congress in Erzurum (23 July–7 August 1919) and at a second congress at Sivas (4–11 September 1919). Indicative of the popularity of the resistance was the fact that, on 28 January 1920, the newly elected lower chamber of the Ottoman legislature in Istanbul decided to adopt the National Pact which served as the political platform for a united resistance movement, Anadolu ve Rumeli Müdafaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti (the Association for the Defence of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia).2 The National Pact addressed a confessional identity, declaring as its goal – in the name of all Muslims in Anatolia and Rumelia (the Ottoman possessions in Europe, sometimes referred to in the capitals of the great powers as ‘Turkey in Europe’) – the freeing of the Caliph from his Christian captivity.3 This choice of words should not surprise, when we take into account that, in 1920, religion was the most deeply entrenched symbol of loyalty and identity structures, defining the relationship between citizen and state, based as it was on norms and practices established by the Ottoman order. While most Christian Ottoman citizens had become citizens of the various South-east European states established in former Ottoman domains and with the Arab lands under Western domination, the majority of the future citizens of the Turkish nation state were the Muslims of Eastern Thrace and Anatolia with a minority of Greek Orthodox, Armenians and Jews. In terms of the territorial extension of the future nation, the focus was on Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, while the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East and Western Thrace were of less importance. Thus, the National Pact did not necessarily envision the future state to include all lands that were under Ottoman rule by 1914.4 It was partly on the basis of these recognitions and partly on the basis of the Lausanne Agreement – signed in 1923 after the War of Independence and the defeat of Greece – that the borders that would define and demarcate the Turkish nation state were decided.

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When it came to internal affairs, the new government abandoned a number of the promises made in the National Pact: in 1922, the Grand National Assembly decreed the abolition of the sultanate. The initiative was instigated by Mustapha Kemal and took place against strong resistance within the Assembly. Kemal worked hard to vilify the house of Osman in public opinion and he began to strike at the Caliphate too, reminding the people how the Sultan-Caliph had used the ‘armies of the Caliphate’ against the national movement and had used Greek aircraft to drop leaflets condemning the national movement’s forces. As a further means of undermining the legitimacy of the Caliphate, it was claimed that the institution had been abolished already in 1258, when the Mongols captured Baghdad. This denied both recent Ottoman tradition, according to which the Caliphate was passed to the house of Osman in 1517, when Sultan Selim defeated the Mamluks and conquered Egypt, and the common sense of those who had witnessed the Caliphate’s increasing symbolic role since the eighteenth century and, in particular, during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909).5 As the strategies to win control of the state were clearly based on a negation of both Ottoman legacy and certain Islamic institutions, Kemal was up against strong forces, something that he was only too aware of himself. As an instance of this: when he finally decided to abolish the Caliphate on 3 March 1924, the Grand National Assembly simultaneously issued a statement denying that the Caliphate had been abolished by allowing a symbolically emasculated Caliph to continue. Kemal for his part issued orders to the ‘puppet’ Caliph that he could not use the title Halife-i-Resullulah (Successor to the Messenger of God), that he could not wear a turban or any style of dress that would be reminiscent of the Ottoman sultanate.6 The same day that the Caliphate was abolished, the National Assembly decided to replace the Ministry of Religious Law and Pious Foundations (Şeriye ve Evkaf Vekaleti) by a Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri) under the prime minister’s office, and to unify all educational institutions into a single modern system under the Ministry of Education.7 The school, the mektep, was to substitute the medresse, an important centre of religious learning in the Ottoman Empire, where, according to Kemal, Islam was distorted by corrupt

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ulama. Kemal often referred to them as ‘the bands of hadjis and hojdas (haci hoca takimi) who had grown accustomed to the habits of a system of personal power and who exploit religion for their personal interests’.8 It was also decided to abolish the office of Şeyhülislam. This institution was the highest religious authority in the Ottoman Empire, one of whose tasks it was to oversee the suitability of political decisions with Islamic law, namely that temporal law, kanun, was compatible with Islamic law, Seri’at.9 In other words, Şeyhülislam often functioned as an ‘interpreter’ between a modernizing state and its subjects, whose language and understanding of the world were rooted among other things in a discourse based on Islamic symbolism. On 30 November 1925, Legal Code 677 banned the religious brotherhoods, the tarikat, and all their activities; as a kind of secular antidote, the Villages Institutes, halkevler, were established to promote officially recognized culture and strengthen popular forms of art and literature. As a result, at the level of popular religion outward manifestations of faith were restructured within the confines of the neighbourhood and the family, while the Naqshbandi orders adopted themselves to the new realities. Some would take civil service jobs at the Directorate of Religious Affairs as a cover and use the state-owned mosques as new centres of Sufi-activities.10 In 1925, the fez and turban were outlawed in favour of the western hat while the veil for women was discouraged. In the same year, the Gregorian calendar was adopted, replacing the lunar Hicri and solar Rumi calendars. The adoption of the Swiss Civil Code in 1926 gave equal rights to men and women.11 1928 saw the deletion of the second article of the 1924 constitution that stated Islam to be the state religion. The same year, European numerals and Latin script were adopted. The abandonment of Arabic script in turn barred future generations from easy access to the Ottoman past and placed the issue of publishing transliterated texts at the discretion of the state, because of censorship. It complicated access to Islamic tradition whose main works were in Arabic. Such motives were also apparent in the creation of the Turkish Language Society in

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1931 that initiated a process to eliminate words of Arabic and Persian origin from the Turkish language. Concomitantly, in 1931 Tarih, a four-volume history of Turkey, was published, meant for the lycées and intermediary schools (ortamektepler). In contrast to its predecessor, which had concentrated mostly on the Ottoman Empire, the new work, to a large extent, was based on a racial outlook in line with Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s and Eugene Pittard’s classifications of peoples by colour and skeletal types. Its leitmotif was that the Turks were Aryans who originated from the tribes of Central Asia stemming from the Alai-Pamir plateau and that it was they who had brought their high culture to Europe. In this manner, the new Turkish man was expected to learn two important lessons: the Turk had attained a high level of culture long before the peoples of Europe; and that he descended from a high race, and not from ‘a tribe of 400 tents’, i.e. the Ottoman Turks. Consequently, the Ottoman Empire was presented as retrograde phase in Turkish history, basically as something alien and non-Turkish. In contrast, the Turkish race was presented as a primus motor of history, while the Turkish language was the most important in the world.12 In 1932, the government launched this credo as the ‘Turkish History Thesis’ that became the basis for all history textbooks for more than two decades. The same year the ‘Sun Language Theory’ was launched, stating that Turkish was the most aristocratic, powerful and lively of all languages and that it was only natural that a race that was the source of civilization should provide a mother tongue to all others. Among other things, the Sun Language Theory was hailed for having freed the Turkish language from the Islamic yoke.13 In 1933 the government closed the Preachers and Prayer-leaders School (Hatip ve Imam Mektepleri) and the Faculty of Divinity in Istanbul University that had been established in 1924 under the new educational system.14 Finally, in 1935 the weekly holiday was changed from Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, to Sunday. All this suggests that, in addition to the endeavours of modernizing state and society, a principal motivation for dismantling these institutions was to neutralize or abolish competing powercentres that could challenge the authority and power of the new state. Seen in this light,

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the reforms also appear as attempts to reserve the field of interpreting Islam exclusively to the new rulers. The fact that Ottoman institutions and traditions based on Islam commanded legitimacy in turn required that the new regime was able to disqualify them in the eye of public opinion. Thus, it would be claimed that the only legitimate political entity was the nation state; that the Caliphate had been paid for in Turkish blood, as other Muslims had left the Turks to carry the burden of defending Islam. In other words, the Caliphate was an anachronism in a world of nation states. Against notions that the Caliphate could be reformed or restructured, Kemal would claim that the Caliphate could only be a laughing-stock in the eyes of the civilized world that enjoyed the blessings of science.15 It was the same approach that made Kemalism deal with Ottoman and Islamic tradition as if they were simply obstacles to modernization and enlightenment and to exclude them from the public domain. Instead, the new regime attempted to create a ‘new man’, a homo turcus, to constitute a model for the future Turkish citizen. However, the relationship between Islam and the Ottoman legacy on the one hand and modernization on the other is more complex.

Ottoman tradition, Islam and modernization It has been convincingly demonstrated that the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire underwent a substantial process of modernization and that it was done to a large extend by its own instigations and on its own terms; that it was based on a radical reformulation of a number of core values and institutions and their implementation in new ways. This also means that the demise of the Ottoman Empire cannot be regarded as a foregone conclusion, as a thing preordained. Rather it must be seen as the result of contingency and power struggles. This, in turn, implies that the Empire left an intellectual and modular legacy that transcended its attraction as a historical curiosity, giving it a potentially powerful claim on the post-Ottoman future.16

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Some emphasize the role of internal social growth because it produced a middle class that learned to harmonize its Islamic culture and ethics with change and some Western modes of life. In this process the intelligentsia and modern educational system that emerged during the reign of Abülhamid II is rendered a key role, as the idea of catching up with contemporary civilization and modernization became the dominant ideology of the Ottoman elites.17 This conclusion has been elaborated to stress that the picture of a perennial struggle between modernizers and reactionaries in the late Ottoman period is misleading. By the late nineteenth century, the forging of an Ottoman modernity was almost complete, something that was achieved by a process of acculturation. This was true to the extent that ‘even Islamist movements of the post-1908 period had long shed the categorical rejection of any imitation of Europe’.18 In this way, it also made the Ottoman Empire appear like a guarantor of Muslim values and ways of life. Furthermore, while foreign occupation in the nineteenth century destroyed most other Muslim states and deprived the old elites there of their political leverage over the community, leaving it without protection of the state, the Ottoman Empire maintained its formal political independence. Because of this and due to its historical continuity and its control of the Islamic holy cities, the Ottoman state possessed the key credentials to co-opt the new and emerging middle classes into its modernizing enterprise.19 At the same time, the Islamist movements shifted their focus from practical questions to such abstract issues as the reconcilability of Islam with modern science and philosophy.20 In this process of Islamist modernization, the Naqshbandi brotherhood played an important role.21 It expanded its influence conspicuously during the nineteenth century to become the most influential brotherhood by the late decades of that century.22 It also became one of the most important forces between the ruled and the ruler. It linked craft guilds and in that way also represented the trades and professions.23 In relation to the state, its role was two-fold: on the one hand, the Naqshbandis became an instrument for articulating the interests of urban small business groups and farmers; on the other, state bureaucrats, intellectuals and notables who were exploring ways in which to

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revitalize Muslim society sought to carry out their mission of societal transformation through the Naqshbandi order. One way in which the Naqshbandis sought to influence the rulers was to bring them to follow the sharia. As they believed it to be the fault of the ruler if the umma had gone astray, they brought the life of the Prophet Muhammad into focus, pointing to him as a modular example of how to transform ignorance into a new civilized society. In this way, Islam became synonymous with the arrival of good laws, justice and civilization. To some degree, this approach to reform is not unlike the European classicism in its search for an aesthetic and intellectual ideal un-bound by time and place and purified from the here-and-now.24 The nineteenth century Prussian reform programme under Wilhelm von Humboldt, based as it was on the ideal of Ancient Greece, is the most powerful exponent of this trend.25 Not surprisingly, therefore, the Naqshbandis initially were critical of the tanzimat reform polities of the Ottoman bureaucrats because they saw them as a way to disconnect Islam from the state. This stance, on the one hand, made the Naqshbandis a vehicle for the preservation of Islam and a motivating force for mass mobilization against the penetration of capitalism and modern institutions that unsettled traditional society; on the other, it was precisely this activism that made them undergo change and come to play a key role in the formation of a late Ottoman society based on constitutionalism and human rights.26 After all, they could defend their position by invoking the fact that in the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims were subjects of an independent Islamic state under the leadership of a Muslim ruler; and, at the end of the day, it was obvious that it was indeed the state that came to act as the main player carrying out the accommodation of the Ottoman society to the changed social and political realities of the new world order.27 It was in course of this process that the Naqshbandis began to adopt modern and even some patriotic concepts such as nation (vatan), religion (din) and state (devlet). The order exhorted its members to participate in the war against Russia in 1877–8. The traumatic mass exodus of Muslims from the Balkans and Caucasus, the destruction of historic Muslim villages and towns in the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman armies confronted the Naqshbandis in a way that prompted

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them to treat Islam as an ideology of resistance and restructuring. The Naqshbandi order also played a crucial role during the War of Liberation in the mobilization of the populace and it has been pointed out that the tekke of the order in Üsküdar provided a shelter for highranking nationalist figures, including Ismet Pasha (later Inönü), against the occupying allied powers.28 The most prominent exponent of Islamic modernization who came to play a role in the DP’s post-war Turkey was Said Nursi. He was the leader of the Risale-i-Nur movement or the Nurcu movement. According to Said Nursi, the influence of Western thought was two-fold: one was the liberal thought that was adopted by the majority of Ottoman intellectuals and many Islamists. A second was the infiltration of the Positivist ideas of Comte and the Materialism of Büchner and others by the way of the new secular schools. These ideas were finally taken by the founders of the Republic as the ideological basis of the state in place of Islam. At the same time Said Nursi had experienced that ilm al-kalam, scholastic theology, could not answer the problems that were besetting the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world. In response to this experience, Said Nursi taught himself modern sciences and advocated as a new method the combined teaching of Islam and modern sciences to be the basis for educational reform and the renewal of the medresse, the Koran schools.29 Here Said Nursi was very much in line with the Islamic reform movement, which distinguished between ‘normative’ Islam and ‘historical’ Islam, between real and ideal. To retrieve the ‘normative’ self from many centuries of socioeconomic, political and religious decline and marginalization, the reform movement adopted an eclectic approach to the West with the view of accepting what was seen as useful and rejecting what was seen as harmful. This made Said Nursi appeal directly to the Koranic text in order to revive normative Islamic ethics and discourse in an age of rapid technological and political change.30 In order to institutionalize his ideas of the combined teaching of the Islam and modern sciences, in 1907 Said Nursi sought the support of Sultan Abülhamid II for a university in Van. While failing in this, he joined the Young Turks and became actively involved in constitutional reforms. He also contributed to the pan-Islamic paper

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Volkan of Ittihad-i Muhammedi and was acquitted of involvement in the 1909 counter-revolution led by the Sheik Vahdeti, head of Ittihad-i Muhammedi.31 However, in terms of power and upward social mobilization, it was the expansion of private landownership, more than anything else, that enabled the new emerging middle class to rise to prominence. This happened in the latter half of the nineteenth century when state land was transformed into private property. While the new middle class was neither feudal lords nor usurpers of public property as they are often portrayed in Turkish and Ottoman historiography, certain key issues separated this class from the bureaucracy. These were the question of government control and the supremacy of the centre over the periphery, something that in the Ottoman Empire took the shape of a fight to control the economy – the land, and the culture of society including religion.32 These cleavages intensified in the wake of the establishment of the Republic and the enactment of the reform programme and they manifested themselves in the process that brought the DP to power. The Naqshbandis would lend a voice to the new middle class and the periphery: while the order fully supported the Turkish War of Independence, it strongly protested the radical and authoritarian secular transformation of the system by Mustapha Kemal.

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CHAPTER 3 CHALLENGES TO THE ONE-PART Y R EGIME IN A CHANGING WOR LD

While the Kemalist reforms took root in the big cities, and were supported by the new elites among the intelligentsia and state apparatus, resistance was rife in the province and in the countryside. Furthermore, the earliest years of the Republic witnessed the concentrated efforts of the one-party elite to consolidate its power by purging the political and socio-religious elite of possible opponents as well as public and private forms of collective association, i.e. political parties, cultural institutions and Sufi brotherhoods. It has been said that Kemal loathed to permit any form of collective action he himself could not control. He deemed as threatening political affiliation with the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, Communist organizations, and, not least the Sufi orders.1 However, these efforts were not wholly successful: while the new rulers managed to regulate formal political participation effectively, the political, sociological and geographical periphery remained largely beyond the reach of Kemalist legislation. Local, ethnic and religious bonds engendered less visible but strong forms of collective action that were so powerful that, according to Gavin D. Brockett, any social history of the Atatürk era must necessarily consider the perpetuation of these shared identities.2

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This is true particularly regarding those of a religious nature which became conspicuous when mere collective association translated into collective action as the Anatolian inhabitants rallied around a shared Islamic symbol – forms of headgear or the call to prayer, for instance – and responded to calls to action issued by local members of the ulama or a dervish sheik.3 As an instance of this, between 1924 and 1938 there were no fewer than 18 rebellions directed against the politics of the state. Draconian laws were passed to implement the reforms while gendarmes and military forces were mobilized to suppress and fight organized religious activity.4 Atatürk ‘instinctively’ feared collective action invoking Islamic legitimization because he himself had met with considerable success at mobilizing popular support as the gazi fighting to defend the SultanCaliph during the War of Independence. This attitude has also left its mark on the historiography, which tends to depict popular resistance as a ‘uniquely Turkish conflict’ over public life between conservative Islamists and secular Kemalists. Thus, it also became a topos in Kemalist historiography – and representation – that collective action did not result from conscious decisions reached by thoughtful people, but from adroit manipulation of symbols by devious Islamists, ‘crazed fanatics’ and ‘dissatisfied’ immigrants.5 There are various approaches to the evaluation of the many rebellions in the inter-war period. Official historiography depicts these events as an expression of clashes between the forces of darkness and enlightenment. The regime blamed the religious brotherhoods for the insurrections, in particular, the Naqshbandi order that the Kemalists identified as ‘a snake we have been unable to crush’.6 While Hakan Yavuz does not agree with the description of the Naqshbandis as exponents of forces of darkness, he accepts that this brotherhood did lead most of the inter-war rebellions. Furthermore, Yavuz sees the state persecution that forced the Naqshbandis underground and the brotherhood’s ability to function and keep together clandestinely as an important precondition for their emerging as a matrix for the revival of organized Islamic movements in the more relaxed period of the 1950s.7

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Brockett, however, argues that the individual characteristics of each of the rebellions allow for a categorization which classifies them in three distinct groups: collective public protest in which participants did not resort to force; violent insurrections against the state; and collective action in which participants were active in Sufi brotherhoods.8 It has been suggested that the long-term intention of the one-party regime was to restore to the individual rights and freedoms which had been severely restricted by strong government since 1923. This, according to the same line of thought, would happen once the reforms had become generally accepted and the ‘danger of reaction’ was reduced. However, after the rebellions began to die down, the one-party rule strengthened. The general public viewed this process with misgiving, especially after the succession of Atatürk by Inönü in 1938.9

One-party rule under pressure In 1939, open discontent was visible at the CHP party convention, but the Second World War put a cap on open expressions of discontent.10 A new surge in strong government and repressive measures followed. In a climate of general threat, fear of espionage and infiltration, martial law was imposed, while the press became subject to stricter control than ever, and police surveillance became universal.11 The war years saw a large-scale mobilization and new economic burdens to be carried by the populace at large. It saw the introduction of the discriminatory Varlik Vergisi, a tax on capital adopted by the cabinet on 11 November 1942. While the law claimed to secure additional revenues for urgent military expenditures by levying a tax upon profiteers who had acquired wealth by speculation and black-marketing, it was applied in a way that made the minorities subjects to the tax in a way that forced many to hand over all of their possessions and drove them into detention camps and forced labour. The law pushed up prices and worsened the general economic situation. Criticism was dealt with in a ham-fisted manner, including the government closing down the newspaper Vatan. At the end of the day, reactions to the law among businessmen and from abroad were so effective that the law was finally abolished on 15 May 1944. Nevertheless, it left a strong animosity and it multiplied demands that

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an effective check ought to be put on the government. There were also voices demanding a new government.12 Wartime political, economic and social measures had unleashed dissatisfaction at home that was so serious that some regarded a general upheaval as threatening.13 In this way, the war years saw the emerging conjectures of a broad middle-class opinion in favor of effective enforcement of the guarantees of property and the provision of other individual freedoms. Clear signs of this tendency appeared between 14 May and 11 June 1945, during the debate of the Land Reform Law when the first concerted opposition to the government spoke against the law. The Land Reform Law was intended to distribute land sufficient to provide a living to the landless and land-short peasants and to those who wanted to become farmers. The land was to be provided by expropriation from state lands, pious foundations (vakif), municipalities and privately owned lands comprising more than 500 hectares (ha.). If that proved insufficient, expropriations would be made from properties of 200 ha. In some cases land of just 20 ha. became subject to expropriations.14 The deputies of the Assembly divided into two groups, one in favour of the law and the other against it. The two deputies who voiced the strongest opposition were the would-be founders of the Democrat Party, Menderes and Koraltan. The latter invoked the fundamental principles of democracy in his defence of the guarantee of property, namely that: The most important element in modern society[...] is, first of all the right to think, speak, write, associate, and express ideas, and finally, to have a guarantee of property and home. Humanity’s fight throughout the centuries has capitalized on obtaining a guarantee on these rights. If an individual in a community cannot speak, think, associate, live freely, and let his conscience work freely, if he cannot accumulate wealth and preserve it, and is deprived of a guarantee that he may benefit from it, it is difficult to believe that such a community will last long ... My friends, whatever is said, the spirit of this law is to take Ali’s fortune and give it to Veli.15

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Menderes stressed the technical and financial aspects of the land problem: the Turkish peasant, first of all, needed agricultural credits and protective measures to protect his living and secure his income. In an ill-disguised hint at the reform programme to expose its inertia, he castigated those who were responsible for the fact that: After 20 years[...] we are far from victory in the battle against the Kagni [the two wheeled oxcart of the Hittites] and the wooden plough; as a matter of fact, the battle has not started yet.16 It is noteworthy that the line of demarcations resembles the frontlines of the latter half of the nineteenth century when the new Muslim middle class clashed with the state bureaucrats over similar issues concerning the land ownership and the desired balance of power between centre and periphery. We also note that Menderes’ and his group’s push for modernization was defined in technical, financial and managerial lines, and as democracy and a multiparty system. While most observers agree that the elections held July 1946 were rigged to a wide extent, there exists a consensus that the 1950 elections were fair and orderly. The transition from CHP rule to DP government was peaceful and took place, in the words of Bernard Lewis, ‘with hardly more incident than the succession of Mr Churchill by Mr Atlee’ in post-war England, when Labour defeated the Conservatives at the elections.17 However, the Democrat victory was a surprise to everyone – mainly because people could not believe that the party that had enjoyed a monopoly on power for so long would allow itself to be defeated or, if defeated, would peacefully hand over to its successors.18 However, Lewis does not believe the popular explanation that the whole thing was ‘a miscalculation on the part of CHP’, and that its leaders were confident of a victory, because ‘almost everyone’ he spoke to preceding the elections believed that ‘in a really free elections the Democrats would sweep the country’.19 He also rejects the widespread belief that it was a result of a desire to please the Americans, while he does agree that the US did exercise strong pressure on the CHP to do away with étatisme and that Washington created a favourable climate for political

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change.20 Nor does he believe the CHP claim that the party always was devoted to democracy and only the war years prevented them from achieving free elections earlier. Rather, it is the DP’s claim that by 1945 the strains of discontent had become so serious that the CHP was forced to open a safety valve to prevent a general uprising that, according to Lewis, offers the best explanation: once started, the opposition soon went beyond the minor role assigned to it by the CHP’s plans. In this way, the real significance of the 1950 elections was not so much a change of party as a plebiscite for or against the CHP.21 In the same vein, the West German Consul General in Istanbul did not see the DP’s victory so much as the result of the populace’s identification with the DP programme as an expression of its disapproval of the CHP. But he also believed that the elections on 14 May 1950 were the result of US pressure to get rid of the one-party system.22 This makes topical an examination of the major shifts in Turkey’s international position, not least because it came under strong pressure during the Second World War and the early post-war period saw Ankara facing a new world order that was significantly different from the one in which the one-party era emerged.

Searching for a place among the nations and relations to the Soviet Union Two currents, in particular, influenced the foreign policy of the nascent Turkish Republic. The first reflected the immediate weakness of the infant state and Ankara’s need to rid itself of the odium which the memory of the Ottoman Empire’s recent past evoked, in particular its foreign policy alignments and its treatment of minorities under the 1913–18 CUP regime. The second current sprang from the various ideologies developed in the second half of the nineteenth century to keep the Ottoman Empire together, to enhance the loyalty of the Empires’ Muslim and Turkish citizens towards state and institutions, and from attempts around the time of the First World War to muster sympathy and support among Turks and Muslims beyond the Empire’s borders.23

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At the end of the War of Liberation, Turkey was virtually isolated among international powers. One important exception was its relations with the Soviet Union. The new government in Ankara and the Bolsheviks shared common ground in the fact that both systems were revolutionary ones, attempting to establish a new order based, among other things, on giving rise to a new man. The former were aiming at creating a homo turcus, while the latter saw the homo sovieticus as the key to building a new future. In these efforts, they subscribed to dogmatically secular ideologies striving at uprooting the old order and at marginalizing and outlawing, if not outright annihilating, its ideological, spiritual and institutional foundations. Common ground was also found in the fact that both movements had been subject to hostile actions from the major European powers who dispatched armies to quell the revolutions. Although in the end they both emerged victorious, Turkey and the Soviet Union entered the inter-war period severely marked by the human and material devastations that protracted warfare and revolution had inflicted on their populations and resources.24 These common experiences manifested themselves in cooperation that began while the struggle was still going on; on 16 March 1921, Moscow signed an agreement of friendship with the Turkish nationalists. On the basis on this understanding, the Bolsheviks began to supply the Turkish liberation army with war materials.25 So keen was Lenin to have an agreement with Turkey that he refused to press territorial claims on behalf of the Georgians and the Armenians. The aims and spirit of the 1921 agreement would be reiterated in the TurkishSoviet agreements of friendship and cooperation signed in the following years, most famously in 1925 and in 1935, the former one being the first such agreement the Soviet Union signed with any country. The government in Ankara also took steps to break its isolation vis-à-vis the West European powers while the war was still going on. This happened when the Nationalists reached an understanding with France in 1921, through the Franklin-Bouillon agreement, and with Italy regarding territories in Anatolia claimed by the respective parties.26 In this process, the two European powers ceded lands under their jurisdiction in the Antalya area and in Cilicia to Ankara, while

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Turkey and Britain both continued to make claims on Mosul in the newly established British mandate of Iraq. Turkey’s borders were finally fixed at the Lausanne Conference in 1923 while it was decided to transfer the Mosul issue to the discretion of the League of Nations.27 This was the context in which Kemal coined his famous slogan ‘Peace at home, Peace abroad’, meaning that in order to gain a place among the nations Turkey should refrain from conflict with her neighbours. This necessitated that the new government curb pan-Islamic and pan-Turkish tendencies, currents that the Ottoman and German governments articulated as slogans in a symbolically strong manner during the First World War, causing serious concern in the capitals of the Entente Powers.28 While we know very little about the actual status of these tendencies in the Turkish state apparatus, it seems, as we shall see below, that at least the case of the so-called Dış Türkler must have remained a latent issue.

Dış Türkler The term Dış Türkler, literally outside Turks, refers to Turks or Muslims living outside the Turkish nation state in former Ottoman lands. Turkish nationalists regarded these peoples as their kin, while some Dış Türkler viewed Turkey as their kin-state.29 It is against this background, among other things, that we should understand Turkey’s engagement in the Mosul issue, which was finally settled in favour of Britain in 1926 with a reluctant Turkey giving up her claims on that area.30 After the settlement of this conflict, from 1930 onwards, Turkey’s relations with her neighbours in former Ottoman lands in southeastern Europe, in particular with the so-called ‘status quo states’, ameliorated significantly. A Greek–Turkish rapprochement initiated by the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and Mustafa Kemal led to the Ankara Agreement of 1930, while the signing in 1934 of the Balkan Entente saw Greece, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia as allied nations.31 At the same time, there was also a rapprochement with the victorious great powers, Britain and France, culminating in the signing of the Montreux Convention in 1936, which recognized Turkey’s right

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to arm the Straits. In 1937, Turkey concluded the Saadabad Pact with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. While the agreement included a mutual obligation by the four powers to preserve their common frontiers and not to interfere in one another’s territory, it contained no provisions for mutual assistance.32 Rising tensions in the international system, in general, and in the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular, because of Italy’s bellicose policy in Africa in the latter half of 1930s, made Turkey a most coveted ally. This, in turn, gave a new lease on life to fears of pan-Turkish sentiments. In late 1936, the British Foreign Office would not exclude the possibility of a Turkish invasion of Northern Iraq (Mosul) if a situation arose in which a weak Iraqi government was dependent on a pro-Turkish section of the army.33 While this must remain speculation, it remains a fact that, from that time onwards, Ankara directed its attention towards the French mandate of Syria, raising claims on Alexandretta, or Hatay in Turkish.

The Alexandretta question According to the Franklin–Bouillon agreement of 20 October 1921 between France and Turkey, Alexandretta was granted special status within the framework of the French mandate over Syria. Because Turkey had insisted that the legal rights and cultural identity of the large Turkish population should be respected, Alexandretta was placed under an administrative structure distinct to that of Syria, and Turkish was made the official language in the sub-province. On 1 November 1936, standing before the Grand National Assembly, Atatürk launched into a ‘State of the Union’ speech. In addition to the presence of all the deputies, foreign diplomats were crowded into the galleries. The Soviet general Eydman was invited as a special guest of the Turkish Republic. The event was obviously designed to catch the widest possible attention not only vis-à-vis the foreign powers, but also internally: outside of the building large crowds gathered around special loudspeakers to hear Atatürk’s speech. He began by describing the steady growth of friendship with Britain, in particular, in the successful treaty negotiations at Montreux. He

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declared that in the past 15 years Turkish–Russian relations had grown friendlier than ever before in history. ‘In fact’, Atatürk continued: Turkey today enjoys very good relations with all countries, except one. [...] The one great problem that commands our attention day and night is the fate of Iskenderun and Antioch and of surrounding zones, whose owners incontestably are 100 per cent Turkish. [...] We definitely must dwell on this point with the greatest seriousness. [...] This is our only difference with France, a country whose friendship we have always valued. Those who know the truth of this matter must recognize and understand the intensity and sincerity of our concern.34 According to the American Consulate General in Istanbul, the deputies applauded furiously for more than five minutes and the crowd in the street showed enthusiastic support. On the following day, all Turkish newspapers reported this portion of Atatürk’s speech under eight-column banners.35 While irredentist sentiments had been as good as absent from the censored Turkish Press before Atatürk’s speech, afterwards a series of headlines on the Hatay issue appeared during November. On 3 November, the newspaper, Cumhurriyet, made national solidarity with the Dış Türkler the leitmotif: ‘We feel great anxiety for the future of the Sanjak Turks [Turks in Hatay]. We are determined to keep faith with our brothers who live outside of Turkey.’ While government and the press claimed that the Hatay population was 100 per cent Turks, Atatürk invoked the Kemalist credo that the Turks descended from the Hittites and insisted: ‘The land which has been Turkish for four thousand years cannot remain captive in foreign hands.”36 After a contested plebiscite held in 1939, France ceded the area to Turkey. This happened against strong protests from the Arabs and, in particular, the Syrians. The controversy pitted the Arab Middle East against Turkey, causing Iraq to express its hope that Britain would intervene against Turkey. Although London feared that the Alexandretta issue would lead to ‘an impossible situation between the Turks and the Arabs’ Whitehall’s official policy was to accept any

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settlement achieved between Turkey and France even if the Arabs opposed it.37 For Britain and France, there were more serious interests at stake, namely the balance of power in the Eastern Mediterranean and, on 19 October 1939, the two great powers signed a treaty agreement of mutual assistance with Turkey.38 The fall of France, the inclusion of her mandates in the Middle East in the Armistice Agreement with Germany and Italy dated 22 June 1940, and the decision by the French administration in the Levant to abide by this new order, radically changed the strategic and political situation in the Eastern Mediterranean. During the winter and spring of 1941, Germany rapidly expanded her power in southeastern Europe. On 1 March, Bulgaria sided with Germany while the Wehrmacht entered Athens and Belgrade during April. Two months later, on 18 June, Turkey signed an agreement of friendship and nonaggression with Germany. This happened only four days before Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his attack on the Soviet Union, and at a time when it looked probable that the Axis powers were about to expel the British from the Middle East.39 All this makes it reasonable to suggest that Turkey, like most other European states, was simply trying to adapt to the rapidly changing international situation in general, and to find its place in the radically altered balance of power in the south-eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean in particular. At the same time, it is also clear that Syrian lands, not least the area of Aleppo, remained high on Turkey’s list of territories of national interest in the Middle East. In the following pages we shall discuss how Turkey responded to various ‘offers’ from the Allies and Germany to make her join one of the two parties in the war as a means to uncover what were Ankara’s regional ambitions and national interests beyond its borders.

Turkish claims to the Middle East The idea that Turkey might take over control of areas in Syria was a possibility that ranked high on the British agenda for the Levant in 1940 and 1941.40 However, William Hale discounts this possibility, emphasizing instead that Turkey was reluctant to add Syria

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to its territory, because, among other things, it would be contrary to the principles of the National Pact. Hale bases his account on Y. Olmert, and mentions that in March 1941, Ankara informed Britain that Turkey did not covet territory in Syria because ‘the Syrians were awkward customers and modern Turkey did not wish to include non-homogeneous peoples within her frontiers.’41 However, these statements may well have been advanced for tactical reasons, as Olmert also cites later reports from Britain’s ambassador to Turkey, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, stating, among other things, that the Turkish General Staff had made clear to him that Turkey’s position towards the war was ‘largely attributable to the existing situation in Syria’.42 This caused, again according to Olmert, Whitehall to conclude that Turkey attached ‘enormous importance to the development in Syria’ and for a brief period Churchill and Eden seemed ready to offer Turkey a foothold in that country.43 While such considerations disappeared from the British agenda after the termination of the short-lived anti-British Rashid Ali al-Gailani regime in Iraq in April–May 1941 and the subsequent British invasion of the Levant,44 pan-Turkish aspirations vis-à-vis Syria remained alive: Aleppo and northern Syria continued to be seen as a natural extension of Turkey’s southern heartland. The same was true of Iraq. Regarding the latter, this impression appears from a private letter dated April 1942 – one year after the Rashid Ali crisis in Iraq – signed by the British ambassador to Turkey and directed to the under-secretary of state in Foreign Office, Orme Sargent. According to this correspondence, Ankara would have preferred to participate in the repression of the Rashid Ali regime, which was notoriously anti-Turkish too, and remained on patrol in Iraq as either Britain’s or Germany’s ally.45 Here we should note that the sources that mention Turkey being interested in Syrian and Iraqi lands also highlight that this awareness was connected to military operations. German sources corroborate these Turkish aspirations. In fact, Germany’s ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Pappen, Auswärtiges Amt and the Nazi-controlled foreign department under Joachim von Ribbentrop, Büro des Reichsaussenministers, all list Syria and Iraq as areas where Turkey made claims for influence, control or possession,

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demands that were made in addition to similar ones on Albania, Bulgarian Thrace, a number of the Greek Aegean Islands, the port of Salonika and Cyprus.46 Although these aspirations all appeared in discussions between Berlin and Ankara regarding a German–Turkish alliance, and must primarily be seen as mere probes and declarations of interests and as bargaining chips in a game of quid pro quo, they do help us to get a clearer picture of some of the foreign policy aspirations that were circulating at the highest level among the politicians and military men in Ankara. As an instance of this, on 29 November 1940, Inönü asked von Pappen to formulate his ideas for a German–Turkish non-aggression pact and a programme for the reorganization of the Balkans in event that Hitler won the war.47 In response to a treaty drafted by von Pappen in which, among other things, Germany pledged to respect Turkey’s territorial integrity and not to attack her, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Şükrü Saracoğlu made von Pappen amend the territorial guarantee to cover not only Turkey, but also an undefined ‘Turkish zone of Interest’. Furthermore, the draft affirmed that Turkish representation would be invited to all conferences on Balkan reorganization.48 In other words, this indicates that Turkey wanted an increased role outside her borders in the Balkans and the Middle East. In this way, Germany was to face the same dilemma as did Britain: a pro-Turkish policy would run counter to efforts to mobilize the Arab Middle East and, at the end of the day, Berlin opted for Turkey. In May 1941, discussing a German overland passage through Anatolia for the Wehrmacht to launch an attack on the Suez channel and the British position in Egypt through Syria, Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula, Saracoğlu made it clear that, in return, Turkey wanted modern weapons and German recognition of Iraq as a part of the Turkish sphere of influence.49 While we should remember that a German–Turkish treaty of alliance never materialized, the German–Turkish negotiations revealed – like the ones between London and Ankara – that in some circles, at least in Turkey, there were territorial ambitions towards the Middle East. Such aspirations reappeared in August 1942 when Ahmad Umar, Turkey’s consul in Damascus, informed his British counterparts that

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Ankara would have preferred to see its jurisdiction revived in parts of the Arab world, but was ready to accept some sort of confederation there under British influence. Syria, however, was an exception and should be awarded to Turkey as a trusteeship.50

Turkish claims to Soviet territory Germany’s victories on the Eastern Front also gave a new boost to pan-Turkish sentiments, in particular in the armed forces, while expectations of an imminent collapse of the Soviet Union made certain officers press for active support of Germany’s warfare as a means to realize claims on Soviet lands. It gave pan-Turkish lobbyism a stronger hand and Inönü seems to have abetted it with a kind of benign tolerance and, at times, to have personally promoted the careers of certain pan-Turkists. As a token of the same, von Pappen reported that as soon as the Wehrmacht crossed the Soviet border, the Turkish government began to consult with some of Abdülhamid II’s former ministers who had espoused pan-Turanism during the Sultanate.51 Fully in line with this spirit, in September 1941, Ankara sent Nuri Pasha to Berlin. Although he was on an unofficial mission, being the brother of Enver Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war, Nuri Pasha was a symbolically prominent personality to send to Germany, not least because of the close relations between Enver and Berlin during the First World War. Nuri Pasha enumerated a number of areas in Asia that he regarded as pan-Turkish. These were the Crimea, trans-Caucasus, Azerbaijan, the lands between the Ural Mountains and the Volga River, the Daghestan and the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Republics. He also regarded the Chinese province of Sinkiang as part of a Turanian state. In the Middle East, he pointed out that Syria, Iraq and Iran had Turanian enclaves. At Ernst Woermann’s comment that Nuri’s proposals ran counter to Atatürk’s principles that Turkey was a purely national state, the visitor told the head of the political division of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Atatürk’s foreign policy had only been temporary due to the weakness of the infant Turkish republic and fear of the Soviet Union. Nuri also emphasized that Turanian expansion was very

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popular with the Turkish people and not least with the armed forces. According to Nuri, the armed forces would simply ‘sweep the government away’ if it did not advance these aims.52 Although Ankara relied on informal channels to convey this sort of aspirations, neither Germany nor Britain, as we have seen, believed them to be merely the expression of popular sentiments. At the same time, there were a number of areas in which the interests of Germany and Turkey clashed.

A clash of Turkish and German interests Turkish interests in the Balkans ran counter to those of Italy, and Ankara castigated Berlin for allowing Rome to run Albania and Croatia. Fears that Mussolini would turn these two countries into hereditary realms under the Italian crown made the Turkish government suggest that Turkey send a ‘neutral police force’ to maintain law and order, something, that Berlin flatly rejected. A further strain was added to German-Turkish relations when Berlin began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of establishing a Turkish supremacy in central Asia. Germany learned that many Dış Türkler dreaded the prospect of coming under the control of the Kemalist regime. Such prospects were widely regarded as anathema, because it was Atatürk who had dismantled the Caliphate and it made Berlin decide against using the label Turanian for any of the legions which the Wehrmacht considered manning with Russian Muslim prisoners, preferring instead the names Tatar, Caucasian, Georgian, etc.53 This only served to sour German-Turkish relations, which started to deteriorate from 1942 onwards, something that was further accelerated by the reversal of German martial luck the same year.

Turkey turns to the West There are various signs that from 1943 onwards Ankara prepared for an Allied victory. Saracoğlu began to reshuffle the personnel at Turkey’s legations around the world, replacing neutral or pro-Axis ambassadors with pro-Allied ones.54

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In the spring of 1944, the Turkish government decided to clamp down on pan-Turkism in a much-publicized action under which a number of prominent pan-Turkists were arrested, among those Alparslan Türkeş, who would later hold a prominent position in the early phase of the 1960 military regime.55 However, there was more to this decision than just internal politics; it must also be seen as a signal to the Allies, not least to the Soviet Union, that Ankara would not tolerate pan-Turkism nor harbour any territorial ambitions vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The timing was dangerously late, however, because at this juncture Ankara had already wasted much of its goodwill among the Allies. There were voices that claimed that Turkey had not honoured her treaties with her regional allies and had betrayed her international obligations by giving in to various German demands during the early war years.56 Britain and the US were reported to have been particularly annoyed by Ankara’s repeated refusals to enter the war on the side of the Allies – something that did not happen until February 1945, long after the last German troops had left south-eastern Europe. This made Churchill and Roosevelt lend a more sympathetic ear to Soviet demands, including an agreement to future changes to the Montreux Convention.57 This, in turn, made the contents of the secret German–Soviet discussions in November 1940 regarding a possible rearrangement of south-eastern Europe an ominous and increasingly realistic warning of what might be in store for Turkey after the War. The Germans made Ankara familiar with Soviet claims on Turkey; the most alarming feature was Stalin’s demands for the establishment of Soviet military strongholds and naval bases along the Straits.58 Such fears were only nurtured when, in March 1945, Moscow abrogated the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation of 1935. On 7 June, the same year, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov declared that Moscow was ready to renew the agreement, on the condition that Turkey ceded Kars and Adahan in the north-east of the country. In the same vein, the Soviet Union demanded an influence over control of navigation on the Straits.59 Compared to the demands put forward in earlier negotiations or to those formulated during the German–Soviet talks in November 1940, these recent Soviet conditions

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were harsher. Soviet demands regarding the Straits had originally met with some measure of understanding from the other Allied countries, because of shared dissatisfaction with Turkey’s attitude towards Germany during the war years. However, it soon became apparent that Stalin’s ambitions went further, betraying a wish to redraw the boundaries of the whole region bordering the Soviet Union. Indeed in the autumn of 1945 there was a buildup of Soviet troops in Bulgaria. This was against the interests of the US and Britain. While it is not quite clear whether Moscow was in fact willing to use its military muscle to force these revisions upon Turkey, it remains a fact that Moscow put forward its demands at a juncture when the Western powers were growing increasingly worried about the dramatic rise of Soviet influence in the countries bordering Turkey and in its vicinity, be it Iran or the rest of south-eastern Europe. To make things look even worse, Greece was the battleground of a civil war between the national government and Communist-led partisans. Such was the regional and international political background against which Ankara attempted to escape its tarnished image among the Allies and, at the end of day, it was the synergy between the Soviet pressure on Turkey and a number of other Cold War dynamics that resulted in President Truman’s address to Congress on 12 March 1947 that would be known as the Truman Doctrine. In this, the President declared the defence of Greece and Turkey to be vital to the West and the willingness of the United States to allocate money to bolster Greece and Turkey against the internal and external Communist danger.60 The Truman Doctrine became a harbinger of new and closer relations between Ankara and the West, and in this way, within only two years of the end of the Second World War, Turkey’s post-war international relations saw a significant rapprochement with the West, enabling Ankara to escape its rather tarnished image among the victorious powers in the Western camp. It is significant that it was during the same period that Turkey moved into the era of multiparty politics. The destruction of the oneparty regimes in Germany and Italy, and the disrepute that befell these regimes in particular, not to mention the rule of dictatorship in general in the wake of Allies’ victory in Second World War, weakened

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the foundation of the one-party rule in Turkey too.61 Furthermore, the fact that Germany was replaced by the USA as the main bulwark against traditional threats from the north stemming from the age of the Russian Empire increased the modular prestige of the American model.62 Pressure was added by the fact that the political atmosphere in the USA, in particular, demanded a democratization of the Turkish political system if Ankara was to get the proper moral recognition that was needed for Turkey to realize the rapprochement to the West that she strived for.63 It was against this background that the acceptance of the United Nations Charter set the stage for opposition to the oneparty rule. It provided the dissidents with legal and moral arguments and encouraged them to come out into the open. During the ratification of UN Charter in the National Assembly on 14 August 1945, Menderes took the opportunity to point to the fact that the UN Charter: requested respect for the sovereignty of the people in the administration of the country by establishing mutual respect in the observance of civil and the political rights of the individual and the state.64 Menderes took up the same line in a speech after the founding of the DP in his hometown, Aydin, in July 1946 claiming that the war years made evident the fundamental shortcomings of one-party rule. His message was that the country needed to align itself with the ‘dominating ideological currents’, i.e. the successes of democracy and multiparty rule. The difficulties encountered during the war years uncovered and showed the weak points created by the one-party system in the structure of the country. The hope in miracles of the one-party system vanished, as the one-party system countries were defeated everywhere. Thus, the one-party mentality was destroyed in the turmoil of blood and fire of the Second World War. No country can remain unaffected by the great international events and the

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contemporary dominating ideological currents. This influence was felt in our country too.65 The growing freedom of debate also made religion a topic of political discussion and gave the clerical and other religious elements a new opportunity to lay down their challenge to the secularist basis of the Kemalist state. In the period from 1945 to 1950, a great revival of religious activities took place, on the formal level of Turkish Islam, among the ulama and among the Sufi brotherhoods. Neither of the two big parties could afford to entirely disregard this movement and thus give its rivals the opportunity to pose as the champion of Islam against a godless opponent.66 We shall now turn our attention to the issue of Menderes and his use and alleged ‘misuse’ of religion by examining questions about the extent to which he can be said to have responded to sentiments existing among the population, and the extent to which it can be said that he took charge in reintroducing Islam into the public sphere. This, in turn, should enable us better to evaluate the meaning of the accusations directed against Menderes of exploiting Islam for political purposes.

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CHAPTER 4 MENDER ES AND COUNTERKEM ALIST CUR R ENTS

Menderes is often seen as the exponent of the tendencies to readmit Islam into the public sphere outside the control of the state. To support this point of view, it is emphasized that the DP government directly and indirectly encouraged private initiatives favouring religion, such as the building of mosques and the setting up of centres of religious instruction by private funds or communal donations.1 Thus, there was a marked increase in the building of mosques and, according to an estimate by officials in the Directorate of Religious Affairs, 5,000 mosques were build between 1950 and 1960, approximately the same figure that the Ministry of Education gave for the construction of new schools in the same period.2 The DP government was also believed to have encouraged the increase in the number of pilgrims going to Mecca, the number of people who visited the tombs and shrines of holy men and a more widespread observance of fasting during Ramadan. Other examples of the DP’s liberal attitude towards religion mentioned are the more numerous gatherings of prayers in the mosques, a greater respect shown towards the imams and the frequency of religious citations among the public, the appearance of religious inscriptions in public places such as in stores, private busses and taxies, etc. The rebirth of the popularity of the Sufi orders, the publication of religious pamphlets by private individuals, more regular information on the development in other

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Islamic countries and the increase in the number of students attending the Faculty of Theology are seen in as in the same vein.3 At the same time is should be noted that after the introduction of multi-party politics, the CHP too began to court the Muslim vote. In the beginning of 1947, the CIA reported: ‘A growing sentiment in Turkey that the lack of religious instruction is leading to a disintegration of morals, particularly among the younger generation, was voiced in the Grand National Assembly by two deputies of the Republican Peoples Party.’ One deputy, Mahittin Baha Pars, pointed out: ‘The void left in the minds of the younger generation by the misguided policy of laicism pursued by the government was in danger of being filled by nefarious religions and theories.’4 Pars thus ascribed beneficial values to Islam, namely its potential as a spiritual antidote to undesirable belief systems. While he no doubt had Communism in mind, he was also warning against leaving the field of Islam exclusively to the brotherhoods and other Islamic currents outside the control of the state, stating among other things the following: The Turks should return to the religion of Islam, and while it was certainly not necessary to tolerate any interference of selfish religious interests in their relations with the state, this was no reason for leaving the people without religious instruction. He concluded by invoking Atatürk, stating: ‘If Atatürk were living today, he would share this point of view.’5 The invocation of Atatürk undoubtedly must be regarded as an attempt to legitimize his suggestions in the eyes of the Kemalists. The other deputy, Hamdullah Suphi Tanriöver, warned that ‘disaster results’ when a faith is destroyed and is not replaced by another and claimed that the following ‘twin faiths’ were necessary as a moral foundation for Turkish youth, namely nationalism and religion, and that ‘in order to protect the Turkish nation from foreign ideologies, particularly Communism, religion should be encouraged’.6 However, Prime Minister Recep Peker refused to give any concession to religion, stating that that it was erroneous to believe that

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religion would combat Communism. To underscore his point, Peker held up the cases of two ‘very religious countries’, Spain and Greece that had recently been torn by bloody civil wars, claiming that that the only antidote to Communism was nationalism. Religion, he warned, had in the past ‘only [led] to exploitation of the nation, and any reactionary religious movement at this time would be a great danger to the state’.7 After the debate in Grand National Assembly, the discussion of the issue of religious teaching and the creation of seminaries for the formation of an Islamic clergy was continued in a secret session of the executive council of the CHP. While the two above-mentioned deputies further elaborated on their statements made in the Grand National Assembly, government spokesmen voiced the same fears as Peker: if religious teachings were reintroduced into the state schools, they warned, it would result in reactions that would eventually, ‘necessitate the amendment of the constitution’.8 In spite of these reservations, at the end of the day, the CHP decided to reintroduce elective religious education in schools and training establishments for preachers; Ankara University announced the establishment of a Faculty of Divinity and in 1949 the tombs and shrines (türbeler) were allowed to reopen. The latter played a central role for the local branches of various Sufi brotherhoods. These steps, however, must also be seen against the background of a general attitude on the part of the Kemalists, which the US Consulate General summed up in the following way: During the Ataturk–Inonu period […] the external forms of Islamic worship were directly assaulted and largely eliminated from Turkish life; an attempt was made to substitute for Islam an essentially pragmatic, material credo, with patriotism as an emotional binding force.9 The US Consulate also noticed that the one-party regime had made other efforts to weaken not only Islam but also traditionalism at large: ‘A part of the program of Atatürk’s era, and a part which was substantially accepted by Inönu, was the creation of a body of history and

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myth which emphasized the pre-Islamic aspects of the Turk’s past.’ The creations of the ‘National History thesis’ and the ‘Sun-Language theory’ were mentioned as designs intended to remind the Turks that they were Turks first – descendants of the Hittites, the Sumerians and Genghis Khan – and Muslims second. This, according to the American Consulate, had resulted in a lack of attention to the Ottoman–Islamic portion of Turkish history, and to an ‘almost complete deletion’ of a very large portion of the cultural heritage from contemporary life. The Consulate saw this as an attempt on the part of ‘Republican Turkey to ignore the centuries immediately preceding its creation except to criticize them’.10 Furthermore, and, as a counter measure to its readmission of Islam into the public sphere, the CHP enacted the Penal Code under Article 163. This law explicitly prohibited the use of religion for political motives: Those who contrary to the principles of secularism engage in propaganda or inculcations, regardless of its form or manner, exploiting religion or religious sentiments or religiously sacred notions for the purpose of wholly or partly adapting to religious precepts and creeds the social, economic, political or legal basic order of the State, or for the purpose of achieving political benefits or ensuring and establishment of personal influence, shall be liable to imprisonment up to five years. In case the action defined above is committed by way of publicity media, the penalty shall be increased by one-third up to one-half.11 All this has led some to conclude that Menderes’ policy regarding the role of religion first and foremost continued such trends as originated with the last years of CHP rule: immediately after the formation of the first DP government, the prayer call in Arabic, ezan, was made legal again, religious education was expanded and parents now had to opt out, instead of opting in.12 In addition to accepting the existence of autonomous religious organizations, the government legitimized the Sufi brotherhoods, but clamped down on activists of the Ticani dervish order when members started to smash busts of Atatürk in the

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wake of the 1950 election. In the same vein, in 1951 a law was passed against the defaming of Atatürk’s memory.13 On 9 December 1952, DP Deputy Hasan Fehmi Ustaoglu from Samsun was expelled from the party on the grounds that he had written an article in Büyük Cihad on 3 October the same year stating among other things that ‘it is not true that the nation is thankful to Kemal Atatürk for his revolution. […] [T]he nation must seek its salvation in the Kuran.’14 In 1953 the government closed down the Nation Party on the grounds that it used religion for political purposes, a motion that the CHP initially supported.15 As a whole, the DP government seemed to have been very conscious of demonstrating respect for secularism. Thus, Article 14 of the DP programme of 1946 stated: ‘Religion must not be a pretext for sowing discord among citizens of different belief. Free thought must not be attacked by fanaticism.’ It was also the DP that enacted law 6187 on 27 July 1953 which complemented Article 163 of the Penal Code mentioned above in the following way: ‘Whoever manipulates religion for political, personal or commercial interest will be condemned to 1–5 years of hard labor. The sentence may be doubled in the case of commercial interest.’16 In the same vein, certain religious periodicals were not allowed to continue and Islamist editors like Nicib Fazil Kisakürek of Büyük Dogˇu and Eshref Edib of Sebilürreshad were condemned to trial on 12 December 1952 and 5 March 1953 respectively.17 At the same time, the DP had good relations with some of the religious orders and, among the Sufi orders, the Nurcu brotherhood played a special role in relation to Menderes, not least Said Nursi himself. His fight against the Turkish state’s attempt to circumvent the role of religion in society had earned him many enemies among the Kemalists and he spent long years in exile and prison until the DP government had him released by a general amnesty on 14 July 1950.18 Menderes’ clear intention to fight Communism and to allow greater religious freedom made Said Nursi follow the political developments more closely and offer Menderes advice and guidance. In the DP government Said Nursi saw willingness to reverse ‘some of the damage caused by twenty five years of [CHP] rule.’ In 1950 he wrote

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to Bayar: ‘In the face of those who have oppressed us making politics the tool of irreligion in a fanatical manner, we work for the happiness for this country and nation by making the politics the tool and friend of religion.’19 Here we should note the expression ‘irreligion’. It was a term that he used against the Kemalists to denigrate in the eyes of the devout the combat against Islam and its institutions, as an anti-spiritual obsession serving the Kemalists’ own political and material ends. Irreligion was also a rhetoric devise to denounce as fundamentally unjust the character of Atatürk’s new order. In Said Nursi’s eyes, the Western philosophical principles belonged to the realm of unbelief and had led to extreme partisanship, exploitative and despotic officialdom, racialism, hatred and injustice. Islamic principles, on the other hand, he stated, would bring about brotherhood, a sense of ‘Islamic nationhood’ (Islamiyet milliyeti) public order, true justice and solidarity, etc. No international treaties or physical forces would halt ‘irreligion’. These convictions were the motives for his supporting Menderes’ moves to reintroduce compulsory religious education in schools. He called the Democrats ‘those who worked for Hürriyet-i seriye’, i.e. for ‘freedom in accordance with the sharia’. He obviously hoped that they would create freedom in accordance with religious norms, and encouraged them to create a social and political environment that would allow for the strengthening of religion and containment of anti-religious forces, and for the peaceful and natural evolution of a more Islamic society.20 Said Nursi’s support took the shape of offering advice and guidance, by illuminating for Menderes various atheistic currents. He would put forward a number of principles from the Koran that he believed would halt and repair these trends. According to Said Nursi, it was essentially a battle between belief and unbelief. There was no third way, nothing between belief and unbelief. A token of this was his moral support for the Democrats at the elections and his urging of his students to support them. At the 1957 elections, he went so far as to openly giving them his vote, something that was not unimportant especially at the 1957 elections because of the DP’s waning popularity.21

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Probably as a quid pro quo in 1956, the Court in Afyon cleared Said Nursi’s magnum opus, Risale. Following this decision the work, which originally was written in the Arab script and only existed in handwritten or duplicated copies, was now printed in the Latin alphabet.22 This made his works accessible to a whole new generation of readers who had never learned the Arab script. However, Said Nursi’s wellknown stature and the fact that he openly supported Menderes in the 1954 and 1957 elections also made him a target of the opposition and the Kemalist elite and nurtured their accusations against Menderes of exploiting religion for political purposes. Throughout the Menderes period, the American representations observed the development of the issue of Islam in politics and society. At regular instances such observations were written into reports. The sources were typically local newspapers, public statements by politicians, interviews by embassy or consular personnel with various Turkish personalities, or eyewitness reports. Regarding Islam’s strength among ordinary Turkish citizens, in 1959 the US Embassy noted: ‘Since the end of Second World War evidence of an increasing interest on the part of the people in the tenets of Islam has been noted in a steadily expanding volume.’ This observation was based on the following ‘inescapable’ conclusions, namely that the interest in religion was at a higher plane than it was previously because more persons were practising Muslim tenets; inter-party quarrels on the issue of religion had in the eyes of the more sophisticated urban dweller degraded the institution of Islam in Turkey; neither the DP nor the CHP had made lasting gains in the political struggle but Atatürk’s reforms had received ‘another severe jolt’; although the principle of laicism itself was not endangered, the ‘religious angle’ was nearer the surface and would possibly be used more frequently.23 The report went on: In recent years this renewed and revitalized religious feeling has reached a point were political leaders believe it possible to gain an advantage in the inter-play of domestic politics were they to pose as the defenders – the advocates – of this revival. These political leaders have sought to capitalize on this increased religious

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fervor and to snare the ‘prayer-rug vote’. It is this aspect of the problem, which is of greater immediate interest.24 In fact, the issue of religion, according the American Consulate General, was one of ‘the most serious and ever-present problems with which the Turkish Republic must contend’. Furthermore, the question of achieving a balance between the relationship of the needs of a state which is trying to develop along Western material lines and the requirements of Islamic theology underlay many of Turkey’s social problems. That, the Consulate General concluded, had become clear during the eight years of the Menderes government: not only had he increasingly tended to tolerate religious expression in the Islamic tradition, but he had even encouraged it.25 Thus, both the US Embassy and Consulate General left little doubt that the visible role of Islam in everyday Turkish life had increased during the Menderes government’s tenure of power. In January 1959, the Consulate General noted that the DP had made ‘considerable use of religion’ while the CHP had not.26 In April of the same year, the Embassy reached the following conclusion on the issue of use and ‘misuse’ of religion, namely that: Stated in the simplest terms the situation is this: the DP administration had chosen to relax some of the restrictions previously placed upon Islam in Turkey. The opposition has alleged that the DP has in each case contrived to make political propaganda. In Turkish domestic politics there is no compromise. It is a fight to the end, the alternatives are black and white – there is no grey area.27

Menderes and the issue of making political use of Islam According to journalists who accompanied Menderes on his tours, the prime minister had developed a habit of interlarding his public utterances with references to the deity, and had occasionally cast his attacks on the opposition in religious terms. In a speech in Thrace, for example, he accused the CHP and the Freedom Party of uniting

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to produce a ‘crusader’s front’ against him. The term used – ‘Ehli Salip Cephesi’–the Consulate noted was an old one, ‘well designed to stir up the atavistic emotions which all Turkish politicians assume are just beneath the surface.’28 Here we should note that the term ‘Crusader’ held strong and very negative connotations. The word represented attempts by the European powers to conquer and dominate Muslim lands and in this imagination the Crusades constituted only a first step in a long series of such efforts. It represented one link in a chain that culminated in the incursion of European power into the Ottoman lands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The term had the potential to reactivate the memory of the loss of the Ottoman possessions in Europe (Rumeli) to the Christian Balkan states between 1830 and 1913; the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 which carved up the Turkish mainland Anatolia and divided the slices among the European powers, Armenians and Kurds except for a very reduced territory; a Sultan who had relinquished virtually all his powers to the Entente powers; the Greek invasion of Anatolia which killed civilians in tens of thousands and threatened the very existence of the Turkish resistance – all these experiences could be comprehended within the framework of Crusaders’ activities. In this way, equating the CHP with the Crusaders made it possible to depict the party as an enemy of Islam and ‘real’ Turkish values.29 In Thrace the memory of the recent acts by the ‘Crusaders’ must have been particularly strong because a significant portion of the more than 400,000 Muslim refugees who were uprooted during the Balkan Wars were settled there. In a similar way, at the occasion of a series of elections for village headmen held in a district of Istanbul that was largely inhabited by Muslim refugees from Bulgaria (the Taslitarla district), a DP pamphlet read that the defence of Islam was recognized as an obligation by the DP but not by the opposition.30 Here the message was designed to invoke the sufferings of the muhacir – the Muslim refugee - and the negligence of his hardship on the part of the CHP. The most recent experience of this kind was the arrival between 1950 and 1952 of more than 160,000 Bulgarian refugees.31 Generally, at the lower levels within the DP politically inspired references to religion were, in the words of the Consulate General, ‘as

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common as ever’: the standard claim was that the CHP was the enemy of Islam and the DP its friend. As an instance of this, a local paper quoted a speaker at a DP provincial congress in Erzurum as saying that the CHP was ‘equal to Zionism and Freemasonry’. The speaker went on: ‘I have the honor of talking to his Excellency Beduizzaman Said-i-Nursi (the Nurcu leader). He told me that if Menderes withdraws as the Prime Minister, Turkey will collapse.’ He also stated that the Imams and Muezzins toured all the villages during election time and worked for our party. These are the only intellectuals who have remained Menderes’ friends.’32 Invoking the support of imams around the villages and Said Nursi’s endorsement of Menderes as Turkey’s ‘indispensable leader’ must be seen as attempts to enhance the image of Menderes as a truly devout. There were also reports of DP politicians who made efforts to demonstrate their personal piety in public. One case in point was the Mevlana, a traditional religious celebration held in Konya that was prohibited during the one-party period but made legal after Menderes came to power. According to the US Consulate General, the annual Mevlana attracted many thousands of people and was attended by three cabinet members and over 250 deputies. Some also used the celebration as an occasion to make overt political statements, as the instance of a religious speaker who departed from his text to reiterate the charge that the CHP was ‘the party of the crusaders’, while the DP is ‘the party of faith’.33 These examples demonstrate that the politicians must have believed that religion or religious imagination were prominent features in the minds of a large part of the Turkish public. They also suggest that the DP decided that these sentiments were of such significance that they were worth appealing to, and it is reasonable to believe that the party expected to gain from it. The same seems to have been true regarding the symbol value of the Ottoman Past: the US Consulate General noted that since the DP government came to power there had been a renewed interest in the Ottoman period in the form of restoration of Ottoman buildings, concerts of Ottoman classical music on the radio, establishment of

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an extremely popular ceremonial unit with janissary uniforms in the army, and a marked resurgence of Ottoman literature, sometimes translated but usually simply transliterated.34 Moreover, on 17 February 1959, Menderes’ symbolic significance lent itself to new and more radical interpretations. On his way to negotiations concerning Cyprus that were to be held in London, the plane that carried him and the Turkish delegation crashed at Gatwick airport. While many passengers were killed, Menderes was able to walk away alive and unharmed.

Divine intervention at Gatwick Airport Like ‘a bolt of lightning’, in the words of the US Embassy, was the effect on Turkish politics of the tragic Gatwick air crash from which the prime minister walked safely away. The survival of the prime minister was directly attributed to the hand of God who had now, it was said, installed Menderes as prime minister of Turkey. While ‘such fulsome praise’, still according to the US Embassy, had no favourable effect upon ‘the more sophisticated Turk’, it may well have been effective in regard to the poorer Turk who thronged the mosques for days thereafter giving thanks for the salvation of the prime minister.35 The scenes of Menderes’ return to Turkey, according to the US Consulate General in Istanbul, testified to this: The Prime Minister arrived in Istanbul late in the afternoon of February 1959, was greeted at the airport by a crowd of several thousand, drove to the Park Hotel through streets lined with thousands more, visited the Eyub Mosque the following day, and then left for Ankara by train, being greeted by similar crowds when he reached the capital.36 It should be noted that the Eyüb Mosque had a strong symbol value.37 While nothing was remarkable in the jubilant reception of Menderes after his having concluded the Cyprus agreement and survived a plane

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crash, what was extraordinary, according to the US Consulate General, was the religious tone: In Istanbul literally thousands of animals were sacrificed as Menderes’ car passed and so much sacrificial blood was thrown upon the car that the driver had difficulty seeing the road. The same thing happened throughout the Prime Minister’s visit to Eyub the next day, again in Ankara on his arrival there, and regularly since that time when Mr Menderes appears in public, and frequently when he does not – sixty oxen were sacrificed in front of his house as recently as March 9 by a delegation of wellwishers from Aydin [Menderes’ hometown]. The religious tone of the ceremonies surrounding Menderes’ return was further emphasized by the signs which were displayed by the crowd which, at least in Istanbul, tended to emphasize the Prime Minister’s close relations with God, by the appearance of the title ‘Gazi’ in connection with Menderes, and by a sudden and quite illegal eruption of imams in clerical dress outside the precincts outside the mosques.38 Here we should note that the title of Gazi was given to Ottoman Sultans like Osman, the founder of the Empire and the man who initiated its impressive expansion. Also Atatürk was given the title of Gazi during the War of Liberation. The imams’ infringement of the law consisted in turning up in clerical dress outside the confines of the mosques, a behaviour which bears witness to their state of excitement and probably also reflects the one by which their congregations were affected. Although the Consulate General believed that it was ‘probable that most of this unexpected evidence of mass piety was entirely genuine and spontaneous’ it did not doubt either that ‘the DP has been playing up to it for all it is worth.’ DP-controlled Havadis ‘led the pack in proclaiming Menderes’ sainthood’, and managed, still according to the Consulate General, to carry almost daily front page photographs of Menderes and others attending religious services.39 The opposition newspaper Vatan cited DP spokesmen for stating that the accident was an evidence of God’s close interest in Menderes’

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prosperity: at the DP Adana provincial congress held on 8 March, Konya deputy Himmet Olcment stated: ‘There is a leader at the head of this nation who was appointed by God and his Prophet and this is Menderes.’ Another delegate declared: ‘God appointed Menderes as Prime Minister at the deplorable London plane accident’.40 Vatan, which obviously had a hard time because it did not dare criticize the Menderes eulogies, confined itself to condemning the fact that the governors of Hatay and Adana were present: they were supposed to be civil servants with no political interests. Two days later at the DP Izmir Central Congress, a delegate was cited for announcing: ‘Adnan Menderes is the twentieth century’s conqueror. We will not let Menderes be called ex-Prime Minister. Menderes is the second Atatürk of the future.’41 The first comparison was a reference to Mehmet the Conqueror – the Sultan who took Constantinople in 1453. Although the last statement may seem a contraction in terms, completely ignoring Atatürk’s wellknown views about secularism, it testifies to the continued importance of his strong symbol value, be it due to the esteem by which he was held in wide circles, or be it to political expediency on the part of the speaker. The airplane crash also affected opinion outside the political parties. The growing religious press was, according to the Consulate, even more ‘extreme’: the bi-weekly religious paper Hür Adam (Free Man), widely regarded as the voice of the Nurcu movement, concluded immediately after the accident that Menderes was saved because he believes in God and that God has marked him for special favour. Since then, it contributed in each issue to ‘the belief that Menderes is the hope of Islam in Turkey’. In the same breath, Inönü was assigned ‘the role of Turkey’s personal devil’, and it was claimed that he had ‘joined Hellenism, Zionism and Communism as an enemy of the nation.’42 Even the organ of the Ticani order, Büyük Dogˇu, that had experienced an ambivalent relationship with Menderes, decided to leave the past behind and to embrace the prime minister in his new capacity as ‘God’s Chosen’. On 6 March 1959, it ran the following headline: ‘God Has Informed the Nation Very Clearly that He Protects You’. The article was a portrait of Menderes written before ‘the Gatwick accident’ that the paper decided to publish in an unchanged form on the following

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grounds, namely: ‘As God has preserved you for the Turkish Nation we have not changed anything in this article’. As the ‘material facts’ of the accident were well known, Büyük Dogˇu informed its readers, the newspaper had decided to consider only ‘the moral issues’. These were: ‘God has informed the Turkish Nation very clearly that He protects you. This is a divine word and it is made in such an awesome form that it leaves no place for doubt.’ Hinting at the prominence of materialistic and positivist philosophy in Kemalism, Büyük Dogˇu chose the following arguments in its attempt to corroborate its conclusion: What else can be said when it has already been announced that your salvation cannot be explained scientifically? Even if we think for days and nights in the midst of awe, tears and thanksgiving about the meaning of God sparing you from certain death, it will still not be enough. Such a test which made you transpass the border of insanity and death and come back and, such a happiness connected with the most dreadful tragic picture is not granted to every statesman.43 The test that Büyük Dogˇu wanted to demonstrate that Menderes had passed at Gatwick was the one proving that he was God’s chosen. The reasoning is the following: Menderes was meant to survive the Gatwick accident because it was preordained that he should lead Turkey, in the same manner as the young – and not yet king – Arthur was meant to pull out the sword from the stone, precisely because he was destined to become King. In a revivalist Islamic context, Menderes survival represented a textbook example of how to find the righteous leader selected by God to guide the community of Muslims. According to such interpretations, by the very virtue of having miraculously survived the accident Menderes, became instantly recognizable as the righteous leader: Menderes was index sui, his own indicator. Büyük Dogˇu continued its framing Menderes as the chosen in the following manner: You are not an ordinary man within the framework of a simple and miserable life, God has a special eye on you: walk and succeed

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accordingly: if you had died – let us not consider what we have become as a nation – the Buyuk Dogu, which was prepared to appear always to present you the truth, to criticize you if necessary and to direct you toward justice, would have preferred to plunge into darkness together with the outcome of the Turkish Nation. It wasn’t just a Prime Minister travelling in that plane, but the outcome of Turkey. Your death would have meant the greatest calamity, the loss of everything for true Turks who have been waiting half a century for a real moral and material salvation. God pitied these true Turks. You have to bear this test given by God only to His most beloved creatures, the heavy burden of the nation’s troubles, and you have to bear us and the truth also.44 Here Büyük Dogˇu frames Menderes as the ‘second coming’ of the spirit which inspired the abortive 1909 counter-revolution against the Young Turks which took place almost exactly half a century before the date of writing. The ill-fated move in 1909 made by the supporters of Abdülhamid II spelled the end of his battle against the new rulers who lead the Ottoman Empire into defeat in First World War, to its final dissolution in the hands of the foreign occupying powers and to the demise of the Sultanate and Caliphate perpetrated by Atatürk. At the same time, this manner of wording would play into the hands of those of Menderes’ opponents who castigated him for promoting ‘reaction’ and being himself among the reactionaries, for no other incident than the 1909 counter-revolution, also known as the Thirty-first of March incident, had such a strong symbolic bearing on the coining of the phrases ‘reaction’ (irtica) and reactionaries. According to the Istanbul Consulate General and the Embassy ‘the injection of religion into domestic politics [was] on a scale unprecedented in Turkish history’. The Gatwick accident, according to the Americans, made ‘certain extremist DP politicians appear to have gone overboard’.45 This tendency was boosted by the ‘definite role’ of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting period, which occurred on the heels of the aircrash and at the height of the display of religious feeling in connection

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therewith: not a day passed without an editorial on religion appearing. Almost invariably, the editor discussed recent actions or speeches of persons belonging to an opposing political party. There was little question that religion was subordinated to political purposes and that the object was to discredit the opposing political party. In fact, the reporting officer, whose first-hand observations of Turkey date back to 1954, was unable to recall any other occasion when the issue of religion has been so closely involved in the daily political life of the country. By the end of April 1959, it seemed that the fervour had ‘slackened somewhat’: religious editorials were decreasing and the state radio was no longer ‘as blatant as it was.’ The end of Ramadan, it was believed, was one reason. Another one might have been that the DP felt that it has gained ‘all the political advantage presently obtainable’. In spite of this, the CHP was still reacting to various DP charges and propaganda made at the height of the campaign.46 All this, and in particular the Gatwick accident, implied that the Kemalists now were up against a person whose symbolic value transcended that of simple political popularity, comprising, as it did, a strong religious significance too. At the same time, it also gave the Kemalists new opportunities to accuse Menderes of exploiting religion for political purposes.

Towards a definition of the Menderes phenomenon The much more prominent role of Islam in everyday life in the cities under Menderes has been ascribed to the fact that the mass of the population was reasserting its rights to express itself.47 This evaluation is supported by a contemporary assessment by the US Embassy that also deems the DP’s success to have rested on its responsiveness to the desires of the people, and in particular, the peasantry. According to the same source, the DP responded to the ‘obvious desires of many Turks for a relaxation of the relentless anti-religious campaign carried out by the republican reformers’. In this way, rather than deliberately stimulating religious reaction, according to Embassy, the DP exploited opposition to the militant secularism of the CHP. Although one might complain that the building of mosques was ‘a

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waste of money’, the attitude of the Turkish peasant was that at least the government was responsive to his wishes, and the reporting US officers was ‘struck’ with the unanimity with which they support the DP because it supplies roads and water to the villages, and supported agricultural prices.48 In this way, the report also sees the revival of Islam under Menderes as a rejection by the masses of the Kemalist developmental strategy. Based as it was on radical secularism and hostility to religion this, in turn, added a certain aura of ‘resistance’ to the role of Islam in the political contest. This and the fact that Kemalism did not manage to overcome the strength of Islamic values and symbols among the populace made Islam a political factor of so much importance that it offered it self to the politicians. While Inönü attempted to fight and repress these tendencies, Menderes took the opportunity to ride on its crest tacitly admitting that Islam was not necessarily incompatible with development and he decided to embrace these currents.49 This assessment is corroborated by the fact that the DP’s cooperation with Said Nursi lent Menderes some insight into modernizing Islam, and a voice to this effect too. It also gave him the support of yet another grass-root movement, so that he could count the Naqshibanis and the Nurcus among his supporters. Yavuz who has noticed the same trends refines his observations by stating that the DP articulated the power and voices of associations of a proto-civil society, including provincial business associations, extended families and Nurcu and Nakshibendi groups.50 A contemporary opinion by the US Embassy concluded that Menderes had embraced these currents to such an extent that Islam simply could not be separated from DP’s ‘basic appeal’.51 According to his biographer, Menderes came to power with a secularist mentality, something that Şevket Süreyya Aydemir52 regards as ‘natural’ because Menderes was brought up in a ‘free environment’ and was an educated man who had studied at a foreign school. While Aydemir concludes that Menderes was against the manipulation of religion, but sometimes lost the initiative when ‘greedy’ and ‘ignorant’ grass-root politicians ‘unscrupulously exploited religion’, Necip Fazil Kisakürek, member of the Ticani brotherhood and publisher of the religious magazine Büyük Dogˇu gives the impression that Menderes

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did use religion from time to time to further political ends. Thus, Kisakürek recounts how Menderes on many occasions extended and then withdrew government support to his paper Büyük Dogˇu, leaving the impression that the prime minister attempted to make use of him, whenever he needed him.53 While the issue of Menderes’ ‘real intentions’ in relation to religion and politics is debated, it stands a fact that the DP’s success rested on its ability to attract the masses by appealing to values that were central to their lives. The DP also did so by introducing reforms that were greeted as improvements in their economic, social and political status. Walter Weiker stresses the social movement aspect of Menderes’ success, pointing to the fact that the DP possessed an organization that ‘penetrated every corner of Turkey’ believing that superior organization and grass-root campaigning were responsible for the DP’s advent to power.54 This point of view is supported by a later assessment by the US Embassy stressing that the support of the DP was based on the party’s responsiveness to the desires of the people, and in particular the peasantry.55 W.B. Sherwood concurs: the DP’s success was rooted in the social structure and the party’s greatest support came from groups that represented the familiar sociological phenomenon of rising social groups in competition with an older elite. These were smallholder peasants emerging from poverty and a subsistence way of life, expanding but still small, commercial, industrial, urban labour groups and newly wealthy farmers. At the same time Sherwood completely discards ideology as an explanation for the appeal of the DP.56 In the same vein, Lewis mentions the fact that all forms of Communism were banned, made any serious discussion of social problems impossible.57 This makes it reasonable to conclude that while Menderes on the one hand was heading a political party, his political persona on the other functioned as a strong symbol for several socio-religious movements as well as a whole layer of the population, in particular, the peasants. The hallmarks of these groups were alienation and exclusion. They were ones who had been excluded – or repressed – by Atatürk’s reforms, or did not want to embrace the new and alien symbolism forced upon them by the regime.

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In the authoritarian settings of the one-party era, opposition groups’ access to formal political institutions and elites had been restricted to the ‘non-political’ arenas in the periphery. These groups constituted the ‘dynamic periphery’ in Atatürk’s Turkey.58 Their activism was local and took place far from the centre, which was ‘hollow’ to them in terms of possible ways to make their influence felt. All this changed once Menderes and the DP entered the scene. He managed to mobilize this periphery because he could be perceived as fighting the establishment by challenging the Kemalists’ preponderant monopoly on state and society. His attraction was further enhanced because he managed to frame his politics in Islamic terms and because he himself was framed in this image. This means that early DP success also represented the revolt of periphery against the centre.59 This conclusion, in turn, provides a link that enables us to connect in a longue durée the periphery that supported Menderes with the numerous popular uprisings of the Atatürk era and probably also with the lines of demarcations in the latter half of the nineteenth century when a new Muslim middle class, as mentioned earlier, clashed with the state bureaucrats over similar issues concerning the land ownership and the desired balance of power between centre and periphery. Since alienation and the existence of a dynamic periphery were conditions of importance for the groups which Menderes was mobilizing, and because these same circumstances are present among those who rally behind Islamic activists in other Muslims countries, it is topical to consider if Menderes’ political success can be understood within the same framework that is applied to analyse the mobilizing potential of Islamic activism more generally. Islamic movements are rooted in the symbolism, language and cultural history of Muslim society. This, in turn, has enabled them to successfully resonate with increasingly disillusioned populations suffering from political exclusion, economic deprivation and a sense of growing impotence at the expense of outside powers and a faceless process of globalization. For that reason, much of the work of Islamic activism is devoted to creating frames that motivate, inspire and demand loyalty.60 Transferred to Turkey, the disillusioned population suffering from political exclusion and economic deprivation would regard as an

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outside power the Kemalist state which interfered in local community, suppressing well-established habits and denying the traditions and values which they believed to be holding their community together. While the DP relied on a symbolism and a language that referred to cultural and historical conditions of the pre-Republican era, the Menderes experience also suggests that the type of Islamic discourse that was employed to frame Turkish politics and reality was primarily a national one. It focused on Turkey and paid only scant attention to conditions beyond the borders of the nation state, more or less neglecting the imagined community of all Muslims. This leads to the following conclusions regarding the relations between Menderes and role of religion in politics, namely that Menderes was not leading a party resembling any of the religious parties which later emerged on the political scene in Turkey. However, he made use of – and managed to ride on – the crest of an opinion that the freedom to exercise religious rites and other activities was a fundamental wish. In this way, Menderes’ popularity can also be seen as reflection of the political potential by this body of opinion and as a harbinger of the coming of religious parties in Turkey. Trends of continuity can also be found in the discourse used to frame the popular movements of the periphery. It is, as was mentioned, a topos in Kemalist historiography that collective action did not result from conscious decisions reached by thoughtful people, but from adroit manipulation of symbols by devious Islamists, ‘crazed fanatics’ and ‘dissatisfied’ immigrants.61 And, as we shall see, it was not only the insurrections of the Atatürk era that were depicted in that way. The old elite from the one-party period attempted to frame Menderes in a similar manner. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that it was mainly from the ranks of the old one-party era elite that the attacks against Menderes for exploiting religion for political purposes originated. In fact, the role of religion in Turkish life has been seen as one of the main issues that characterized the growing polarization between the Republicans and the Democrats,62 while the ‘real issue’ should have been the clash of opposing socioeconomic groups, between the rising social groups on the one hand and the old elite on the other.63

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CHAPTER 5 THE KEM ALISTS HIT BACK

The CHP was the party of the older elites, representing those classes who came to dominate the latter days of the Ottoman Empire, as the well as the first 25 years of the Republic: civil servants, city intellectuals, military officers and the traditional class of notables, eşraflar, in the countryside which included quite a lot of landowners. Many in this group received land primarily because of loyalty and service rendered to the Association for the Defence of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia, the political platform for nationalist resistance during the Greek-Turkish War of 1919–1922. In many cases, they had received title to lands abandoned by Greeks and Armenians, something that was true, in particular, in the Aegean, the Çukurova, parts of the Black Sea, and in Eastern Turkey.1 The official view of the CHP in the wake of the DP’s sweeping 1950 victory was that Menderes’ success was a temporary thing – a ‘mistake of the people’. According to a later account by former CHP deputy Prime Minister, Nihat Erim, he too subscribed to that credo. However, Menderes’ second resounding victory in 1954 was an eye-opener. He now became convinced that there had been a ‘true change’ in Turkey under Menderes, and he recognized that because the CPH was representative of the old order, the party would probably never win another election unless it radically changed itself and successfully achieved a new popular appeal with the electors.2 The CIA supported this estimate and, according to its director Allen Dulles, the CHP was ‘almost moribund’ following its defeat at the 1950 and 1954 elections.3

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The CHP versus accusations of ‘irreligion’ In this situation, according to the periodical Akis – which was a strong opponent of the DP government and whose editor in chief was Metim Toker, the son-in-law of Inönü – many CHP men attributed the defeat at the 1950 elections and, in particular those in 1954, to accusations of ‘irreligion’ directed against the CHP. Against that background, Inönü’s advisors asked him to dwell on the subject of religion. He was advised to close his addresses with a prayer. However, Inönü, still according to Akis, rejected such suggestions in order to avoid making the issue of religion central to the political strife. Had he given in to such temptation, the whole political competition, Inönü believed, would have centred on religion. The article was published shortly after the 1957 elections, held on 27 October, which gave the CHP its best result since 1950. It is against this background that we should understand Akis’ conclusion that ‘the outcome of the 1957 elections is the first sign proving the correctness of such reasoning’. However, according to the American Consul General, Inönü had no other choice: his close personal affiliation with the secular policies of the CHP regime would have made any accentuation of religion sound unconvincing. The American also observed that in the 1957 campaign, the CHP was ‘faced by such direct assaults on the part of the DP on the subject of religion that very little initiative was left to it in this field except to engage in an embarrassing defence’.4 This makes it reasonable to conclude that the CHP’s past record and the vigour of religious feelings among the masses left the CHP with no other choice regarding the issue of Islam but to attack the DP whenever there was a chance to claim that Menderes was exploiting religion for political purposes.

Religion turned against Menderes ‘You are so powerful that you can bring back the Caliphate if you wish’, Menderes told his group after having survived the November crisis in 1955 – the worst in his career as prime minister until 1960. Immediately the opposition press, and to some extend pro-government

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papers in Istanbul, launched a series of attacks on him, centring the criticism on two themes: in the first place, it was claimed that by this remark Menderes was ‘exploiting religious feelings for political purposes’ and, secondly, he was castigated for making remarks on ‘a sensitive subject such as secularism’. Pro-government media criticized his remarks for being ‘contrary’ to the DP programme, and for being made without prior consultation with his political colleagues. These waves of criticism raised against Menderes rose further as a result of a visit by the prime minister and the president to Konya – a hotbed of traditionalism and religious feeling and the home of the annual Mevlana celebration. The official purpose of the trip was to open a meat cooperative installation but, on his arrival, Menderes made a speech on a public square saying among other things: And now I want to talk to you about our views concerning laicism which means separation of religion from politics, as well as freedom of conscience. We do not tolerate the slightest hesitation as regards the sharp division between religion and politics. As regards the question of freedom of conscience, Turks are Muslims, and will remain so. It is an unquestionable prerequisite, therefore, that they should be able to teach their religion to their children and future generations. However, if no religious courses should be taught in schools, people desirous of teaching Islam to their children will be deprived of this possibility. Muslim children should not be deprived of this very natural right of learning their religion, and such privation can hardly be said to be in keeping with freedom of conscience. It would, therefore, be proper to introduce religious courses into secondary schools, for we do not believed that a society without any religion could endure. We know for instance that even the most advanced nations, while drawing a line between religion and politics, are strongly devoted to their faiths. It would be unfair to accuse our noble nation of fanaticism because, while firmly attached to its religion, our nation practices Islam with the purest of feelings. Actually Islam has reached its loftiest level in the heart of Turks. [...] We are going to institute religious

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lessons in secondary schools immediately and we will be successful. [...] We consider the courses in religion as the most important of all others instructed in secondary schools, and there is need for trained ‘imams’ and preachers for the teaching of religious lessons. For this purpose, we are planning to give higher status to existing schools for the training of ‘imams’ and preachers.5 Menderes’ speech focused on the role that Islam should play in the upbringing of Turkey’s youth. Here we should recall that it was the CHP that had re-introduced the possibility of religious teaching in schools, while the DP made it mandatory unless the parents opted out. Thus, the novelty of Menderes’ suggestion was in making secondary schools the object of such reforms. To fulfil that task, Menderes declared it necessary to enlarge the facilities for training imams and preachers and here he was probably hinting at the Imam Hatip schools. Thus, there was nothing revolutionary in his suggestions, and more than anything else, they must be seen as a continuation of earlier CHP and DP politics. At the same time, there can be little doubt that Menderes had consciously selected the audience for this announcement, and making his declaration in Konya would probably only add to his popularity in that area. Nevertheless, his announcement unleashed strong reactions in the press. Not surprisingly, opposition papers led the attack; but pro-DP papers also contributed. The bulk of criticism claimed that Menderes had opened a Pandora’s box. Secular bastions in the press and in university circles criticized Menderes’ declarations as bad timing and planning: concessions on religious matter should only be made in a well-prepared atmosphere and only after thorough examination. Some papers claimed that his remarks amounted to nothing less than a declaration of Islam as state religion, and an abandonment of the 1928 revision of the constitution that eliminated Islam as state religion.6 The independent opposition newspaper Dunya portrayed Menderes’ remarks in highly derogatory terms which framed him as an exponent of a primitive and out-dated mindset belonging to the era of the defunct Ottoman Empire, and raised the spectre of reactionary backlash by accusing Menderes of using the ‘demagoguery of Ottoman

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days when the Sultan exploited religious feeling to divert attention from a worsening internal situation.’ The consequences of Menderes’ statements, according to Dunya, was that: Tomorrow in party congresses and councils party leaders will adapt themselves to the new position and will use the same tactic to increase their prestige. [...] [W]e will thus see proposals for a return to polygamy and deprivation of Turkish women of their freedom and rights becoming a mode.7 Taking into account the actual content of Menderes’ message and keeping in mind the fact that religious instruction already existed in Turkey’s educational system, it is reasonable to conclude that the implications which the opposition papers, in particular Dunya, attributed to Menderes’ suggestions were widely off the mark. The CHP and the secular press reaction more resembled an attempt to denigrate Menderes in the eyes of those who feared that their status was threatened by Menderes’ political line. The same papers also demonstrated a certain disdain for the Turkish voter, by depicting him as ‘unenlightened’ and of a mentality rooted in backwardness, lacking the required faculties to control himself and as one who is easily aroused by ‘simple tricks’ from ‘smart politicians’. In this way, the tirade must also be seen as a topos in the Kemalist discourse simply used to disqualify the opponents of the CHP in the line with the often-used ‘forces of darkness’-cliché. The independent pro-DP newspaper, Yeni Sabah, on the other hand, praised the principles of instituting religious education in secondary schools ‘against’, as the newspaper stated, the ‘charlatans of the Atatürk revolution’. The editorial concluded by expressing its hope that Menderes was sincere in his Konya promise so that ‘the Muslim Turkish nation will stand’. The primary merits of Menderes’ suggestions, according to Yeni Sabah, were that they provided a kind of spiritual antidote to ‘excessive’ Kemalism that, in the view of the newspaper, had damaged the Turkish nation. Another pro-DP newspaper, Milliyet, defended Menderes’ action on the grounds that religious instruction would increase Turkey’s defence

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against Communism.8 Milliyet, too, saw religious instruction as a spiritual antidote, but in this case against Communism. All these public reactions demonstrate that the parties involved regarded the issue of Islam as important, that they believed religious feelings among the population to be a strong and a potentially forceful factor in political matters also. In March 1957, in the midst of speculations regarding the holding of elections, the American Consul General reported: Enlightened circles in Istanbul have been viewing with concern developments of late which forecast the possibility of an extensive exploitation of the sentiments of the devout in connection with the [future] general elections [...]. What tends to aggravate concern is the fact that these manifestations have been coming from the party in power charged with the enforcement of legislation prohibiting the employment of religious issues for the attainment of political objectives.9

Said Nursi as a symbol of the ‘black-bearded mens’ reaction’ It only added to such concerns in the same circles that religious leaders with high prestige such as Said Nursi openly supported Menderes in the 27 November 1957 elections. As will be recalled, Said Nursi was a prominent exponent of modernizing Islam, a personality well versed in science, and we should read the following piece by the Kemalist periodical Akis with that in mind. The text is quoted in extenso, as it provides a textbook example of the techniques used to denigrating dissent against the Kemalist project stemming from Islamic circles. Here follows Akis’ report on election day in Isparta, where Said Nursi had his residence: It was on election day, October 27. The headman in charge of the ballot at Kemeralti Street in the town of Isparta stared with astonishment at two black-bearded men standing before him. He seemed to have failed to grasp what these two men wanted

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of him when one of these two men repeated what he had said before: ‘Our master wants the ballot box to be able cast his vote’. Then only did the young man in charge of the ballot station understand what these men meant. His face reddened in anger and looking straight into the eyes of his interlocutors, he gruffly replied: ‘Go and tell your Master that if he wants to vote he’ll have to come here. The ballot box will not move an inch.’ Now it was the turn of the bearded men to stare with surprise and anger at the young man who was defying their powerful master [...] Their master was an old sick man. Furthermore his recent travels had exhausted him completely.10 Akis frames the representatives of Said Nursi (the master) as blackbearded men, an appearance which in the mind of many a citizen would call forward Atatürk’s expression haci hoca takimi, which was used to denigrate the ulama as ‘bands of hadjis and hojdas’ – simple priests and superstitious holy men representing manners and mentalities of the Ottoman era. In sharp contrast to this outdated appearance stands the headman in charge of the ballot box whose profile fits well the ideal type of a Kemalist: he is young and firm and not deterred by the demands of the two black-bearded men, in spite of the fact that they represent a religious authority. The young man’s brave behaviour and rejection of Said Nursi is meant to symbolize the attitude of an ‘enlightened’ Turkish citizen vis-à-vis the Ottoman and Islamist world of yesterday. To further emphasize the impression that tomorrow belongs to the reformers and the reformed, the young man’s vigour is contrasted by comments about Said Nursi being an old sick man, exhausted by travelling. The report goes on: What brazenfacedness to require of him to come all the way to the ballot box! The men standing around were really surprised at the audacity of the young headman. He could count himself happy if a curse did not fall upon him. This was really challenging fate [... but ...] the young man couldn’t care less about all that [...] A short while later the Master, who was no less than the influential Bediüzzaman [Said Nursi] appeared between the two

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disciples. He, indeed, seemed very tired, but was still trying to walk erect and with firm steps. The fact was that his extensive tours by car on the eve of elections had thoroughly exhausted him. [...] Without uttering a word he did what he was told to do. He was made to walk into the voting booth and after putting his vote in an envelope, was asked to drop it into the ballot box. Next he was required to sign his name in the voters’ register.11 If we assume that ‘the men standing around’ are meant to represent the Turkish people, we get the following epic: the whole nation watches in awe the duel between the Ottoman past and religious superstition on the one hand and Turkey’s present and future on the other. For a while they fear that fate and curses may harm the young man, but they soon see that he proceeds in his project undeterred and unharmed as living proof that Kemalism has the means to defy reaction and the dark forces of yesterday. Even Said Nursi must give in, obey orders and he finally turns up in person to cast his vote. Akis goes on: But the Master did not know the letters of the Latin alphabet, or pretended not to do. One of his disciples promptly offered to sign for the Master. The young man at the ballot box once again got mad. This was not a circus. The law required that everybody sign for himself, or if illiterate, leave his fingerprint. That’s what the Master did and walked away with his disciples with a stain of blue ink on one of his fingers.12 Akis raises doubt about whether Said Nursi knows the Latin alphabet and the context in which he is depicted leaving his fingerprint gives the impression that Said Nursi is an illiterate too; in fact, his whole way of behaving is denounced as being mere ‘circus’ and the whole passage seems to be intending to demonstrate that Said Nursi and his kind are equivalent with superstition and that religion implies yesterday’s men in contrast to the enlightened and civilized people who respect the laws of a well-organized society. In spite of the fact that the DP won in Isparta, Akis concludes in an optimistic manner, using the symbol of the sick Said Nursi and

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his ‘circus’ as a harbinger that a new era is bound to arrive even to the stronghold of Said Nursi: ‘The true winner was not the DP but secularism’.13 Akis approached the fact that the DP won the elections by stating that although ‘Fate had smiled on the DP in Isparta’ the fact still remained that in ‘the very sphere of influence of the Master’, the sum of the votes received by the opposition was larger than the vote won by the DP. This happened in spite of the fact that ‘the great Bediüzzaman had done everything in his power to prevent the Administration from changing hands’ and the DP won a narrow victory only because there was a split in the opposition vote. Akis was also encouraged by the fact that an important section of the population composed of young men and intellectuals had been fighting against the influence of the Master and that several villages visited by him continued to vote for the opposition. This marked, still according to Akis, a ‘tremendous change’ since the last elections: religion undoubtedly continued to play its part, but it was no longer the number one factor and there was good reason to believe that by the next elections, its usefulness as an electoral issue would diminish still further.14 Akis also ascribed a wider significance to the events: ‘Only if one realizes how influential Bediüzzman is in Isparta, can one fully understand the great significance of the fact that the sum of the opposition vote in that province was larger than that of the DP.’ Akis obviously saw the same pattern in other parts of the country: in Konya, in Maraş where the elections were lost to the CHP and in many Eastern provinces where the CHP inflicted a crushing defeat on the DP. This happened in spite of the fact that the CHP was accused of favouring ‘irreligion’ and, Akis noted, nor was the DP ‘very lucky’ on the Black Sea coast.15 In spite of Akis’ prognosis, Said Nursi continued to make his influence felt in the following years while the pro-secular press went on denigrating him as a reactionary and casting his followers in similar terms. At the same time, the Istanbul press attempted to convey an impression of the Nurcu movement that inflated its size and the proportions of its activities.

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Inflating the size and proportion of ‘reaction’ In April 1958, the Nurcus were reported to have openly engaged in ‘a vicious defamation of the secular regime’. According to the American Consulate General, in such cases Atatürk usually was the principal target of attack.16 The impression that something unusual was taking place was enhanced by the fact that the police and courts took action and because a prohibition was imposed on public reporting of two cases that were said to have caused much consternation in secular circles. Although the US Consulate General in Istanbul saw ‘no reason to ascribe much seriousness’ to the cases, it judged that in the town of Nazilli Izmir, ‘the followers of Sheikh Said-i-Nursi, known as the “Disciples of Light”, operated with remarkable lack of restraint’. The Nurcus were reported to have claimed that Said Nursi had been elevated by divine power to the glory of prophethood to restore an order of godliness.17 The activities lasted two days and transgressed the confines of the mosque and private gatherings. It was reported that the Nurcus spread their religious messages over loudspeakers from the principle mosque and invited people to shed their blood for their cause, maintaining, among other things, that they formed a tightly knit spiritual grouping of close to 12 million peoples. Although Said Nursi was known to have a large number of followers, this figure (12 million) lacked any substance, according to what the Consulate believed to be ‘informed sources’.18 No matter how this number originated, its mere reporting by the press could only serve to scare the ‘enlightened’. To make things appear even worse from a Kemalist point of view, the Ticani sect was reported to be active again, something which, in turn, caught the attention of Akis. According to the Consulate General, the Ticanis had been engaged in ‘intensive sectarian retreats and propaganda along the lines of the ones recorded in Nizilli, but in a less conspicuous manner’.19 At both events arrests and house searches followed, leading the authorities to claim that they had discovered ‘a host of reactionary literature’, firearms as well as special flags bearing religious emblems. In addition, 30 persons, mostly women according to reports, were taken into custody. The press gave much attention to the case of one

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of the arrested women who was in a very advanced state of pregnancy despite the fact that her husband had been away for over a year. On being asked how she could reconcile this with her religious fervour, she was reported to have claimed that there was no reason for astonishment over her condition since this was a simple case of an immaculate conception. The Consulate’s reporting officer obviously was sceptical about this press story and added ‘The Istanbul press is particularly eager to play up such aspects of sectarian life in an attempt to discredit the morality of the fanatic elements’. To support the assessment, he noted: ‘Istanbul circles do not tend to attribute special importance to the reported instances of regressive activities’. The heart of the matter and main ‘source of concern’ rested in the fact that such actions have been conducted with openness and much boldness. The Istanbul press blamed the Menderes government for ‘laxness’ in enforcing secular principles and for the concessions made to the ‘conservative and reactionary elements’ for the purpose of securing their political support.20 Thus, it seems that the press’ reporting on eruptions of religious sentiment was also intended to evoke the spectre of reaction and relapse into ignorance and to blame it all on Menderes. However, the very same press also makes it clear that the government did clamp down on such activities and in that way did implement the laws protecting secularism and Atatürk’s reputation. The political aspects of Islam continued to make headlines: practically every week, prominently featured news items appeared in the majority of Istanbul newspapers on arrests of ‘reactionary propagandists’ or the seizure of ‘retrograde literature’. Such coverage, according to the Consulate, easily conveyed the impression that a major development was in progress. However, the incidents were isolated cases and there were no signs of a concerted movement. Thus ‘qualified Istanbul circles’ estimated that the only concerted action was taken by the press, something that the Consulate saw as a reaction to the ‘undue stress which the administration harped on the religious theme during the recent month of fasting [Ramadan]’. In fact, much public comment criticized Menderes for the government’s ‘connivance of departures from the fundamental politics of Atatürk’. This, in turn, led the Consulate to the following suggestion, namely that the political

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motives of ‘harassing the Administration’ had a considerable share in all the recent press publicity given to the subject of ‘reaction’. Thus, the impression that the Consulate’s estimate leaves is that it was the press which was exploiting the issue of religion for political purposes, by using minor and major incidents of religious outbursts in public to attack Menderes. Seen from this perspective, invoking the memory of the Ticani order must be regarded as an efficient means to raise the spectre of religious anti-Atatürk fanaticism because this brotherhood had already made itself quite conspicuous by vandalizing and destroying public statues and monuments erected in the honour of Atatürk. It was in precisely the same vein that, on 30 April, the opposition newspaper Vatan castigated the government for hiding the truth about the investigations and arrests of Nurcus and Naqshbandis: ‘No one has the right to play with fire for the sake of winning a few votes.’ The issue, according to Vatan, was a national one because ‘the greatest menace which can threaten Turkey is the exploitation of religion for political ends and petty motives’. Once again, the leitmotiv in the Kemalist press was the issue of Menderes’ exploiting religion for political motives. The prominent editorialist Nadir Nadi of the pro-CHP newspaper Cumhuriyet took the same line in a slightly new version, accusing the DP of seducing the peasant: ‘the tendency of cultural regression [...] began with the era of Democracy’.21 Nadi accused the government – if not democracy – of having corrupted the countryside.

Seducing the peasant and the vile democracy The government was behind the rise of religious feelings among the peoples of the villages, according to Nadi. At the same time, however, he wrote off the possibility that the origins of this tendency would be discovered in villages or small towns or in the remote Eastern provinces. No, it originated in the big centres like Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. It was these cities that played the ‘leading part in furthering retrograde trends’ and it was the politicians who were the culprits: ‘Indeed, the fanatics derive their main support from the peddlers in politics.’ Nadi left little doubt which politicians he had in mind. It was

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the Democrats ‘who have made it a habit to play on religious feelings to obtain political benefits’ and ‘reside in these very cities’. Furthermore, Nadi accused the politicians of the big cities of having contaminated the ‘poor villages, without a school, doctor and medicine’. Instead they possessed ‘quite a suitable modest mosque’. The poor villages that had been ‘caught by this fancy’ – the rise of religious feelings – had also ‘involved themselves in inextricable debts just to build a new mosque which in many instances they are unable to complete’.22 In an effort to substantiate his thesis that the rise of religious feelings originated from the cities, Nadi pointed at the fact that the veil was more frequently encountered in centres like Istanbul, Izmir and Bursa than elsewhere. These big-city vices made the Kemalist editorialist lament: ‘Where is the generation raised by Atatürk? Among the young girls born after his death, there are many who today are forced to wear the ugly black veil.’ All this made him conclude: ‘One can, indeed, say that in this respect our villages are more emancipated and more civilized. What a sad spectacle to see Atatürk’s reforms wasted twenty years after his death for the sake of a handful of votes!’23 On 3 May another prominent editorialist, F.R. Atay, of the Kemalist newspaper Dunya took up the same line: Let us, indeed, know what we are striving to achieve. We rightly claim that democracy is a regime of freedom and law and that we have to defend it against all sorts of enemies of freedom and law. Moving from this premise we see Bolshevism as an enemy of our regime on the left, and reaction as a foe of democracy on the right.24 To nurse Turkey’s young democracy, Atay declared it a duty to wage ‘an implacable war on both these enemies’. While Turkey was fighting the enemy on the left, the ‘enemy on our right flank’ was left in peace. However, appeasement had proved to be the wrong strategy: For a time we thought we felt that the whole problem was settled if we introduced the teaching of religion in schools. But since ignorance of the majority of the voters made profitable the

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exploitation of reactionary leanings, we made one concession after another to the forces of darkness just for the sake of securing benefits in elections. We have permitted the harangue of counter-revolution to assert itself in our mosques and have even gone to the point of broadcasting this voice over our radios.25 As a means to strip the religious revival of any merit, Atay invokes the well-known cliché that ‘reactionaries’ and other ‘forces of darkness’ are exploiting the ignorance of the people. The moral is quite clear, namely that the people still needs to be protected against itself. As a remedy, Atay recommends education and re-education in Kemalism while, quite unsurprisingly, he indentifies the Nurcus as the frontrunners among the ‘forces of darkness’: Now that the Nurcus are going even further[...] It is high time that all our political parties come to their senses. The regime of law we are longing for is not a final objective. It is simply a means of leading us safely to civilication[sic]. A democracy leading the country backwards can never live.26 Depicting the Nurcus as someone leading Turkey backwards and as exponents of ‘retrograde’ ways of thinking must be considered a gross simplification and a polemic tool to disqualify resistance to Kemalism as something belonging to the ‘forces of darkness’. In this way, and, because of his links to Said Nursi, it must also be seen as an attempt to make Menderes look like an accomplice. In fact, Atay goes so far as to question the wisdom of protecting the primacy of democracy and the rule of law when confronting enemies of this nature. Atay is undoubtedly right in recognizing that the religious revival was active in the urban centres; however, this should not obscure the fact that the periphery must have remained dynamic on its own terms. After all, it was precisely in the periphery where the reformers of the one-party era encountered the greatest troubles in controlling the minds of the Turks and in eradicating values based on Islam and traditions stemming from the Ottoman era. Tacit but determined resistance to Atatürk’s revolution and reforms is probably the reason

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why the influence of the halkevler (CHP’s village institutes to promote officially recognized culture and strengthen popular forms of art and literature) remained limited; it was for the same reasons that the DP’s relaxation of the one-party era’s militant anti-religious prohibition proved instantly successful. This point was also reflected by the US Consulate General in Istanbul who, in the beginning of 1959, noted that one of the cases which has been made regularly in recent years, is: That the Democratic Party has been attempting to gain political favour with Turkey’s rural masses by permitting a constantly increasing amount of freedom in the practice of Islam in Turkey, and by regularly drawing attention to the fact that it has done so. The Party’s policy has been less one of leading the people toward religion, than of simply allowing them to do what they want to do, with the result that the ‘religious revival’ has been given direction by the people and by the untrained village imams rather than by a trained religious hierarchy. It has, therefore, manifested itself in the resurrection of traditional practices, such as çarşaf-wearing and the sacrificing of animals, rather than in the development of new religious thought and practice.27 Thus, the Consulate General identified the periphery and the ordinary Turk as the dynamic forces of Turkey’s religious revival. However, the fact that these impulses originated in the periphery and took the shape of a revival of traditional practices made the Consulate General conclude the ‘result has truly been reactionary’. To further substantiate this evaluation the Consulate General also noted that: The half-hearted attempts of the Government to create a new religious hierarchy by the establishment of advanced schools of religion may or may not succeed in the future, but to date have had no effect. The point has also been made that, since the Democratic Party Government’s policies on religion are essentially passive, change has occurred rather slowly and unobtrusively, punctuated by incidents at irregular intervals which

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tend briefly to draw public attention to what is happening. The result of this new attitude has been the gradual reappearance of overt evidence of Islamic feeling. [...] The reappearance of Islam has taken such forms as increased attendance at the mosque, increased observance of the requirement of daily prayer, and wider use of the çarşaf by Turkish women. [...] What is really significant, of course, is not simply the extension of the use of religiously based forms, but the state of mind which is indicated by this trend. While a statistical tabulation of religious attitudes is obviously not obtainable, it is felt that some useful conclusions can be drawn from a survey of recent developments connected with the practice of Islam and of public reaction to it.28 The fact that the forms of practising Islam were the traditional ones does not exclude the possibility that the very revival of such activities also can be seen as an act of resistance against the Kemalist state’s attempt to penetrate the periphery and to force its secular programme upon the villages. In doing so, such resistance contributed significantly to the political development, in that it was the vote of the periphery that brought the DP to power. Menderes, in turn, responded by being permissive vis-à-vis the ‘religious revival under the direction of the people’ rather than being an active reformer himself, a way of behaving that he probably hoped would allow him to get by without having to openly challenge the Kemalist credos. This state of affairs, in turn, might go a long way toward explaining why the Kemalist establishment reacted so strongly to both major and minor instances of overt manifestation of Islamic piety: they rightly saw this as a symptom of a deeply rooted aversion, if not resistance, to Kemalism and that such sentiments had a strong hold on large parts of the Turkish population, something which, in turn, would make a return of the CHP to power a distant reality. This interpretation is supported by the Consulate General who noticed that instances of ‘sudden and dramatic acts’ of Islamic manifestations aroused strong sentiment among the intellectual minority (whose large majority was Kemalists) who liked to feel that they have

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passed into a comprehension of Western, rational thought, and who refer to themselves as ‘modernists, republicans, or Atataturkists’. This also indicates that this group felt its former privileged position threatened by the religious revival and that they were under pressure.29 One such instance were the, according to American Consulate General, inept efforts of the Head of the Presidency of Religious Affairs to rule against a translation of the Koran into Turkish: it evoked a storm of press indignation and resulted in a flurry of slander suits.30 The heart of the matter in this case was that translating the Koran would be fully in line with Kemalism, while the mere thought of translating the word of God which was spoken in Arabic would be an offence to traditional Muslim piety. A similar clash occurred when Islam’s green banner was displayed from a minaret during a visit by Menderes to the town of Emirdag, where Said-i-Nursi was residing: the Kemalist press reacted with indignation and strongly castigated Menderes’ failure to repress it. While this incident dropped out of the press after the government arrested the imam and a number of his parishioners, Menderes’ connection with the incident continued to be discussed.31 In a similar manner, Cumhuriyet and other CHP journals regularly ran photographs of little groups of black-shrouded women in the city’s street and markets and published articles on what should be done about it. According to the opinion of some legal experts who were interviewed by the newspaper, a ban on the çarşaf could be imposed although they believed it a mistake to act so. After all, there seemed to be a connection between poverty and çarşaf-wearing: the çarşaf is far cheaper than most other dresses and the conditions in the villages and slums, being as they are, make economics along with religion the sponsor of the çarşaf. In contrast, the traditional fez of the pre-republican period was still forbidden by law and this type of headgear had not reappeared yet.32 The only aspect of overt demonstration of piety which was seldom mentioned and never criticized in the press was that it was possible to see men praying in the open air, ‘even in Istanbul’ and ‘although everyone seems to be aware of this increased attention to prayer’. Most praying in the open air took place around construction projects where

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substantial numbers of rural people are employed and, according to the Consulate General, this activity like attendance at mosques and prayer in other places, had increased very substantially since 1950 and the formation of the Menderes’ government.33 The Kemalist press probably abstained from criticizing this practice because a substantial portion of potential CHP voters were among those who attended the mosque or other places of worship. In late March 1959, after Menderes’ miraculous survival of the Gatwick air crash, the American Consulate General summarized the balance of the religious revival and the Kemalists’ stance on the phenomenon in the following manner: the Gatwick accident had left – the press which is ‘by and large overwhelmingly secular in outlook’ – in a difficult position. In the beginning, most Istanbul dailies ‘played the news as it came’, with little or no comment on the religious overtones, but since the beginning of March ‘the latent fires of secularism’ had begun to flare up and, particularly since the end of the brief period of peace between the parties, the press has launched into what may develop into a new major attack against ‘public religious activity and sponsorship thereof by politicians’.34 Regarding the CHP, according to the Consulate General, the party ‘found itself forced to admit there were obvious signs of increased religious sentiment on the part of the people’, something which the CHP explained in the following way: ‘a hungry man turns to religion’. This theme, still according to the Consulate General, was repeated in nearly every discussion with CHP personalities. The party also stated that it believed that the DP had turned to this issue in desperation and the whole campaign was ‘nothing more than evidence of the weakened posture of the DP’.35

The CHP’s exploitation of religion for political purposes The continued attacks on overt demonstrations of piety and the habit of blaming Menderes were first and foremost intended to appeal to the old elite. These were the bureaucrats, officers, teachers, academics and journalists – those who already subscribed to Atatürk’s dogmas on religion, nation and history, and who had gained from them.

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Erik Zürcher simply rejects the reaction of the educated elite as ‘little less than hysterical’ because the religious revival was nothing more than expressions of non-political Islamic feelings.36 What was at play for this group, according to him, was a fear that the much more prominent role of Islam in everyday life would threaten their cultural hegemony. Having internalized Atatürk’s dogmas, they owed their position in the ruling elite to the fact that they represented a positivist Western-orientated outlook.37 Their position was also threatened by the fact that the civil servant, in the words of Lewis, had fallen from the ‘dizzy eminence’ that he once occupied in the social hierarchy, so that he was no longer the ‘most sought after bridegroom’ for a father with marriageable daughters. The emergence of a new commercial class had radically changed the political balance of forces to such an extent that it threatened the traditional social ethos.38 Seen in this context, it is tempting to claim that it was this group of bureaucrats, officers, teachers, academics and journalists, and the CHP who exploited religion for political purposes, namely as a tool to denigrate Menderes. After all, his permissiveness vis-à-vis the religious revival gave the Kemalists the opportunity to cast Menderes as a ‘reactionary’ who strived to undo the achievements of modern Turkey and to open the gates for the ‘dark forces’ of religious fanatics and Ottoman backwardness, and to denounce him as a spokesman for the long-gone Sultan-Caliph. While the one-party regime had resorted to physical violence in the shape of military campaigns and police repression to combat opponents of the regime, their heirs, the Kemalist opposition of the 1950s, fought Menderes and his supporters in the arena of public opinion. They relied on their dominant position in the press and on support from the intelligentsia. Although the Kemalists succeeded in increasing their appeal among the educated elite, the vast majority of whom were city dwellers, they soon realized that it was much more difficult to reach the periphery, where most Turks lived, be it in the squatter towns around the urban centres or in the villages in the countryside. In these places, the majority remained in favour of Menderes. The fact that such sentiments were often clothed in an Islamist discourse probably

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only increased the Kemalists’ impetus to denigrate their support of the DP as signs of ‘backwardness’ and to denounce those who disagreed with the CHP as ‘reactionaries’. The preferred medium for these attacks was the newspaper. Because the rate of illiteracy was high in the countryside, it is reasonable to believe that the tirades were directed primarily at an educated audience in the cities, i.e. at Kemalists or potential Kemalists. One aim was to stir up fear that the ‘forces of darkness’ were on the verge of taking over Turkey and that Menderes was heading this wave of ‘reaction’. According to Sherwood, the CHP’s claims that the DP was the ‘party of reaction’ and that its success at the polls was primarily the result of its ‘reckless reaction and demagogic exploitation’ of the religious feelings of ‘ignorant people’ cannot be taken seriously. He concedes that the DP responded to the relaxation of the militant antireligious campaigns but rejects the idea that it was merely pandering to its religious inclinations. These claims, according to Sherwood, must be seen as a rationalization of CHP’s lack of success at the polls.39 The CHP and the Kemalist elite’s hostility to the DP and fear of Menderes were probably also conditioned by the fact that the prime minister functioned as a symbol of hope in the eyes those who wanted Islam to play a greater role in the direction of national politics. This was true regarding the Sufi brotherhoods, in particular the Naqshbandis and Nurcus, something which probably only made matters worse from the point of view of the Kemalists, because the brotherhoods represented the very same forces in politics and society which Atatürk and the CHP had fought for decades. It only added to sour relations between the Kemalists and the DP that Menderes gave the brotherhoods much more leeway than they had known since the early years of the republic. While Menderes’ attitude vis-à-vis incipient political Islam can be seen as an early symptom of the political elite responding in an accommodating way to a current that, from the 1970s onwards, would constitute itself, as political parties among other things, and although Menderes’ attempt to align himself with this current against Communism resembles efforts in the 1980s to forge a Turkish–Islamic synthesis in order to mobilize Islam in the service of the state, such

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efforts were an anathema to the Kemalists of the 1950s. After the CHP’s modest success in the elections of 1957, the party kept up, in the words of Zürcher, its campaign of rejecting and criticizing absolute everything and anything the government did.40 One such field was the arena of foreign policy. For that reason we shall briefly discuss the stages of tying Turkey to the Western alliance systems and the role that, the CHP and DP governments played in this process. Then we shall examine the Cyprus issue, which had a strong bearing on internal Turkish developments and caused so much controversy that it left a lasting mark on the evaluation of the Menderes era.

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CHAPTER 6 THE CYPRUS ISSUE

The genealogy of Turkish–American military relations begins with the establishment of the US base at Adana in 1943.1 By the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Turkey, along with Greece, became the first peacetime recipients of US overseas aid. At the same time, it was decided at the Pentagon talks held in 1947 between the State Department and the British Foreign Office that in regard to security policy, Greece and Turkey belonged to the British sphere of defence, namely the Near and Middle East.2 It was in this situation that Turkey began to press her case for joining the Western defence system that was under construction. Before the signing of the NATO Alliance on 4 April 1949, Turkey made it clear that she was interested in membership, stating that her location was compatible with the geopolitical position of Italy and the North African territories held by France.3 In December 1949, the Turkish government raised the issue again, to be told by Assistant Secretary of State George C. McGhee that the USA could not support the Turkish request. The American view of Turkish membership in a security pact was put forward at a meeting held in London in May 1950 of the Tripartite Powers: the USA, Britain and France. The USA could not consider security pacts with Greece, Turkey, Iran or other Near Eastern countries as long as Washington was unsure of its capacity to defend vital interests in Europe. The only way that an inclusion of this area into a security pact with the USA seemed possible was if Europe’s own defence was strengthened.4

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The outbreak of the Korean War and, not least, the Chinese invasion of the Korean peninsula in November 1950, caused Washington to seriously reconsider the role of the USA in the defence of the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. This and reports that Britain did not have the necessary economic and material means to defend the Middle East led political planners in Washington to the conclusion that the USA should play a bigger role there.5 At the same time, Turkey continued her requests for inclusion in NATO. On 29 and 30 July, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, Menderes made an official request for membership,6 while a few days before, on 25 July, Bayar had announced that Turkey would sent 4,500 combat troops to Korea.7 On 31 August 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson told the Secretary of Defence that whatever decision was made regarding Turkey, it would affect the USA’s relations with Greece and Iran. For political reasons, the inclusion of Turkey would require the inclusion of Greece as well, while Iran might be excluded on the grounds that she was not a European country. On 12–14 September 1950, the foreign ministers of the Tripartite Powers met in New York. Once more Turkey’s request for admission to NATO was refused. At the same time the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that Greece and Turkey be given an associate status in NATO, as it would be beneficial to have them participate in military planning and actions in the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East in concert with NATO countries. On 19 September, Acheson informed the Turkish ambassador to the USA, Feridun C. Erkin, that NATO could not grant Turkey full membership, but that it was invited to associate with NATO in matters related to the Mediterranean. On 2 October, Ankara accepted this proposal. The following day, Greece was offered the same conditions as Turkey and the same day accepted these.8 In early 1951, Acheson endorsed McGhee’s proposal for a greater US military commitment in the Middle East. At the same time, Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. Regarding the defence of Europe, he told Truman that the West must rely on land forces to defend the centre, and on sea and air power to defend both flanks. He was therefore in favour of supplying Yugoslavia

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and Turkey with arms and of supporting them with greater air and sea power. Eisenhower’s stance represented an important upgrading of the importance of Turkey. Concurrently, the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to the conclusion that the admission of Greece and Turkey to NATO would be the best way to contribute to the security of the Middle East.9 In 30 April 1951, Truman voted that the USA should press immediately for the inclusion of Turkey and Greece as full members of NATO.10 In September 1951, the NATO council decided to invite Greece and Turkey into NATO. Full membership was granted to both countries on 18 February 1952.11 In 1953 and 1954, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia formed the so-called Balkan Pact by the signing of the Ankara Agreement on 28 February and the Bled Agreement on 9 August 1954.12 In this way, the DP government not only continued the pro-western foreign policy of the CHP administration but also successfully managed to enlarge Turkey’s role as an agent of western interests. In this process, her alliance partners often framed Greece and Turkey as two halves of the same walnut and saw their cooperation as a cornerstone in the defence of south-eastern Europe and the Near East. However, historically that relationship was far from stable and it was threatened by the Cyprus issue.

Relations with Greece Turkey and Greece entered the inter-war period after more than ten year of almost constant warfare. Greece had been at war with the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars (1912–13), allied with the Entente against the Central Powers and the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, while the Turkish nationalists successfully rejected Greece’s attempts to establish supremacy in Western Anatolia between 1919 and 1922. The latter war had a strong bearing on the national consciousness of both countries. For Turkey the war was an important theatre in the War of Liberation, while in Greece it became known as the ‘Disaster in Asia Minor’. In Turkey, it provided the backbone for the narration

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of the birth of the Turkish nation in general and of the greatness of Mustapha Kemal, in particular. In Turkey, ‘1922’ signifies the successful completion of the War of Liberation, the final act of the process of throwing off the yoke of foreign dominance. It implies the ultimate triumph of Atatürk over the unjust conditions forced on the Turkish nation by the Sèvres Agreement in 1920. The Turks would now be masters in their own house and have no more of foreign sponsored carving up of the Turkish heartland, be it in Greek, Armenian or Kurd possession. In short, ‘1922’ signifies the moment of creation of modern Turkey, an event, which every Turk knows from school, from the media and from the army. In Greece, the defeat spelled the end of the so-called Megali Idea, the Great Idea, the political vision of an expanding Greece that would not have reached its proper historical extension until the former Byzantine capital Constantinople ‘once again’ was Greek. ‘1922’ signifies the ‘Disaster in Asia Minor’, the final defeat of the Greek army by Mustapha Kemal’s troops in August and September 1922, the expulsion of the Greek Orthodox population from Asia Minor and the Turkish reconquest of Smyrna – Izmir to the Turks – on 9 September 1922 and the burning of that city. It also provided a source of highly electrifying allegories to the two main factions in the political world, the Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, to legitimate their respective claims to power and to disqualify and eliminate their opponents’ pretensions.13 Ten years of almost constant warfare also saw a number of atrocities committed by both Greek and Ottoman authorities as well as by the Turkish Nationalists against Muslim and Greek Orthodox civilians.14 These misdeeds, in turn, were incorporated into Turkish and Greek narratives to dehumanize the opposing group, and to extol the righteousness of their own cause. At the same time, the inter-war period saw a significant rapprochement. Beginning with the Ankara Agreement signed in 1930, and followed by the conclusion of the Balkan Entente between 1930 and 1934, as mentioned above, Turkey and Greece became ever closer allied. This process, however, was interrupted by the Second World War and its immediate aftermath: Turkey was blamed for not having honoured her obligations as an ally when Ankara remained passive

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vis-à-vis Italy’s attack on Greece on 28 October 1940. In a similar vein, Ankara was castigated for the Varlik Vergisi tax as it was seen as a punitive and odious special measure levied on the minorities to drive them into bankruptcy and lead to their deportation.15 Ankara for its part would criticize the decision to transfer the Dodecanese Islands from Italy to Greece. To justify her claims on the islands, Ankara pointed to the fact that they were near the Turkish mainland, had a Turkish speaking Muslim minority and had been an Ottoman possession until Italy seized them by means of war.16 Thus, Turkey and Greece entered the post-war period with the highly emotional and dual legacy of their mutual relations. One tradition provided the source for a narrative of cooperation and mature statesmanship while the other offered countless examples of perfidy and cruelty. In the first post-war decade, the legacy of cooperation and mature statesmanship prevailed: Turkey and Greece became allied in NATO in 1952 and entered the Balkan Pact with Yugoslavia, signed in 1953 and 1954. The effect of excellent official relations was also felt on a local level. This is true, in particular, for the Greek minority in Istanbul for whom the years 1948–55 constituted a period of unseen prosperity and degree of autonomy regarding the functioning of communal institutions.17 At the same time, a strong undercurrent of mutual suspicion continued to exist. School textbooks and numerous publications for public consumption nurtured this in both countries, representing the Greek and Turkish ‘other’ respectively in a negative cast. In Greece, the history of the Greek lands under Ottoman control was depicted as one of decline and tyranny. The Ottomans were held responsible for social and economic backwardness, while the rare glimpses of prosperity and excellence were ascribed to the ingenuity of the Greeks. Ottoman rule was depicted as occupation of a former free Greek people upheld by means of suppression and cruelty. The fact that Greek identity in the Ottoman Empire was defined by confessional terms and the social and political functions of the Greeks based on the institution of millet-i Rum (the orthodox community) headed by the Patriarch was largely ignored.18

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The representation by Turkish historiography of Greece and Greeks denied any link between Ancient Greece and present-day Greeks, a perception that constitutes the backbone of Greece’s national narrative. While the present days Greeks were represented as Slavs, the Ancients from the time of Homer to the pre-Socratic philosophers were depicted as the true ancestors of the Turks under the term Ionians. In a similar vein, the Byzantine period was hardly mentioned.19 Regarding relations between the Ottoman Empire and Greeks, the Ottoman government was extolled for having protected the latter and for having provided a framework favourable for their welfare and prosperity, making them, in the words of Hercules Millas, a ‘happy millet’. Ottoman rule was also claimed to have shielded the Orthodox Greeks from Catholic and Papal encroachment. The emergence of the Greek nation state in 1830, in turn, was depicted as the result of foreign machinations against the Ottoman Empire: the Greeks would never have achieved independence had it not been for great power collusion, British support and European Philhellenism. As a consequence, the Greeks were presented as ungrateful and the real cause of the minority troubles which haunted the Ottoman Balkans during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, leading to the loss of almost all the Ottoman possessions in Europe by the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913. Faithful to this explanation, Albanians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs and Christian Arabs were only rarely mentioned. Claims were also made that the Greeks lived better than Muslims and even at the expense of the latter.20 Little distinction was made between the aims of the Greek nation state and those of the orthodox millet. The Patriarch was depicted as a main instigator of the Greek revolt in 1821 and it was claimed that the Patriarchate nurtured the same ambitions of expanding the Greek nation state at the expense of the Ottoman Empire to resurrect Byzantium – the Megali Idea – as did the government in Athens. In a similar way, the millet-i Rum was depicted as Greeks being loyal to the Greek nation state rather than a minority in its own right owing its allegiances to the Ottoman state.21 The Megali Idea also served as a most significant factor explaining the emergence of the Turkish nation state: rather than resulting from secession from the Ottoman

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Empire, the Republic was formed after the Turkish-speaking population of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace successfully resisted incorporation into Greece or reduction to colonial status.22 This, in turn, made it an easily convincing claim in the Republic of Turkey that the Megali Idea never was far from the mind of Athens, the Patriarchate or other Greeks in ‘un-redeemed’ territories like Cyprus.

Turkey’s involvement in the Cyprus issue 1950–1955 From 1950, onwards Cyprus became a permanent Greek national interest. A poll among Greek Cypriots organized by the Orthodox Church and held from 15 to 22 January declared that 96 per cent were in favour of enosis, union with Greece.23 On 23 January 1950, a Republican People’s Party delegate, Cevdet Kerim Incedayi, raised the Cyprus issue in the Turkish parliament, the Grand National Assembly. He accused the government of ‘passivity’ regarding the fate of the Turkish Cypriots and warned that Cyprus might well come under Greek sovereignty one day. Defending the line of the government, Minister of Foreign Affairs Necmeddin Sadak stated that ‘there is no such thing as a “Cyprus question” [...] for that island is under the sovereignty and the administration of Great Britain. [...] [N]o agitation originating in Cyprus, of whatever kind it may be, can change the situation.’24 Initially, this ‘line of passivity’ also represented the policy of Menderes’ cabinet. The government declared itself to be confident that British rule in Cyprus would continue and supported the Britishguaranteed status quo. As an instance of this policy, Minister of Foreign Affairs Fuad Köprülü made no it secret to Greek journalists that, for the Turkish government, there existed no Cyprus problem between Turkey and Greece.25 At the same time, the Greek Army engaged itself more actively in Cyprus. In 1951, Alexandros Papagos, the commander-in-chief of the Greek Armed Forces, began to arm the Greek Cypriots and transferred George Grivas to the island while promoting him to the rank of general at the same time.26 Grivas had build up a reputation for notorious brutality as leader of the Royalist ‘Chi’-squads during Hitler’s occupation of Greece, fighting both the Germans and the Left.27

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In contrast to official Turkish reactions, which were few and discreet, public attention to the Cyprus problem in Turkey was rising. The government now began to outline its stand in order to address a situation, should the question of the sovereignty of Cyprus become an issue. Such views were aired through the semi-official newspaper Zafer, among other channels, which stated that: ‘If there is any question of the changing of the status quo of Cyprus and transferring the island to any other country, the first country that comes to mind is Turkey which has incontestable geographic and ethnic rights.’ At the same time, the statement emphasized that: Turkey wishes to cooperate with Greece in performing duties within the framework of the Mediterranean defence system, we do not desire to make an issue of the matter of Cyprus and hope that Greece will show the same spirit of understanding.28 The Turkish government obviously prioritized Turkish–Greek relations over Turkish nationalist claims. On the other hand, the government could hardly afford to ignore the claims of Turkish nationalism. In 1953, when it became known that the Greek government had officially decided to support the Greek Cypriots’ demands for union with Greece, Ankara warned Athens that bringing the Cyprus issue to the UN would jeopardize cordial Greek–Turkish relations. At the same time, the Turkish Cypriot community in Cyprus appealed to Ankara for support, complaining that the efforts of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Greek Cypriots to turn Cyprus into a Greek island were provocations and would mean enslavement of the Turkish Cypriots. However, the Turkish government had no firm strategy in regard to the Cyprus issue and had never ordered any detailed plans to be worked out on the question. It was in this situation, and against the background of the fact that on 16 August 1954 Greece brought the Cyprus issue to the UN General Assembly, that Menderes appointed the diplomat Fatin Rüştü Zorlu Minister of State to his cabinet and commissioned him to look at the Cyprus problem.29 According to a later account by Ismail Tansu,

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one of the founding members of the armed branch of the Turkish Cypriot movement, TMT (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilati), Zorlu took a much stronger interest in Cyprus than did Köprülü. In contrast to Köprülü’s lukewarm support of Turkey’s claims on Cyprus, Zorlu’s last words before he was hanged in 1961 should have been, according to the TMT myth: ‘Even if I achieved nothing for my country, at least I solved the Cyprus problem.’30 Zorlu, who was informed about the Greek army’s material support of the Greek Cypriots,31 began to devise a more active Turkish policy: he immediately established a Cyprus Commission in the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs whose task it was to formulate an official opinion on the issue and devise the tactics and strategies to be adopted by the government.32 On the eve of the tripartite conference regarding Cyprus to be held in London in August and September 1955 among Britain, Greece and Turkey, he should have warned against organizing public demonstrations, according to one account, because the British and Greek arguments were still to be learned. However, at this juncture the newspaper Hürriet and national activists were already vigorously engaged in the Cyprus issue and rallied under slogans like ‘Cyprus or death’, ‘We want war’ and ‘the green island must not turn red!’33

The creation of public opinion For some time, systematic efforts had been undertaken to acquaint Turkish public opinion with the Cyprus issue. The frontrunners in these efforts were students. But they also included people already familiarized with issues related to the issue of Dış Türkler. For this purpose, the Turkish National Student Federation organized the Turkish National Youth Committee and succeeded in catching the attention of the press. On 5 March 1954, the committee held a meeting on the subject of Turkey and Cyprus, which was followed on 21 April by a convention organized by the Student Federation. As a reaction to news that Cyprus would be given autonomy, the student federation issued a statement entitled: ‘It is our sacred duty to resist any action which will disturb the tranquillity of the island which is

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an inseparable part of our own country and a sacred legacy of our grandfathers.’34 About one week after Greece brought the Cyprus issue to the UN, on 22–25 August 1954, the Turkish Secretariat of the European Youth Campaign organized a seminar for young newspaper people in Istanbul. In an obvious attempt to benefit from this occasion, on 24 August the Turkish National Student Federation arranged a general meeting on the Cyprus issue directed at the many newspaper owners and editors present in the metropolis. The meeting turned out to be highly successful as it was attended by the great majority of the newspaper people who had come to Istanbul. It resulted in the election of a committee, named the ‘Cyprus Is Turkish Committee’. On 2 October 1954, it was renamed the ‘Cyprus Is Turkish Society’ (Kıbrıs Türktür Derneği).35 The purpose of this new institution was to ‘define actions and ideas related to the Cyprus issue’. Soon the society began to publish brochures in Turkish and English. Its professed aim was to ‘acquaint world public opinion with the fact that Cyprus is Turkish, to defend Turks’ rights and privileges with regard to Cyprus from every point of view and to condition Turkish public opinion.’36 Within the first week of its foundation, on 28 August 1954, according to the martial law commander who conducted an investigation into the Cyprus Is Turkish Society a year later, the founding members were received by Menderes. The prime minister should have admonished them ‘that the Turkish nation act with moderation in the Cyprus question’. At the same time, Menderes promised ‘Cyprus could never be Greek’ and assured the society that the government had taken all necessary measures to achieve this end. Thus, according to this account, the gist of Menderes’ message was that he wanted the government to stay indisputably in charge of the handling of the Cyprus issue at home and abroad. Menderes also seems to have been disinclined to support attempts to influence Turkish public opinion by other channels than those controlled by the government.37 However, the leadership of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society was also open to influence from persons with strong irredentist inclinations

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who had strong ties to the army. Such sentiments were not unlike whose of the pan-Turkist committees which had attracted many military men during the Second World War, but which had been muzzled by the government in the closing years of that conflict. One of leading members of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society, Hikmet Bil, was believed to have been connected to the CHP and to have belonged to a nationalist organization that the government dissolved in 1953.38 Bil was also a reporter for the newspaper Hürriet, which, as we have seen, had engaged itself in the Cyprus issue. According to the martial law commander mentioned above, the society was under the de facto domination of Kamil Önal. Önal was known to nurture a strong attachment to the province of Hatay. Thus, he had stated his desire to enter the Cyprus Is Turkish Society, declaring that ‘as a child of Hatay, a land that had been rejoined to its mother country’, he wanted to work for this cause.39 Hatay held a particularly strong emotional sway over Turkish nationalists.40 The incorporation of Hatay also served as a symbol of expanding Turkish control beyond the 1923 borders. In some respects, the case of Hatay resembled the Cyprus situation: both lands were inhabited by Dış Türkler; furthermore, both areas were under colonial control. Önal’s primary connections to the state were to the army. He had been working as an informer for the National Security Police, Milli Amele Hizmet (MAH).41 In this capacity he was sent to Syria and Lebanon to report on activities undertaken by Kurds, Armenians and Communists, all of whom Ankara counted among its principal enemies.42 Önal was a driving force in setting up branches of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society in all the major cities in Anatolia. He also toured London, Paris and Rome to make the Society’s case known.43 In July 1955, Önal went to Cyprus and made personal contact with prominent members of Turkish Cypriot Society, among others, the Mufti, Dana Effendi and the president of the Cyprus Is Turkish Party on the island, Fazil Küçük. It was around this time that, according to the martial law commander, the Cyprus Is Turkish Society began to instigate its anti-Greek campaign. On 13 August, Bil received a letter from Küçük who,

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among other things, stated that according to rumours circulating in Nicosia, the Greeks ‘were getting ready for a general massacre in the near future’. The letter, which the martial law commander presented in his report read: My request of you is that as soon as possible you inform all branches of this situation and that we get them to take action. It seems to me that meetings in the mother country [Turkey] would be very useful because these (Cyprus Greeks) will hold a general meeting August 26. Either on that day or after the conclusion of the Tripartite Conference [see above] they will want to attack us. As is known they are armed and we have nothing. Bil enclosed Küçük’s message in a circular which he directed to all branches of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society which said, among other things: ‘Please notify all organizations that our branches should choose whatever action they see fit, particularly with the view that London and Athens should be intimidated by the manly voice arising in the mother country.’44 On 19 August 1955 Önal swung into action, stating in an article on the front page of the Adana Demokrat newspaper that the Greeks in Cyprus had set fire to several Turkish cemeteries and that the Turks had retaliated by setting fire to Greek ones, something which made the Greeks quiet down. According to the martial law commander, Önal’s statements were ‘completely and absolutely contrary to fact’. Their sole purpose was to raise anti-Greek sentiments among the Turks.45 Önal and Bil were, indeed, attempting to raise anti-Greek sentiments among the Turks. In order to do so efficiently, they needed to frame the otherwise rather diverse groups labelled as ‘Greeks’ in a light that would make them all appear alike and dedicated to one common goal. To achieve this end, the mass media and authoritative personalities from the political world and public life played an important role. Significantly, therefore, since the beginning of July an increasing amount of newspaper and public attention was directed to the Cyprus question.46

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Framing the Greeks at home and abroad: a united enemy of the Turkish nation On 1 July 1955, the following statements could be read in Cumhuriyet: Athens and all those whose eyes are fixed on Cyprus say: ‘there are 400,000 Greeks in Cyprus; how are they going to live under a Turkish administration?’ Let us compare, let us take the Greeks who live in Turkey and the Turks who live in Greece after the War of Independence. Let us examine what has happened to them, and how their situation is. One is first of all struck by the fact that the Turks are getting subject to ever increasing repression and that they flee in ever increasing numbers. Conversely, those who live here are enjoying comfort and prosperity to such a degree that they would never think about fleeing. Some of them even sense themselves to be so free that they support the views of Athens vis-à-vis our national cause.47 More specifically, the Turkish Press would often demand that the Patriarchate condemn the actions of the Greek Cypriot nationalist paramilitary organization, EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kipriakou Agonos) and intervene against the Greek Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios. This happened under headlines such as the one that appeared in Yeni Sabah on 3 July 1955 ‘We keep asking ourselves: what does the Patriarchate think of the actions by the Church of Athens and the one of Cyprus?’48 The Patriarchate’s response emphasized the separation of religion and politics and stressed that the Greek and Cypriot churches were autocephalous and that they were not under the control of the Patriarchate.49 In a speech on 24 August, Menderes referred to the rumours mentioned above which claimed that the Greeks were preparing a massacre against the Turks in Cyprus.50 The speech was given at Restaurant Liman in Istanbul, and Menderes concluded, among other things, that the Greek front now stood united: it included the Greeks of Greece (Yunanlilar), the Greek government (Yunan Hükümeti),

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agents provocateurs (Tahrikçiler), Greeks of Cyprus (Kıbrıs Rumlari) the Greeks of Turkey (Rum vatandaşlarimiz) and the Churches of Greece and of Cyprus as well as the Patriarchate. In this way, Menderes depicted the heterogeneous group called Greeks as one tightly knit unit dedicated to achieve their ends on the Cyprus issue.51 Menderes’ speech played a significant role in framing the Greeks of Turkey as the internal enemy and was lauded by the CHP. Inönü’s son-in-law, Metin Toker declared that ‘the whole of Turkey’ received Menderes’ speech well, not least – still according to Toker – because the public had long had enough of the government’s passive attitude to the Cyprus issue. The opposition immediately declared itself an ally of the government on this issue.52 In this way Toker also made clear that the CHP wanted a more activist policy in the Cyprus issue than the government had followed. At about the same time Rüstü Aksal, a former minister of finance in the previous CHP administration complained to a representative of the US Embassy US that Menderes’ government had been too lame on the Cyprus issue. He believed that Menderes should have begun a campaign to convince world opinion that Turkey had legitimate interests in Cyprus several years earlier; in fact, Menderes had only begun making that point in the preceding year and a half.53 On 28 August Menderes once more spoke about the Cyprus problem, stating among other things that his government would defend the preservation of the status quo (of Cyprus) as our minimum condition. [...] [S]hould a change in its status come into consideration, that change must be based not on ethnic grounds but on more important and permanent principles and realities, and these can only render it to Turkey.54 These principles and realities, according to Menderes, were that Cyprus was an extension of the Turkish mainland, and the island constituted a main pillar of Turkey’s security. In an ill-disguised warning to the Greek government he said: When we emerged from the unprecedented disasters of the First World War completely powerless, disarmed and even with our

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national unity lost, we were faced with events which endangered our very independence and our existence as a nation; all this we want to forget and disregard by conforming to the realistic viewpoint set forth by Atatürk and Venizelos. [These viewpoints were formalized by the so-called Ankara Agreement of 1930 which paved the way for a substantial rapprochement between Greece and Turkey]. But the scene today, inevitably, brings back to our minds the boundless sacrifices we have had to make in order to safeguard our national existence and the very dangerous and sorrowful years which we had to live through.55 By the latter part of this statement, Menderes was invoking the memory of the War of Independence while foreign observers noted that the dispute over Cyprus on a whole revived memories of the past, and these memories recalled that the local Greek community in Turkey sided with the Greek cause in the period of 1919–22.56 In the Turkish national narrative, the Greek efforts to conquer Anatolia symbolized a mortal threat to the very existence of the infant nation and the analogy between the Greek campaign in 1919–22 and enosis must be seen as an attempt to invoke strong sentiments in order to mobilize public opinion to support Turkish claims on Cyprus. Such rhetoric must have struck a cord, in particular, among military men, to whom the War of Independence was extremely significant. According to Mehmet Ali Birand, this war is: The key to a sound understanding of the officer’s attitude [...]. It stands as the period when he identified himself with Atatürk and gradually adopted the idea of saving the homeland [...]. The War of Independence is taught so systematically and with such enthusiasm that the cadet internalizes it with an emotional involvement unknown to his peers.57 On 6 September, news broke that Atatürk’s birthplace and the Turkish Consulate in Salonika had been bombed. Later the tribunal at Yassiada appointed by the military regime of 1960–61 claimed that the episode was engineered by two Turkish students, Hasan Ucar and Oktay Engin, responsible for the security of the Consulate, who had

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thrown a bomb into the Atatürk Museum.58 However, the Cyprus Is Turkish Society used the opportunity to hold the Greeks responsible for vandalizing Atatürk’s memory. Such claims, in turn, according to the martial law commander, were crucial in the triggering of riots in Istanbul and Izmir directed against the Greek minority resident in these towns. On the eve of the riots, Önal made the following statement to the press: ‘We do not see harm any more in proclaiming openly that we shall make those who laid hands on our scared Ata (Atatürk) pay it very dearly’. While his message was reproduced by the evening papers, Önal organized a massive distribution of placards to the crowds gathering in demonstrations throughout Istanbul. At the same time, the presidency of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society issued a communiqué directed to ‘Turkish public opinion and the Greek people’. In a threatening and very emotional tone, it stated among other things, that Atatürk’s house in Salonika ‘in this historic city in Western Thrace that we consider essentially as Turkish soil [...] occupies a privileged place in the heart of every Turk as well as in Turkey’s struggle for liberty.’ The communiqué warned the Greek government and those who supported it that unless they changed their tune they ‘will face our hate and power in a manner that will surpass the years of 1922’.59 Here the Cyprus Is Turkish Society was alluding to the historic events of 1922. By selecting such leitmotifs to represent the ‘real’ forces behind the Greek efforts to achieve enosis, the Cyprus Is Turkish Society obviously aimed to arouse Turkish public opinion against the Greeks and galvanize support behind the Turkish claims on Cyprus. Thus the passage of the communiqué regarding 1922 read: Beloved citizens, we are addressing you. It looks like the Greek imperialists who cowardly came to invade our country in its weakest moment, burned our houses, killed our mothers, brothers and wives in a barbaric way and killed our fathers in the battlefield, have forgotten that they were driven to the sea in 1922 and are directing today their attacks against Atatürk’s house, our country’s sacred place of worship. Tighten your ranks.

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Pay utmost attention to those among you who do not belong to us and renew your national pledge. Cyprus is Turkish and Turkish it will remain. Whoever thinks the contrary or tries to break his pledge will pay very dearly for this action.60 Following demonstrations held at Taksim Square in the late afternoon, certain groups started to stone windows and shops belonging to members of the non-Muslim minorities, and in a short while, groups armed with tools attacked churches, shops and houses in neighbourhoods that were known as non-Muslim business and residential areas such Beyoğlu Kurtuluş, Şişli and Niştantaşı. Similar acts of violence took place in more remote districts like Eminönü, Fatih, Eyüb, Barıköy, Yeşilköy Ortaköy, Arnavutköy and Bebek. Also areas on the Asian shore were hit, such as Kadiköy, and in the Sea of Marmara, such as the Princess Islands. It is estimated that around 100,000 people took part in the violence. Organized units 20 to 30 men strong carried out the assaults. The group leaders would single out objects to be destroyed and some of them had lists including the names and addresses of non-Muslims. (Some of these lists were reported to have been prepared at the time of the Second World War). The tools necessary for destruction were kept ready at central points in the city or at bus stops and brought out to where they were needed by a prearranged network of transportation. The pattern of destruction was the same all around and other recurrent features were that the police tended to remain passive while the fire brigades were so late at the scene that they claimed not to have the adequate equipment to fight the fire.61 According to official Turkish sources, 4,214 houses, 1,004 workplaces, 73 churches, one synagogue, two monasteries, 26 schools and 5,317 other establishments were attacked. According to American sources, 59 per cent of the attacked workplaces and 80 per cent of the damaged houses belonged to Greek-Orthodox people. Regarding the Armenians, the percentages were 17 and 4 per cent and in the case of Jews, they were 12 and 3 per cent. Women were raped and, according to the Turkish press, 11 to 15 persons were killed.62 Dilek Güven explains the relatively low number of fatalities by the fact that the

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hooligans were instructed to avoid bloodshed and theft, concluding that riots of 6–7 September were planned by the DP government. This happened, he goes on, with the cooperation of the secret service and the Democratic Party’s local administrations, state-guided organizations such as student unions and youth associations, syndicates and the Cyprus Is Turkish Society.63

Washing my hands: the DP government versus the armed forces In the midst of condemnation from home and abroad, Menderes attempted to put the blame on the police and the armed forces. Within a few days of the riots, the police chiefs in Istanbul and Izmir and three senior army officers in Istanbul were relieved of their command. Also Minister of the Interior Namık Gedik was forced to resign. Government sources told the US Embassy that the army commander in Istanbul twice had refused to follow the instruction of the governor to take action against the mobs.64 The US Embassy had noted, too, that the police and army were not effective until around midnight and, in Istanbul, ‘real order’ did not begin to return until late afternoon on 7 September. This could to some extent be explained by the fact that ‘the army commanders feared that their careers would be ruined by public reaction if some fatalities occurred while their units were quelling the mobs’. At the same time, the US Embassy excused the lack of action by the Turkish security organizations by the fact that they had only a limited staff and did not consider the Cyprus Is Turkish Society’s ‘patriotic’ activities justified being carefully watched.65 Menderes’ accusations against the army and the indictment of the members of the Cyprus is Turkish Society caused anger in military circles. In particular, the case raised against Önal implicated the security forces. The chief of staff of the Martial Law Commandant aired his strong indignation to a senior member of the American Consulate General in Istanbul. He characterized the indictment and proceedings ‘an outrage [...] and an attempt by the Prime Minister to relieve himself of the guilt, which many believed he feels because of the disorder.’66

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Assessing these allegations, the US Embassy informed the State Department that it knew that the Cyprus Is Turkish Society had some funds and was well connected. It knew that Bil had an hour’s interview with Menderes on 5 September and that, according to information from the Apostolic Delegation in Istanbul, the prime minister had given some financial aid to Bil. However, the US Embassy refused to believe that Menderes had encouraged the riots. Accordingly, the State Department was informed that the Embassy ‘does not agree with some people who believe that this riot could have occurred only with the consent and knowledge of the Government’. The Embassy had learned from police sources that the forces of law enforcement were certain that the Cyprus Is Turkish Society ‘definitely organized the original demonstrations in Istanbul and Izmir’. This, in turn, according to the Embassy, made people wonder why one of the Turkish security organizations did not discover the preparations.67 Thus, the US Embassy was inclined to regard the activism of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society and the inaction on the part of police and armed forces as the key to understand why the excesses of 6 and 7 September could take place. Consequently, the Americans accepted the view of the martial court tribunal, which saw the Cyprus Is Turkish Society, and therefore Pan-Turkism, as the driving force in the processes that led to the September riots. However, there were also strong voices that held the government responsible. On 12 and 13 September 1955, the Grand National Assembly debated the riots. Atatürk’s successor, former president of the republic and leader of the opposition party CHP, Inönü directed a strong diatribe against the government.68 Menderes defended himself by claiming that ‘the Turkish nation emerges as the major victim of the recent unfortunate disturbances in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir’. Deputy Prime Minister Köprülü characterized the riots as ‘Turkey’s Pearl Harbor’.69 Within the following year, Köprülü decided to resign, allegedly in a protest against the rising dictatorial tendencies of Menderes’ mode of government. However, resentment against government responsibility for the riots is also said to have played a role in Köprülü’s decision.70

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As a result of the debate, the Grand National Assembly endorsed a number of emergency measures including the application of martial law and the establishment of five military courts (three in Istanbul, one in Ankara and one in Izmir). At the same time, seemingly in order to absolve the government, nationalists and the armed forces from responsibility, attempts were made to put the blame on an alleged Communist conspiracy, which was said to have masterminded the riots. In this vein, an editorial in the Istanbul opposition newspaper Dunya read: Citizens of Turkey, a trap has been set for you: operating behind the facade of nationalism, those whose sole aim is to cut the Turkish nation apart from its friends and allies have tried to provoke and incite you with various rumours.71 The Istanbul military court which was established to investigate the September riots even tried to make subversion instigated by ‘international Communism’ the leitmotif in the history of the Cyprus question: ‘the Communists who particularly after the liquidation of the Greek Communist movement in Macedonia began to come to the island at first united around the slogan “Autonomy for Cyprus”.’ Later, according to the same account, the Greek Communists began to defend the enosis movement ‘acting without doubt on a directive from the Comminform [...] to break up Turkish–Greek friendship and also to upset the world peace front.’72 According to the same account, the Communist Party of Cyprus (AKEL) planned to draw the Orthodox Church ‘completely under its influence’ and to direct the Cyprus question, ‘according to its own views. [...] The [Cyprus] problem then began to develop on a basis of Communists’ cooperation with the church.’ According to this account, the main idea behind these efforts was that in the event that Cyprus was transferred from a ‘strong England’ to a ‘weak Greece’, the Soviet Union would be in a position to intervene and infiltrate the island. In this case, the Communists might even ask for Soviet protection of Cyprus. It was also claimed that the Turkish poet and well-known Communist Nazim Hikmet was behind efforts to spread Communist

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propaganda among Turks. The military court denounced him a ‘traitor to our country and faithful servant of the Cominform’.73 Later at the Yassiada court Köprülü, who was among the accused, claimed that ‘the official theory’ adopted by the government that the riots were a ‘Communist plot’ had been suggested by Allen Dulles, head of the CIA who was in Istanbul at the time of the riots.74 The Communist plot explanation can be seen as an attempt to exonerate nationalists as well as the government and the armed forces and as a way to find an explanation which would also fit the world-view of a Greek government that was still strongly influenced by the recently ended civil war between the national government and Communists. In spite of these efforts, the army continued to hold Menderes responsible for the riots. Clearly, this transpired after the military coup d’état on 27 May 1960. According to the testimony by Bil to the military court at Yassiada, Menderes was the patron of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society. Bil also claimed that the September riots were the result of tactics planned by Zorlu, Menderes and himself. Zorlu’s role was to prevent the British from granting self-determination to Cyprus, while Menderes is supposed to have told Bil to be active in Turkey. Bil referred to a telegram which Zorlu cabled from London in which Zorlu is claimed to have asked Menderes to take action at home.75 At the Yassiada court, Menderes’ personal assistant Hayrettin Sümer stated that Secretary of State Mükerrem Sarol had said: ‘We told them to do it but not in this way. If you tell Turks to smash up property, they easily start killing.’ Sümer also stated that Menderes’ private secretary had said: ‘They have committed the crime and now they are trying to wash their hands of it.’76 However, we should note that these statements were given to a court which was established by the military regime and at a time when the armed forces were at pains to justify their coup d’état against the elected government vis-à-vis a public among whom it was feared that Menderes was still widely popular. Although the Yassiada trial gave the army the last word in its feud with Menderes, and although the government and armed forces never agreed as to who was responsible for the September riots, it is reasonable to conclude that Menderes’ engagement went deeper than the

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hearings of 1956–57 that his own government had established. It is beyond a doubt that Menderes actively strived to frame the Greeks of Turkey as the internal enemy, something that contributed to mobilizing the mobs against local Greeks, that he had been in personal contact with the Cyprus Is Turkish Society, which played a leading role in organizing and executing the campaign against the Greeks of Turkey and that the security forces took a long time to react. Finally, it remains a fact that his attempts to blame the Army for the anti-Greek riots estranged Menderes from the armed forces. It was under such conditions of bitter and revengeful relations between Menderes and the armed forces and under mounting pressure from public opinion that the main stage of the Cyprus issue now moved to Cyprus proper.

Ankara actively engages in Cyprus In Cyprus, the Greek Cypriots had intensified their armed struggle, with the EOKA movement under the leadership of General Grivas playing a leading role. EOKA was supported by Athens and targeted the British but from June 1955 onwards, it also began to hit Turkish Cypriots. At the same time, the British began to consider various plans to involve the local population in the administration of the island. In 1957, Menderes decided to change Turkey’s official policy from supporting the status quo or claiming the transfer of Cyprus to Turkey to demand partition of that island, taksim. It was an election year and the DP was under strong pressure from the CHP to adopt an activist policy on the Cyprus issue in the same manner as Atatürk had acted vis-à-vis Hatay some 20 years before. Speaking before a party congress at Edirne on 6 May, Secretary General of the CHP Kasim Gülek declared: ‘Let us hope that this Democratic Party administration will solve the Cyprus problem as the R.P.P. [CHP] administration solved the Hatay problem.’77 The government now began considering influencing events in Cyprus by clandestine channels, too, by creating a paramilitary organization that would become the armed branch of the Turkish Cypriot movement, TMT. We know that Zorlu was keener than was Menderes

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that Turkey should actively support the Turkish Cypriots by other means than political ones. The Turkish armed forces supported the creation of the TMT. On 15 November 1957 Rauf Denktaş, Burhan Nalbantoğlu and Mustapha Kemal Tanrısevdi agreed that something should be done to arm the Turkish-Cypriots. Apart from Denktaş, they were Turkish officers. Denktaş was a leading Turkish Cypriot who was in favour of taking up arms. Tanrısevdi was a Turkish citizen and had been working in the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 1956 when he was transferred to Cyprus to the Turkish Consulate. In a later statement stemming from his memoirs published on 26 May 1997 in the Turkish Cypriot newspaper Ortam, it transpired that Turkish nationalism was an important motive for Tanrısevdi’s decision to engage himself in the struggle for Cyprus: ‘I am an admirer of Atatürk and I have used the model which he followed in his struggle for liberation.’78 At the end of December 1957, Küçük and Denktaş visited Ankara. They complained about the attacks by EOKA against the TurkishCypriot society, among other things. This transpires from an account by Ismail Tansu, a retired colonel of the Special Warfare Department, ÖHD (Özel Harp Dairesi), who gave two long interviews to Kıbrıs Mektubu in July 1996, the organ of the Turkish Cypriot Cultural League, and to Halkin Sesi in August the same year. According to this source, Küçük and Denktaş asked Ankara for arms to be distributed among the right persons on the island. Zorlu, who was obviously moved by their grievances, warned them that the issue was a delicate one, but he promised to look further into it. On one of the last days of December, still according to Tansu, Daniş Karabelen, then in charge of ÖHD, was told by the general staff of the Turkish Armed Forces that the government wanted to learn if the Turkish Armed Forces were able to establish an organization in Cyprus like EOKA.79 Soon after ÖHD was put in charge of an organization which immediately began to prepare a plan for the reconquest of Cyprus; it was codenamed Kıbrıs Istirdat Plani (KIP).80 However, the Turkish government needed some time before it finally decided, in June 1958, to actively support the TMT because

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Menderes, who wanted a diplomatic solution, dragged his feet before Zorlu managed to push him to accept the foundation of TMT. Zorlu was an ardent supporter of the creation of the TMT and later he became the honorary leader of the organization. He wanted it to be a counter-force against EOKA to protect the Turkish Cypriots against its assaults. Zorlu also believed that TMT could be used in the diplomatic game as a means to put ‘real’ force behind demands during negotiations.81 The Turkish state now sent officers and special forces veterans, who arrived secretly on the island and presented themselves as bankers, teachers and businessmen and trained Turkish Cypriots in the tactics of unconventional warfare. The government also supported TMT logistically and militarily. General Karabelen was leading the irregular Turkish Cypriot attacks on Greek Cypriot properties while the initial targets of TMT also included Turkish Cypriots who worked in panCypriot or Greek Cypriot organizations, in an attempt to improve the conditions for taksim.82 According to Tansu, the nexus between the DP government and TMT was perceived to be so strong that the latter was nicknamed ‘Menderes’ Gestapo’ and immediately after the coup d’état of 27 May 1960, TMT was looked upon with great suspicion because the new regime believed that Karabelen and his subordinates belonged to the Democratic Party.83 Thus the decision by the DP government to adopt a more activist policy seems to have been made under the pressure from a mounting public opinion and a vociferous CHP demanding that Turkey follow Atatürk’s example from the Hatay issue. Regarding the role of the government in the creation of the TMT, it was Zorlu who took the lead. But we should also bear in mind the possibility that the government saw the creation of TMT as a way to appease the armed forces by giving them an opportunity to play a leading in role in achieving a solution to the Cyprus issue that would equal Atatürk’s triumph in Hatay and to accommodate those who held pan-Turkish ambitions. However, Cold War tensions and Menderes’ desire to increase Turkey’s importance for the West moved his priorities from Cyprus to the Middle East.

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CHAPTER 7 TUR KEY AND THE ATTEMPTS TO TIE THE MIDDLE EAST TO THE WEST

Relations between Turkey and the countries in the Middle East were conditioned by several factors. The Turkish national narrative framed Arab nationalism in negative terms, claiming, among other things, that the Arabs had stabbed the Ottoman Empire in the back when the Sheriff of Mecca, Hussein, leader of the Arab Revolt in 1916, joined forces with the British. Arab nationalism, for its part, in particular the Syrian version and the Lebanese one, depicted the Turks (Ottomans) as oppressors and savages who left no other legacy on the Arab civilization than destruction.1 In addition, Turkish Syrian relations, as already mentioned, were strained by the Hatay issue while, during the war years, on a number of occasions as demonstrated above, Turkish politicians and military men expressed a distinct interest in increasing Turkey’s sphere of control to include Syria and northern Iraq. At the same time, the inter-war period saw Turkey concluding formal alliances with Iraq and Iran in the Middle East and with Afghanistan in Central Asia, finalized in the Saadabad Pact signed in 1937.2 In the post-war era, Turkey voted against the partition of Palestine in the November 1947 UN referendum. However, according to Israeli

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diplomatic reports, Turkey paid only lip service to the requirements of Muslim solidarity and, following Israel’s victory in the 1948 War against a number of Arab states, there were manifestations of disdain for the Arabs and glee over their downfall while the military might of Israel evoked admiration.3 In March 1949, after the Western powers recognized Israel, Ankara followed suit.4 It was about the same time that Britain’s position in Egypt came under increasing pressure. British–Egyptian negotiations regarding the Suez base had broken down when Britain refused to compromise on her demands to keep ground troops in Egypt during peacetime. The USA supported the British position but was concerned that this stance, combined with US support for Israel, undermined American prestige in the Arab countries.5 On 29 December 1950, McGhee proposed the creation of some sort of joint US–British military command structure in the Middle East.6 In this way the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs was also proposing that the USA take over more military responsibility in the Middle East.7 This step was soon followed by attempts to formalize Turkey’s pro-Western stance in relation to the Middle East, something that transpired in the planned Middle East Command that envisioned the inclusion of the Arab countries under Western leadership. On 8 June 1951, Britain suggested that Greece and Turkey be included in that organization.8 However, the combination of rising Egyptian nationalism and British and American lack of understanding of such sentiments spelled the end of that idea, when Egyptian Prime Minister Mustapha Nahas told the Egyptian parliament on 15 October 1951 that the Middle East Command was unacceptable to Cairo. In spite of such opposition, the British re-launched the idea of a Middle East Command on 22 January 1952, this time in the shape of the Middle East Defence Organization (MEDO). MEDO was intended to serve as a liaison and planning organization between the countries in the Middle East and the West, and would have its headquarters in Cyprus.9 By the autumn of 1952, MEDO, too, was dealt a fatal blow when the Syrian, Iraqi and Lebanese governments rejected the proposal.10

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Menderes upgrades Turkey’s role in the Middle East On 26 and 27 May 1953, the US secretary of state met the Turkish prime minister, during John Foster Dulles’ tour of a dozen capitals in the Middle East. This gave Menderes an opportunity to elaborate on Turkey’s stance regarding defence and security in the Middle East, declaring that the primary object of such schemes should be to thwart the ‘Communist menace to the free world’. Menderes depicted Turkey’s position to the Middle East as a ‘bridge between the West and the underdeveloped countries of the Near East’. In spite of this, Turkey had decided, Menderes went on, to abandon a MEDO that included the Arab states. What was needed in its place was a new concept based on Turkey, which should constitute the backbone of the defence of the Middle East: ‘Turkey will continue to exert every effort to accomplish an organization of countries in the area [the Middle East], including eventually Pakistan.’ In other words, what Menderes suggested as an alternative to MEDO was to upgrade Turkey’s regional role, possibly, within the framework of an enlarged ‘Northern tier’. In the same vein and as a token of Turkey’s ‘unshakably solidarity with the West’, Menderes also made clear that Turkey supported Britain’s position in that area in general and in strategically important Egypt in particular. Britain’s Suez Base was internationally relevant, and of interest to Turkey’s security and to NATO’s strategy. For that reason Menderes expressed the conviction that Britain did not only act out of self-interest, but as ‘a guarding of an outpost of one the key positions of the free world’.11 Following Dulles’ July 1953 declaration that MEDO without Egyptian participation would be repulsive to the rest of the Arab world and that ‘so far as the State Department is concerned MEDO is dead’,12 Turkey began to focus on the ‘greater Northern tier’, namely the Balkans and Central Asia. Turkey concluded alliances with Greece and Yugoslavia in 1953–54 and a defence pact with Pakistan in 1954. In this way, Turkey alone of all countries in the world was a member of no less than three international defence pacts (NATO, the Balkan Pact and the one with Pakistan), a status that made

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Ankara a prime political and military nerve centre. This state of affairs did not go unnoticed in the Middle East and exercised strong attraction on several Arab states as well as on Israel.13 But it also unleashed conflict, as some Arab states feared the prospects of rising Turkish influence in the region. This was true, in particular, regarding Egypt, which did not only see Ankara as an agent of Western interests in the Middle East but also saw it as a rival for hegemony over the Arab countries. Such suspicions were increased during 1954 when Britain once more launched the idea of some sort of Middle East defence organization, this time in the shape of the so-called Baghdad Pact. The idea was to ally Britain with Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and the Arab countries in the Middle East. Washington supported such plans. Affirming that British troop presence in Egypt and Britain’s mutual defence agreements with Iraq and Jordan still operated as the primary defence of Western interests in the Middle East, National Security Council paper 5428 dated July 1954 urged Iraq and other Arab states to join the Turco–Pakistani Pact in order to complete the ‘Northern tier’ line of defence against the Soviet Union.14

Menderes, Nasser and the Baghdad Pact That Turkey should have a leading role in the Middle East was only natural to Menderes. The Turkish prime minister saw such a status as a logic consequence of his activist foreign policy; what surprised Menderes, however, was that Egypt’s new leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser harboured similar ambitions.15 In this way, the potential appeal to the Arab countries of the Turco–Pakistani Pact set Turkey and Egypt on a course of confrontation. At the Arab foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo in December 1954, Nasser managed to push through two resolutions intended to counteract temptations among the Arab countries to join the Turco– Pakistani Pact. In the first place, it was agreed that no alliances should be concluded outside the fold of the Collective Arab Security Pact – a pet project of Nasser’s that he envisioned to be established within the framework of the Arab League; secondly, that cooperation with

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the West was possible, provided that a ‘just solution’ was found for Arab problems and provided the Arabs were allowed to build up their strength with arms.16 Following Nasser’s December move, Menderes set out on an official tour to visit three Arab countries that were potential candidates to join Turkey’s pact with Pakistan, namely Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. During his visit to Baghdad, on 13 January 1955, Menderes and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said issued a communiqué declaring the intention of Turkey and Iraq to sign a defence agreement. They also opened the door of membership to the US, Britain, to all Arab states as well as to Iran and Pakistan.17 In Syria, the Turkish–Iraqi announcement unleashed demonstrations even before the arrival of Menderes, culminating in a clash between demonstrators and police in Aleppo on 15 January that left 50 protesters and 32 law-enforcement officers injured.18 It is significant that it was Aleppo, neighbouring the former Syrian province of Alexandretta (Hatay) and an object of pan-Turkish ambitions, that was the centre of such protests. According to the Syrian Director General of Police and Security, those arrested were Communists and supporters of the Arab Socialist Resurrection Party, i.e. pan-Arabs, a group that the US regarded as a Communist front organization. However, protests were strong in the Syrian parliament too, and the opposition cast Turkey as ‘a friend of Israel’ and ‘the ambassador of the USA in the Middle East’. Turkey’s Ottoman past in the Middle East was also turned against the country: it was categorized as barbaric oppression and it was stated ‘if the Turks had left any mark on our civilization, it is what they destroyed when they departed as savages’. The opposition press welcomed Menderes in the same vein, with headlines like: ‘Usurpers of Alexandretta on official visit to Damascus. [...] What is the difference between Menderes and Koprulu and Sharett and Ben Gurion?’19 As a result of these reactions, Menders cut short his visit to Syria and stayed only one day before moving on to Lebanon.20 In an attempt to take advantage of the anti-Turkish momentum in Syria, on following day, 16 January, Nasser took a strong stance against the planned pact: it was the duty of all Arab nations to follow the same line of foreign policy; they should take upon themselves the

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responsibility of defending their region and form a defence organization within the framework of the Arab League. Nasser also declined a proposal from Menderes to meet on the grounds that Turkey had recognized Israel and because Ankara was acting as the puppet of the US and Britain.21 Instead the Egyptian president decided to host the leaders of the Arab countries from 22 January to 6 February, but Nasser’s attempts to galvanize a united front against the Turco–Iraqi Pact turned out to be abortive.22 It was in this atmosphere of growing attacks against the planned alliance that Turkey and Iraq signed the Baghdad Pact on 25 February. (Britain became a member on 4 April the same year, while Pakistan joined the pact on 1 July and Iran on 3 November 1955.) In this way, Ankara also raised its stakes in the fight against Nasser for the hearts and minds of Arab governments and public opinion and launched a campaign directed at the ‘undecided’ countries. Turkey was supported by Washington: although the USA refused to join the new alliance, it expressed strong support for the Baghdad Pact and tried to persuade other Arab countries to join, claiming among other things that the Soviet Union and not Israel was the main enemy of the Arab world.23 The prospect of Britain’s adherence to the pact, in particular, gave Nasser ample ammunition to denigrate the regime in Baghdad as a lackey of colonialism and a traitor to the Arab cause and to depict the Baghdad Pact as a tool of imperialism. From this platform, he managed to reach beyond the borders of Egypt and arouse Arab nationalist public opinion in the whole region. This, in turn, placed the governments of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria under rising pressure, turning these countries into battlegrounds between traditional pro-western governments and a more and more vociferous pan-Arab opposition.24 Israel’s attack on an Egyptian military installation in Gaza on 28 February gave further boost to popular protests against the Baghdad Pact: in the eyes of many Arabs, the Gaza attack belied US contentions that the Soviet Union and not Israel was the main enemy. It also gave Nasser the opportunity, on a silver platter, to claim that the assault was coordinated with the Baghdad Pact.

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It was in this vein that Cairo Radio and the Egyptian newspaper al-Gumhuriyya began to spread rumours that Turkey had massed two divisions of her army on the Syrian border to put pressure on the Syrian parliament and public, something Ankara rejected as lies.25 Nevertheless, only two days after Israel’s Gaza raid, on 2 March, Syria signed an accord with Egypt that denounced the Baghdad Pact and called for a joint military command and increased economic cooperation between the two countries.26

Battleground Syria In March, Turkey’s pro-government press began to direct a series of attacks on Syria. It was particularly Damascus’ pledge on 6 March to join Egypt and Saudi Arabia in creating their own alliance that brought Turkey’s wrath on Syria.27 The proposed treaty implied the strengthening of the collective Arab defence and a rejection of the Baghdad Pact. This of course was anathema to Ankara because it would thwart Menderes’ ambitions of making Turkey the pivotal point in the efforts of tying the Arab Middle East to the West. On 9 March an editorial in the organ of the Democratic Party, Zafer read among other things: The Syrian Army is not happy with the situation for the reason that such an alliance [with Egypt and Saudi Arabia] will place Syria under Egypt’s administration, and it will deprive her from friends and defence. This statement was a clear hint at Syria’s instability and at the interventions in internal Syria affairs by foreign states. Zafer was undoubtedly building up a political and moral case for Turkey’s involving itself in Syria. Thus, the newspaper claimed that machinations by foreign powers kept Damascus from choosing partnership with Turkey and her Western allies. It was Nasser, in particular, who was to blame; Egypt was the ‘real’ force behind Syria’s resistance to the Baghdad Pact and the Egyptian–Saudi–Syrian alliance was a mere attempt on the part of Cairo to bring Syria under Nasser’s control. In this way, Zafer attempted to convey the impression that Turkey’s ‘real’ concern was to protect Syria from Egypt, and that in order to make it possible for Syria to opt for the Baghdad Pact, Ankara would have to counter ‘Cairo’s intrigues’.28

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Zafer also played the card of anti-Communism: Egypt, too, was a mere puppet, because in the final analysis it was the Soviet leaders who pulled Nasser’s strings.29 On 18 March, the pro-government newspaper maintained that by supporting the Egyptian plan, Syria, and in particular, Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Khaled al-Azm were making concessions to the Soviet Union.30 On 20 March the same newspaper warned: Syria is following a very fateful course today under certain administrators who are enemies of the Turks and of those who plan for peace. Syria pretends to admire herself on the basis that she has concluded an agreement with Egypt. Therefore she has resorted to stupid actions. But in doing so it has never occurred to her that she will yet deplore such actions greatly. Ethics and character are primarily requirements in the relations of states as they are among men. Everybody loses faith in a State which changes its course of policy into one of hypocrisy, which denounces its own words with its own deeds and especially when it changes continuously its course according to the blowing wind. ... Since the talk about strengthening Turkish–Iraqi friendship began, Syria’s hostile attitude toward Turkey has not escaped anyone’s attention. Despite our warnings, the Syrian administrators have gradually increased their impertinences and attacks. We know quite well that Syrian public opinion does not join them in this.31 The harsh tone in the editorials must be regarded as a reflection of the Turkish government’s attitude. This is corroborated by the fact that according to the Syrian government, Turkey only a short while before had sent two aide memoires to the leadership in Damascus dated 7 and 13 March 1955. The Syrian officials declared the spirit and tone to be incompatible with the rules in use for correspondence between independent states and contrary to cordial relations, something that Damascus made clear to Ankara in an official way on 19 March.32 After Menderes had rejected the Syrian protests, on the following day, 20 March, the Syrian minister of foreign affairs called in the chiefs

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of the diplomatic missions to present the Syrian version of the ‘war of words’ with Turkey. The US ambassador, James S. Moose, was handed both texts – the Turkish aide memoires and the Syrian note. The Syrian minister then quoted Menderes as having rejected the Damascus’ protest because, according to the Turkish prime minister, Syria and Egypt had declared war against Turkey and Iraq. Syria’s ‘hostile intentions toward Turkey’ should, still according to Menderes, have manifested themselves in the fact that Damascus was ‘following [the] line of [Egypt’s] Salah Sal[e]m in [the] evil-intended attacks (which) began only after Prime Minister [Faris al-]Khuri was pushed to resign in [the] wake of the publication [of] the Turco–Iraqi declaration.’ According to the Syrian Minister, Menderes even threatened Syria’s sovereignty and was reported to have declared: Our patience is at the end. ... Your Foreign Minister spoke in one of his declarations about frontiers ... what frontiers? Alexandretta? If you want to talk of Alexandretta we will speak of Aleppo. Yes Aleppo, and if you want to break off relations and close the frontiers we are ready.33 Moose, who obviously believed the authenticity of the texts carrying Menderes message, concluded that while Menderes’ ‘outburst’ had discouraged Syrian supporters of the planned Syrian–Egyptian pact, the tone used by the Turkish prime minister was generally resented.34 The latter judgement seems to have been to the point because the Syrian–Turkish ‘war of words’ had repercussions region-wide: the Beirut press unanimously criticized Turkey for placing Syria under ‘heavy handed’ pressure. The strongest reactions charged Menderes of ‘Hitlerism’, of rendering ‘indirect service to Communism’ and of ‘open interference in Syrian affairs’. Turkey’s attitude was also criticized for ‘killing all hopes for adherence [of] other Arab States to the TurcoIraqi pact’. Finally, several reports even hinted at the possibility that the Soviet Union would interfere to help Syria maintain her freedom and independence vis-à-vis Turkey’s pressure.35 Clearly defying such opinion Ankara, according to US military sources, was about to move several Turkish tank battalions towards the

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south-east of Turkey in the direction of the Syrian border. However, the same sources denied press reports that it was done because of the Turco–Syrian crisis.36 The manoeuvres in question allegedly formed part of a NATO plan (SACEUR 1957 capabilities plan) and the Turkish Armed Forces should have requested permission from the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) to go ahead with the plans. The Turks were reported to be ‘impatient’ to proceed with the redeployment of forces, but NATO’s Headquarters (SHAPE) took a negative stance regarding the manoeuvres deeming them ‘not desirable’ because it was felt that the reason behind the proposal was ‘probably some other than implementation of [the] capabilities plan’. NATO’s top brass obviously feared that the manoeuvres were related to the Turco–Syrian crisis and concluded: ‘in view of the Turco–Syrian tension and recent press reports alleging movement of Turkish troops toward Syrian frontier SACEUR would appreciate Department’s and Ankara’s evaluation of Turkish intentions’.37 The commander undoubtedly wanted to avoid a situation in which Ankara would use NATO manoeuvres as a smokescreen for directing threats against Syria. Hence, it is also reasonable to conclude that if any planning was in the making that Turkey should put pressure on Syria, NATO was not a part of it. After all, SACEUR was responsible for the European theatre and would hardly like to see NATO-member Turkey actively involving itself in conflicts with countries outside NATO’s main sphere of interest.

Turkey under pressure in the ‘undecided countries’ The Turkish move also had a negative impact on the ‘undecided countries’: the Lebanese ambassador to Turkey warned Ankara that the Lebanese government was ‘greatly concerned’ regarding Turco– Syrian relations. Beirut was also convinced that the tension was ‘unwarranted’.38 Simultaneously, Lebanese Prime Minister Sami Solh informed the US ambassador that Lebanon was extremely concerned over the Turco– Syrian tension and, in particular, over Turkey’s ‘heavy-handedness’. It caused general uneasiness in the Arab states and was against Turkey’s

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own interest. Regarding Egypt’s opposition to the Turco–Iraqi pact, Solh believed that it was based on fear that there existed a ‘secret agreement’ between Ankara and Baghdad to realize Iraqi ambitions for the creation of a Fertile Crescent Federation – that Baghdad was endeavouring to form a bloc of Arab countries under Iraq’s leadership, backed by Turkey and Britain.39 In other words, the Lebanese government reverted to the by now well-known palette of Arab concerns regarding the Turco–Syrian crisis, namely that Turkey’s undue pressure on Syria had unleashed fear in a wider circle of Arab countries that Ankara was planning to ‘re-colonize’ parts of the Arab world on behalf of Britain and under the disguise of the Baghdad Pact. In Jordan the repercussions of the Turco–Syrian crisis struck the same chord: local newspapers were full of reports that Turkey was concentrating troops along the Syrian border and that the whole affair was becoming an international issue: while Turkey was bullying Syria, the Soviet Union had begun to threaten Turkey. This, in turn, according to the US Embassy, had resulted in ‘a great flow’ in Jordan of petitions and telegrams of protest against Turkey, the USA and the West in general. Despite all denials, the public believed that Turkey was massing troops on the Syrian border and menacing Syria, something which, according to the US ambassador, was unfavourable to Turkey: it had called to the public mind ‘the Turk’s scornful attitude toward the Arabs and their penchant for throwing their weight around’. The reporting officer also warned that ‘if two Turkish brigades were sent to the Syrian border the timing was most unfortunate’. This was not least so, he went on, because the Jordanian government was ‘toying with the idea of joining the Turco–Iraqi Pact and is steering clear of the Egyptian– Syrian–Saudi agreement’.40 Quite unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union grabbed the opportunity to depict Ankara’s moves as part a larger master plan ‘made in Britain and the US’ to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East. On 31 March Pravda claimed that the ‘Turkish provocations’ were the result of concerted efforts of the USA and Britain aiming at overthrowing the Syrian government in order to force Syria to adhere to the Baghdad Pact.

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Pravda also attempted to re-invoke fear of Baghdad’s ‘Greater Iraq’ ambitions and Turkish irredentism, stating among other things that Nuri al-Said and Menderes were plotting to dismember Syria, Turkey taking the Aleppo district and Iraq the remainder of that country.41 Pravda’s campaign obviously reflected the attitude of the Kremlin. In fact, on 23 March, the Soviet foreign minister is reported to have informed the Syrian envoy to Moscow that the Soviet Union supported Syria and was willing to extend to it aid in any form whatsoever for the purpose of safeguarding Syria’s independence and sovereignty.42 On 31 March the Soviet Minister in Damascus repeated the message to the Syrian premier. The note also made headlines in the Arab press, among others on Cairo Radio, which claimed that ‘Turkey must remember that she too has a neighbour who is stronger that she is’.43 It was in this situation that Mr Hart from NEA recommended to inform the Lebanese government on ‘a very confidential basis’ that Washington had told the Turks that the US government thought that their approach to the Syrians was ‘unduly strong’.44 Thus voices were heard in Washington that the US should distance itself from Turkey’s aggressive attitude towards Syria. Such a stance would not only be reassuring for the Baghdad Pact prospects but would also accommodate Iraq. The Turkish move caused concern in Baghdad where officials were reported to be ‘considerably disturbed’ by the situation.45 The gist of the Iraqi message to Washington was that Turkey’s pressure on Syria was counter-productive: it would not promote the Baghdad Pact but only stiffen Damascus’ attitude vis-à-vis Ankara and force Syria into Nasser’s camp. After all, Turkey was seen a foreign power with no legitimate interests in the Arab world – a perception that was only strengthened by Ankara’s close alliance with the West, something which also made it easy to depict Menderes as the ‘gendarme of West’. For that reason, the US Ambassador to Iraq, Waldemar J. Gallman, advised Washington that Ankara should be told to curb its impatience and exercise restraint and let the Iraqi government attempt to influence Arab public opinion in both Iraq and other Arab states. Ankara should also bear in mind that Turkey’s record among the Arabs has ‘scarcely been conspicuous’ and by casting the controversy in terms of

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‘Turks versus Arabs’ it would force Iraq to side with the Arabs: ‘the shades of Djamal Pasha [the notoriously brutal CUP governor in Syria] remain long in the Arab minds and are easily stirred’.46 Thus, Gallman supported the Iraqi stance and advised Washington to inform Turkey to keep a low profile and let Iraq take the lead.

Moscow enters the game It was in this situation that on 16 April 1955 Moscow made it clear that the Soviet Union intended to play an active role in the Middle East and would counter the Baghdad Pact.47 Regarding the latter, Moscow singled out Turkey as a major adversary acting on behalf of Washington and London.48 Furthermore, Moscow depicted Turkey’s involvement in the Baghdad Pact as a direct threat to the Soviet Union: The Soviet Union cannot remain indifferent to the situation in the Near and Middle East, since the formation of these blocs and the establishment of foreign military bases in the countries of the Near and Middle East have a direct bearing on the security of the USSR [...] since the USSR is situated very close to these countries.49 Turkish media responded by blaming Nasser, claiming that the Egyptian leader had joined forces with the Communists. Through their alleged collusion with Communism, Egypt and Syria were accused of conspiring against Turkey. On 16 April the newsmagazine, Akis published a picture showing the Communist Turkish expatriate, Aslan Humbaraci, in company with Nasser and his Minister of National Guidance, Colonel Salah Salem. The subtitle read: The picture given above is one of the best evidences of arrangements made against us in Egypt. [...] The Communists have send Aslan Humbaraci to the Middle East in order to work against Turkey. In the Middle East he was received by the leaders of Egypt and Syria.50

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Thus, in its address to a Turkish public, Akis choose to put the blame for the rising regional and international tensions on Communism, in general, and Egypt’s and Syria’s collusion with these forces, in particular. In May, Moscow responded by claiming that the Soviet Union had apprehended, sentenced and executed three ‘Turkish spies’. All three men were said to have been recruited by officers in the Turkish intelligence Service with the purpose of maintaining radio communication.51 The Syrians on their part escalated their anti-Turkish moves too: officially endorsed maps were circulated in which Alexandretta (Hatay) was included as a part of the Syrian state. A text supporting the maps read: ‘The hardest blow directed by the French to Syria and its first nationalist regime, however, consisted of the conspiracy which led to the giving over to Turkey of the Syrian district (Sanjaq) of Alexandretta.’52

Nasser triumphant Israel’s border wars, which included armed raids into Jordan and Syria resulted, among other things, in rising Arab demands for arms. As the Western powers proved unwilling to accommodate such wishes, Syria, who unlike Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, was under no treaty obligations with Britain, turned to the Soviet bloc. In late 1954, the Soviet Union concluded a so-called ‘mini arms deal’ with Syria.53 According to a later account by Syrian Chief of Staff Shawkat Shuqayr, he had originally wanted to buy 11 Mark IV tanks from France but ended by concluding a deal with Czechoslovakia and chartered an Italian ship to deliver the tanks to Beirut.54 However, it was Nasser’s arms deal with Czechoslovakia dated 27 September 1955 that radically transformed the climate among the Arab states and did the final job of shifting the ground towards Nasser in the fight over the pact. The arms deal electrified the region and the response was unanimously positive: Nasser was applauded for his courage; his deal demonstrated to the Arab world that it did not have to be subservient to the West while it rendered anachronistic strategic arrangements such as the Baghdad Pact,55 and there was hardly

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a building in Syria that did not carry a picture of Nasser and major streets and squares around the country were named after the Egyptian leader.56 Egypt’s arms deal also made some of the Arab states desirous of obtaining Egyptian military assistance. It was in this atmosphere that the Egyptian–Saudi–Syrian Pact finally materialized: on 20 October by signing the Egyptian-Syrian bilateral defence agreement, Cairo and Damascus pledged to come to the assistance of one an other in event of armed attack. The agreement was substantially drafted by the Egyptians and set up several committees to coordinate military cooperation and created a joint military command headed by the Egyptian Abd al-Hakim Amr. On 27 October, Saudi Arabia and Egypt signed a similar agreement.57 In this situation, with Syria firmly in Nasser’s camp, Ankara directed its attention to the only Baghdad Pact prospects left, Jordan and Lebanon. In an attempt to bring pressure to bear on Jordan President Bayar, Foreign Minister Zorlu decided to visit Jordan from 2 to 8 November 1955. Similar steps were taken vis-à-vis Lebanon which Zorlu visited on his way home from Amman. During their visit the Turks used every possible argument to convince Amman of the advantages of joining the Pact, including the benefit of having Turkey as an ally against Israel, a prospect which Bayar stated in the following way: ‘In case some day our brotherly Jordanian army should be subjected to an unjustified attack, no one should be surprised if the Turkish army were found on its side.’58 In Lebanon, Zorlu attempted to secure the support of President Camille Chamoun.59 It has been suggested that Bayar and Zorlu managed to convince King Hussein of the advantages Jordan would derive from joining the Pact.60 However there was a gulf between what the King contemplated and what his people felt. According to the American consul general in Jerusalem, William E. Cole, the public reaction to Bayar’s visit was ‘one of unanimous hostility’: all educated and articulate Palestinians whose views were known to the Consulate General were opposed to the visit. There were some abortive demonstrations while shutdown strikes took place in the business community in Jerusalem,

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Nablus and Ramallah. This transpired clearly in spite of the attempts by the government to keep the lid on such sentiments by means of newspaper censorship. The reason for Arab hostility towards Turkey, according to one Palestinian, was that ‘the whole pattern of Turkish history is anti-Arab’. Cole concurred, pointing at the events during the Turco–Syrian crisis in March when the Jordanian press and populace denounced ‘Turkish “threats” and “menaces” against Syria’ as a proof of the ease with which anti-Turkish sentiments could be aroused in Jordan. Although bitter memories of the Ottoman past were recalled, the root of this hostility, according to Cole, was Turkish–Israeli relations and Turkey’s special relationship with the USA, which to the Arabs made Israel and Turkey America’s ‘two foster sisters’. The most immediate objection to the visit by the Turkish president, according to Cole, was the Turco–Iraqi Pact, as most Palestinians seemed convinced that the real object of Bayar and King Hussein’s meeting was Jordan’s adherence to the Pact.61 Cole felt that the immediate effect of the visit was a lowering of King Hussein’s prestige. He was held responsible for Bayar’s visit and the American consul general heard comments on Hussein such as ‘a stubborn boy’, ‘the last king of Jordan’ and ‘he’ll go the same way as his grandfather went’. The last comment referred to the assassination of King Abdullah by a Palestinian in 1951.62 Cole’s evaluation of the mood of the public was to the point in that during the following two months Jordan lived through one of the worst internal crises in its entire history. King Hussein’s attempts to make Jordan join the Baghdad Pact resulted in the downfall of two governments, the largest demonstrations that the country had ever seen, and in the volte-face of the king who, in a desperate attempt to save his throne on 1 March 1956, decided to dismiss Glubb Pasha, the British commander of the Arab Legion. These developments also spelled the end of any prospects of Jordan joining the Baghdad Pact, demonstrated the strength of pan-Arab opinion in the streets, and showed Nasser’s appeal to the masses in that country.63 Thus, at the turn of 1955–56, it was clear that any further attempt to lure other Arab states into the Baghdad Pact would be fruitless: Nasser’s strong appeal to the Arab masses had proved a tremendous

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obstacle deterring traditionally pro-Western governments like those in Jordan and Lebanon from such steps and leaving Iraq more and more isolated among the Arab states. This, in turn, only aided in pitting Turkey more bitterly against Egypt and vice versa. As an instance of this, Nasser demanded that Britain leave not only the Suez Canal but also Cyprus, something, which in May 1956 made Köprülü define the Egyptian leader as an enemy of Turkey.64 Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956 and the ensuing Suez-crisis in October and November of the same year not only sealed the enmity between Turkey and Egypt. It also made the Middle East a Cold War hotspot and Nasser a symbol of successful Arab resistance to colonialist designs on the region.

Domestic reactions to Menderes’ foreign policy Menderes’ foreign policy got the full backing of Said Nursi, who lauded the prime minister’s battle against Communism and endorsed his international alliances to this effect. Said Nursi’s attitudes towards the West had changed after the end of Second World War, and he regarded post-war America in friendly terms because he saw it working for religion in a serious manner.65 Because of this, and in the face of the anarchy he believed to rise from Communism and atheism, he blessed the government’s decision in 1951 to contribute to the American warfare in Korea with troops by sending one of his own students. Upon the signing of the Baghdad Pact in 1955, he wrote a letter of congratulation to Menderes and Bayar, applauding the agreement as a positive step towards peace in the area. Stating that he was ‘someone who had studied the question for fifty-five years’ and with a view to giving the government direction in its Middle East policy, he predicted that the pact would create a brotherhood of 400 million Muslims and 800 million Christians.66 In Ankara’s aligning with the Muslim world, Said Nursi obviously also saw a step toward re-establishing relations between Turkey and the Arab countries. In spite of Arab nationalism’s gaining momentum at that time, Said Nursi emphasized that Islamic unity of a non-political nature would be a source of strength for Turkey. After all, in Said

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Nursi’s view, the true nationality of Turks and Arabs was Islam and the Baghdad Pact would defuse the danger of radicalism.67 Initially the CHP supported Menderes’ Middle East policy too, something that Inönü declared in public a short while before Turkey signed the Baghdad Pact in the first half of 1955.68 However, in the shadow of the gathering crisis triggered by the conflict between Nasser and the West because of the Baghdad Pact and Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Channel, on 4 September 1956 a representative of the US Embassy discussed Turkey’s foreign policy with Rüstü Aksal, a former minister of finance in the previous CHP administration. The American described him as ‘moderately’ active in CHP circles. While Aksal supported the basic aims of the DP’s foreign policy, i.e. that Turkey should follow a pro-Western and anti-Soviet line, he disagreed with Menderes’ current handling of the country’s foreign affairs. The issue at point was the Baghdad Pact. Aksal believed that the Soviet Union probably never would have been a serious threat to Middle East security had it not been for the Pact: it had encouraged the Soviet Union to infiltrate the Middle East and it had aroused the anger of Egypt against the West. He dismissed any suggestion that Moscow had begun to infiltrate the Middle East long before the pact was first signed, and he was convinced that the Suez Crisis demonstrated the basic weakness of the Baghdad Pact. Aksal believed Menderes’ policy vis-à-vis the Middle East was too activist and that fighting Arab nationalism would only further Soviet aims in the region.69 Said Nursi’s view that Menderes’ Middle East policy was commendable because it would win the hearts of ‘400 million Muslims’ was attacked by Metim Toker in an article strongly critical of the DP’s foreign policy published in Akis on 9 February 1957 under the headline ‘A Policy with Which We Are Not in Agreement’. The line of attack was that the DP government was using faith as a criterion for making friendship among the nations by choosing its ‘brothers’ among those ‘who have common faith with us’. Toker, in particular, castigated Menderes for stating during a visit to Libya, that not only were all of the Arabs Turkey’s brothers, but also that it was absolute impossible to separate Turkey from ‘the Islamic world in

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which we have the honor of being a member’. To his knowledge, Toker, went on, the Republic of Turkey was not Muslim: There are Muslim countries in the face of earth. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are Muslim. The Republic of Turkey is not among them. First of all, the Constitution does not permit this. We do not have any political obligations towards the Islamic world. Besides, we are not compelled to establish friendly relations with this world for the sake of religion. We choose our friends by bearing in mind our national – not religious – interests. We have allies whose people are Christians that are thousand times more valuable that our ‘Arab brethren’.70 It is clear that Toker bases his arguments mainly on the rhetoric and the figures of speech that Menderes used on the very specific occasion of addressing his Libyan hosts whom we should expect would take pride in being addressed in this manner. At the same time, Toker, probably wilfully, ignores the fact that Menderes’ realpolitik towards the Arab world did not deviate significantly from the line of the rest of the West in selecting its friends among Muslim countries: Pakistan, Libya, Jordan, Iraq and Iran were all pillars of Western interests in that region. Furthermore, in the gathering confrontation with Nasserism and Arab nationalism, Turkey like the rest of the West preferred to support conservative Muslim rulers like the Hashemit Kings of Iraq and Jordan, the Shah of Iran, King Idris of Libya, or Pakistan whose raison d’etre vis-à-vis Hindu India was its Muslim character. Toker also omits the point that Turkey followed a line towards Syria that was more hostile than any other Western nation. All this, in turn, suggests that Toker’s invective was intended primarily to further denigrate Menderes in the eyes of public opinion in Turkey and to accuse him of infringing on the founding principles of Atatürk’s revolution. This is clear, in particular, from the following long statement: We are facing the West. We take our examples from there. Our aim is to be a respected and liked member of that world. It is

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for this reason that we try to make our mode of living, our mentality, and especially methods of governing, resemble theirs. It is that world that it should be absolutely impossible to separate us from as a state and society. We broke off our ties with the other world the day that we established the Republic of Turkey. The voice of the Arabs, the Arab thought and mentality do not convey much to us. Until recent years we served as a model for them. Democracy is the last reform on the road to Westernization undertaken by those who established the Republic. We do not have any special ties with the Islamic world in the political field. Common religion concerns the individuals, not the state. What will happen if we now proclaim that we are part of the Eastern World? We shall become distant from the Western world. There are many in the Western world who do not want us. If we talk about ourselves as the ‘The Muslim State of the Baghdad Pact,’ they will refer to us as ‘the follower of another civilization’. Our real community is the European Council, the Atlantic Pact. It is with them that we have ties outside of and above political relations. These are ties of civilization. We no longer have anything to learn from the other civilizations. We have contributed a great deal to those civilizations. Indeed it is enough. It is for this reason that Atatürk abolished the Caliphate, did away with the Arab script, instructed the call to prayer be chanted in Turkish and turned our faces to the West.71 While this part of Toker’s message seems to have been intended mainly to add fuel to the fire already grilling Menderes for ‘exploiting religious feelings for political purposes’, there is more foreign policy substance in the following criticism: As long as we keep on saying that ‘We are leaders of the Islamic world’ demonstrations against us in the Arab world will increase. It is necessary to know the Arab world and to understand its feelings. No positive result can be achieved by tactic of flattering the Arab leaders, giving them receptions that resemble 1001 Nights and engaging in all kinds of ceremonies. The King

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of Iraq, the King of Jordan and the President of Lebanon were given perfect hospitality. But we have neither been able to get our petroleum royalties from Iraq nor have Jordan and Lebanon joined the Baghdad Pact. It is necessary to show greater reserve towards these people and not to be so keen about them. Do you know with which country the Islamic world is most friendly in this world? Conservative Spain. [...] Because Spain acts with greater understanding towards the Arabs and their problems. While Northern Africa is revolting against France, and Egypt is censuring British–French imperialism and while [King] Saud is preventing the planes of ‘Turkish brothers’ from landing on his territory, they all press Spain to their bosom. We, too, could have acquired such a position. But our policy, which is full of contradiction, is pushing the Arabs further away from us every day. The Arabs have always supported Spain at the UN. Can the Republican Government guarantee that they will do the same thing for us, for example in the Cyprus issue? We definitely have to review this policy. Much loss without any gain has in no period of history been described as a successful policy.72 Toker is here advocating that the government should follow a policy similar to that of Spain. He could have mentioned Greece in the same breath. Confronting Turkey over Cyprus, Greece managed to gain support from some Arab nations in the UN for its stance on the island. In contrast to Turkey, Greece was highly critical vis-à-vis the Western great powers’ policy in the Middle East. It observed a position of benevolent neutrality towards Egypt during the Suez Crisis, and warned against equating Nasserism and Arab nationalism with Communism, as Washington, London and Paris would do.73 This means that Toker’s invectives can also be read as an illdisguised criticism of Menderes’ extremely pro-Western policy in the Middle East siding against the forces of Arab nationalism that were becoming ever stronger in the region. Toker’s criticism was taken ill up by the government and soon afterwards he was arrested because of his article, according to what

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the American consulate general believed to be ‘well-informed sources’ in Istanbul.74 To sum up: in the beginning of 1957, it was obvious that Turkey’s attempt to bully Syria into the Baghdad Pact had backfired. Not only had Damascus turned to Nasser but also the pact itself was moribund. There were critical voices home and abroad. The CHP, which initially had supported Menderes’ efforts to enhance Turkey’s role in the Middle East, now was highly critical. One line of attack castigating the government for making faith a criterion for friendship among the nations was in tune with the CHP’s overall condemnation of the DP for exploiting religious feelings for political purposes. The other line emphasized that the results of Menderes’ activist Middle East policy were detrimental to Turkey’s national interest and to the common goals of the West because it had paved the way for the Soviet Union to enter the area and had pushed Arab nationalism into the arms of Moscow. The USA, too, on a number of occasions expressed similar reservations, fearing that Menderes’ heavy-handed approach to Syria was counter-productive, something which had become obvious when Egypt and Syria turned to the Soviet Union for armaments. However, at exactly this point of time, when Damascus was perceived to have slid into Moscow’s sphere, Menderes’ willingness to take risks turned into an asset for Washington because brinkmanship held the potential of serving American interests vis-à-vis Syria if it could provoke a regime change in Damascus.

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CHAPTER 8 A NEW COLD WAR FRONTLINE: TUR KEY VER SUS SYR IA

From the second half of 1955 onwards Syria became a cause of great concern to Washington. According to estimates made by the Operations Coordinating Board in Washington, Syria posed a security threat to US interests. This was so, in the first place, because of Syria’s ‘inherent instability’. According to the estimate, instability was characteristic of all governments holding office almost since independence. In addition, the Operations Coordinating Board went on, Syria had been a permanent object of ‘thinly veiled intervention’ in its internal affairs by ‘at least five states’, namely Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Soviet Union and France. Thus, the Operations Coordinating Board described coups d’état, political assassinations, armed uprisings and threats of armed foreign intervention as ‘characteristic of the existing situation’. The Board added ‘apathy toward Communism on the part of politicians and officers’ as yet another factor, which meant that the situation in Syria was unlikely to ‘improve in the foreseeable future’.1 The Operations Coordinating Board was created in 1953 by Eisenhower to follow up on all National Security Council decisions and was the coordinating and implementing arm of the National Security Council for all aspects of the implementation of national security policy,2 meaning that its estimate can also be seen an exhortation to the White House to take the Syrian situation seriously, to treat it as

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a security threat to US interests and to tune US politics towards that country accordingly. And so it did. Eisenhower asserted that Syria was the immediate object of Communist domination: by controlling Syria, the Soviet Union could flank Turkey and drive a wedge into the Middle East. It was also feared that a Soviet-controlled Syria would cut the oil pipelines and thereby threaten the economies of Western Europe.3 According to Dulles, in 1957, Damascus had almost acquired the status of a Soviet satellite and he had no doubts about Soviet ambitions to obtain control of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.4 Washington’s obsession with the ‘Syrian threat’ was so strong that, encouraged by the early success of the CIA in installing pro-US governments in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954, the CIA and the State Department began to plot with dissident Syrians, the British government and the Iraqis.5

The USA and the regime issue in Syria There are strong indications that Iraq wanted to take the lead in Syria and sought Washington’s approval for such action: the prospects of left-wing Syrian officers toppling the government by a coup d’état were said to have been taken very seriously in Baghdad. Thus, in 1955, Nazir Fansa, a Syrian national with good connections towards the Iraqi government and a supporter of the Baghdad Pact, informed the US Embassy in Damascus that he believed that Turkey’s tough attitude had in fact averted a left-wing coup in Damascus. Fansa was no stranger to Syrian politics. He was the brother-in-law of Syria’s late pro-Turkish leader, Husni Zaim, and co-owner of the pro-Western newspaper al-Nas. Not only did Fansa have a positive evaluation of Turkey’s attempts to influence Syrian politics, but like Zaim, Fansa also regarded Iraq as a political friend and a potential partner.6 It is hard to tell if Fansa was reporting his conversation in an honest way – if it had taken place at all – or if he just wanted to lure Washington into supporting his faction in the struggle for power in unstable Syria.

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Nevertheless, it remains a fact that Ambassador Moose suggested to Washington that he met with Fansa’s Iraqi contacts.7 All this indicates that there were groups in both Syria and Iraq who declared themselves willing to resort to force to keep left-wing sympathizers from gaining control of Syria. It also shows that the US ambassador to Syria recommended that Washington took up contact with such groups. Simultaneously rumours spread in Baghdad and Damascus that the Syrian president Hashim al-Atasi had requested Iraq to send troops and weapons to Syria to prevent an immediate Communist takeover and that Nuri al-Said was reported to have agreed. As the Iraqi Minister in Syria and the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Moussa al-Shahbandar confirmed these rumours to Moose in Damascus and to Ambassador Gallman in Baghdad, Dulles instructed Gallman to convey his objections to Iraqi military interference in Syria ‘in the most powerful way possible’.8 This order seems to indicate that at that particular moment Dulles was against an Iraqi action, at least an overt one. However, according to Bonnie Saunders, Dulles was ambiguous on this matter, stating in October 1955 to British diplomats, among other things, that although the USA could not openly support an Iraqi invasion of Syria, that country was the nearest thing in the Middle East to a Soviet satellite. In fact, comparatively minor measures now could forestall the use of much stronger measures later.9 On 20 October 1955, the very same day that the Egyptian–Saudi– Syrian Pact was signed, the British Foreign Office decided to make contact with American officials in Washington, including the CIA. The British had long approved of a union between Syria and Iraq. London would not preclude the use of force to achieve this aim, although it was recommended that overt intervention by Iraq should be avoided unless it became the lesser evil. The American officials, including those from the CIA, agreed with the British approach: Syria showed a definite danger of falling completely into the ‘Communist net’ and Western countries had to take some action to prevent it. At this point, the National Security Council had already discussed the possibility of an Iraqi invasion of Syria in order to find a response to requests from Nuri al-Said that indicated that Baghdad sought permission from

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Washington to ‘absorb Syria’. Likewise, the State Department had told the British ambassador that Washington would not rule out the possibility of a ‘forward policy for Iraq’.10 Nevertheless, the possibility of an Iraqi action diminished significantly by the end of October when Nuri al-Said made it clear that he had no intention of using force in Syria. This, in turn, made it necessary to look for other candidates if London and Washington wanted to act against Syria by proxy. The most likely prospect was Turkey. According to the account by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former undercover CIA agent based in Beirut and Damascus, the Turkish ambassador to Syria, Adnan Kural, emphasized his own personal opposition to outside intervention in Syria, be it by Iraq or his own government. However, he was not sure if his superiors in Ankara would permit Syria to drift too much further leftward before they acted.11

Turkey versus Syria On 20 November, the acting Turkish minister of Foreign Affairs asked the deputy head of mission in Beirut to call and discuss a message from Lebanese President Chamoun to Bayar and Menderes, according to which Syria was ‘all out’ for the Soviets.12 In his account to the Americans, the Turkish foreign minister said that Moscow had given Syria assurances of possible aid against an Israeli or Turkish attack.13 The issue of Soviet weapons to be used against Turkey was, again according to the Turkish foreign minister, also taken up by Chamoun who stated that the situation was critical and that in the recent months the Syrians had received about three times Syria’s actual military needs. It was the Syrian leader Shukri al-Quwwatly who himself was reported to have given Chamoun this information. Finally, Chamoun should also have warned that Syria was becoming a Soviet arsenal, intended among other things, for Soviet ‘volunteers’ to be used against Turkey.14 A few days later Turkey’s ally Iraq took some steps which further escalated the crisis: on 24 November, Iraqi Foreign Minister, Bashayan summoned the Syrian minister to give him a ‘strongly worded protest’ concerning statements of a Syrian military spokesman broadcast by

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Damascus radio which said that Syrian military authorities had seized large quantities of arms being transported to Syria from ‘neighbouring Arab countries’. In a new note sent to the Syrians on 26 November, the Iraqi government also accused Syria of having pursued a ‘subversive campaign’ against Iraq for two years and of having allowed the campaign to take a violent form by blowing up oil-pumping stations in Syria. The note complained that Syria was accusing Iraq of supplying Israel with oil and of sending arms to hit the Syrian Army from the back for the sake of Israel. The note somberly warned that the Iraqi government would spare no efforts to defend its reputation and dignity and would use ‘all legal means at its disposal’ to achieve this aim.15 The Iraqi approach, too, can be seen as an attempt to solidify the case for intervention in Syria. If the Turkish and Iraqi efforts were aimed at provoking a casus belli, they were highly successful, perhaps too much so: Pravda and Moscow radio responded by accusing Turkey and Iraq of preparing an attack on Syria. Turkish media, in turn, rebuffed the Soviet claims. The progovernment newspaper Havadis claimed that the hostile Soviet propaganda was an attempt to provoke trouble between Turkey and its ‘excitable’ and ‘unstable’ neighbour Syria. Cumhuriyet compared the situation to the line that Soviet media took in 1939 against Finland, when all the organs of Soviet propaganda, as the paper put it, were screaming that Finland was preparing to attack the Soviet Union. The paper went on: ‘Does the USSR, which is accumulating arms and “experts” in Syria have the same kind of intentions toward us or possibly Iraq?’16 While Turkish media blamed Syria and the Soviet Union for the crisis, they also contributed to keeping the pot boiling. On 28 November, the Syrian foreign office called Ambassador Moose to inform Washington that according to official Syrian information, Turkey was concentrating troops on the border and that Baghdad Pact members were planning an attack on Syria.17 In the following days, the Turkish press was busy rejecting the Egyptian media’s reiteration of Soviet charges that Turkey was preparing to attack Syria.18 At the same time, the Egyptian Embassy in

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Damascus denied that Egypt and Syria were using Pravda information. According to the Egyptian Embassy, Damascus acted on the basis on intelligence stemming from the Syrian legation in Baghdad: a former Iraqi prime minister was reported to have given the Syrian government the details of an alleged plot in a letter which the Egyptian staff member told Moose he had actually seen.19

The Turco–Syrian crisis in the context of US plans for regime change in Syria Around the end of December, the Turco–Syrian crisis was taken up at a meeting between the USA and Britain. On 24 December 1956, Dulles told the British ambassador to the USA, Harold Caccia, that the situation in the Middle East resembled that of Greece and Turkey at the time of the declaration of the Truman Doctrine. As in the situation in Greece in 1947, the USA was not prepared to use force. Even if Syria became Communist-dominated, the USA would not resort to overt action to overthrow such a government. After all, Dulles did not believe it would be feasible for the Soviet Union to maintain a satellite (like Syria) with which it had no geographical continuity. There were other methods: directing the British ambassador’s attention to Guatemala, where US policy goals were met not by overt US military intervention but by a US-supported clandestine action carried out by locals who toppled the Arbenz government. Dulles said: ‘although the British had not looked with sympathy upon our policy there [in Guatemala], the fact was that a Communist-controlled government had been eradicated without any military action whatsoever on the part of the United States.’20 Seen from the point of view of Washington, the similarities between Guatemala and Syria were striking: in Guatemala, according to Dulles, ‘the Government sought to be supported by shipment of arms from Poland’,21 while the US army attaché in Damascus reported that at least four shiploads of Soviet bloc arms arrived in Syria during January 1957.22 Delivering arms at this rate, according to the Operations Coordinating Board, meant that by the end of March 1957 the Soviet Union would

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have met the Syrian orders, namely the delivery of military hardware worth US$25 million. In the words of the US army attaché in Syria, the port of Latakia was ‘jammed’ with military supplies, while the CIA voiced fears that the Syrian government was readying itself for action to hit Israel. Therefore, Roman V. Mrozinski from the Operations Coordinating Board wanted to get the various departments to consider what the reaction of the US government should be. At the same time, he suggested that Washington call on the UN to take various actions, including a blockade force to prevent further shipments from reaching Syria. He also emphasized that the situation called for ‘speedy and vigorous action on our part so that we are not faced with further Middle East hostilities with all of their dangerous implications’.23 It is not quite clear what action on the part of the USA Mrozinsky had in mind, or what decisions the Operations Coordinating Board made on this specific matter. However, we know that fear of growing Soviet and Communist influence ranked high on the Board’s agenda on Syria and that among the possible actions to be taken by the USA ‘to improve the internal situation in Syria and combat Communist subversion’, the Operations Coordinating Board considered the following, in particular: • Actions taken within Syria itself to strengthen Western, and ‘specifically American’, influence and weaken that of anti-Western, pro-Soviet and Communist elements • Actions taken on a regional basis outside of Syria, which would eliminate or reduce the factors favourable to anti-Western, proSoviet and Communist activities. Regarding actions taken on a regional basis, the Board warned against the following scenarios: ‘absorption of Syria by Iraq’. Incorporating Syria into a greater Iraq – an old Hashemite dream – should, at least for the time being, be avoided. The creation of a greater Iraq would only alarm Israel, exacerbate intra-Arab rivalries and provoke a ‘radical deterioration’ of Western relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless such action had, according to the Board, the following

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merits, namely that it would ‘perhaps temporarily’ reduce Communist capabilities in Syria.24 While the Operations Coordinating Board was willing to toy with the idea of a ‘regional solution’ to the ‘Syrian problem’, the Department of Defense flatly rejected any solutions based on actions taken on a regional basis: Washington should discourage Iraq and Turkey from ‘instigating any coup attempt, or from intervening militarily to directly aid a coup’.25 Here we should note that, in contrast to an ‘Iraqi solution’ to the ‘Syrian problem’, a Turkish action would scare Israel less. Nor would it disturb the balance of power between the Arab states to the same degree as one taken by Iraq. In the following, therefore, we shall discuss Turkey’s possible role in Washington’s policy towards Syria.

Turkey as the executor of a regime change in Syria? On 29 April 1957, the American consul in Iskenderun, John H. Morris, was travelling by car from Ankara to Iskenderun when he passed a convoy of some 200 Turkish military vehicles heading towards the Syrian border. The following day he noticed 36 tanks passing through Iskenderun, going in the same direction. As Morris had received no information from Ankara about troop movements, he decided to see the local garrison commander, General Cevdet Yamanoğlu. Morris was surprised to see the general wearing high-top boots and was surprised that Yamanoğlu took the initiative to talk about the convoys, tanks and other military vehicles passing through Iskenderun: three Turkish divisions plus several brigades were massed on the Syrian border because of the uncertain political situation in Jordan. For that reason, Turkish jet airplanes were flying back and forth from Gaziantep (Turkey) to Aleppo (Syria). Although no particular activity had been observed on the Syrian side of the border, the General bluntly told Morris that his troops were in position and prepared to cross into Syria and take Aleppo. He was only waiting for one thing: the orders from Ankara to move into Syria. General Yamanoğlu also stated that the movements of Turkish troops were coordinated with those of the Sixth American Fleet off the coast of Syria.26

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Morris noted that the general was so open in his remarks that he believed that he was passing along information that Ankara wanted to be disseminated. However, due to the lack of secure communication between Iskenderun and Ankara, Morris did not report his conversation in detail until he arrived at the Embassy in Ankara. Here it was concluded that General Yamanoğlu’s information ‘exhibit[ed] a Turkish inclination to take direct action to “correct” any unfavourable situation, in this instance the present pro-Soviet orientation of the Syrian Government’.27 In other words: Ankara was about to launch a regime change in Damascus. This assessment was supported by facts on the ground. On 8 May, Morris observed another three convoys of 230 military vehicles proceeding towards Iskenderun.28 While the Syrian government protested against these ‘threatening’ manoeuvres, Turkey’s diplomatic representatives in Damascus informally answered that the army movements were ‘normal spring manoeuvres’.29 Nevertheless, the Turkish troops remained massed at the Syrian border well into the summer until sometime in July 1957, when they were withdrawn apart from two battalions at Islahiye. On 10 August 1957, Consul Morris called the commanding officer at Islahiye, Major Necati Gunakan, who confirmed the strength of Turkish Army at the Syrian border to be just two battalions. Gunakan also emphasized that in his opinion the concentration of Turkish troops on the Syrian border had had a positive effect in preventing Syria from moving into Jordan and had likewise prevented further Russian penetration of the Middle East. Gunakan was also convinced that if Turkey had invaded Syria, the local population would have welcomed the Turkish troops, because they were not satisfied with their government.30 This makes it difficult not to see the Turkish ‘springtime manoeuvres’ along the Syrian border in the context of rising tensions in the Middle East in general, and between Turkey and Syria in particular. After all, it would not have been the first time that Turkey used its military muscle to intimidate Syria and manipulate internal affairs there.

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Within a month after the bulk of the Turkish troops on the Syrian border had been withdrawn, US–Syrian relations deteriorated dramatically. This was due partly to Syria’s on-going orientation towards Egypt and the Soviet Union, and partly due to US intervention in internal Syrian affairs. Thus, another failed CIA plot to overthrow the Syrian government on 13 August 1957 led to the expulsion of three US diplomats who were accused of plotting a coup d’état with dissident Syrians.31 With 50,000 Turkish troops concentrated on the borders of Syria, Moscow issued a series of warnings to Turkey from 10 September onwards, stating that ‘the organizers of the conspiracy against Syria’, i.e. the US, had propelled Turkey into the role of ‘gendarme’ in the Near and Middle East and that Ankara cared little that in so acting ‘Turkey may end in an abyss’.32 The Soviet involvement escalated the potential consequences of the Syrian crisis, prompting the Eisenhower administration to prepare the country for a major international crisis. In a meeting with the Democrat Senator Michael Mansfield, Dulles described the Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko’s tone as ‘ugly’ and ‘provocative both against the United States and Turkey’. He also told the Senator that the Soviet ambassador to Turkey was seeing Menderes and that he, Dulles, had reason to fear that he was going to deliver an ultimatum: should the Soviet Union initiate a military action against Turkey, the USA would be bound to stand behind Ankara under the NATO treaty as well as the Eisenhower Doctrine.33 Thus, the worstcase scenario of the Syrian crisis, according to Dulles, was nothing less than World War III.

Fear of a general war The escalation was also reflected in activities at the highest military levels in the US, NATO and Turkey. On 16 September 1957, Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Lauris Norstad informed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Nathan Farragut Twining, that Chief of the Turkish General Staff İsmail Hakkı Tunaboylu, according to a still classified source of intelligence, was expected to ask him, Norstad, the following question: ‘Would USAF planes in

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Turkey rise and attack invading planes whether they be Syrian, Soviet or Egyptian?’ The scenario the chief of the Turkish general staff had in mind was the following: in a situation in which the Turkish Armed Forces had invaded Syria, all Turkish planes would be used in offensive operations and the first objectives would be to knock out airfields. Some Syrian planes, however, might get through to bomb Iskenderun, Izmir, Ankara or Istanbul. The general stated that he did not expect US planes to enter Syria. General Tunaboylu also stated that he would not permit his forces to enter Syria without a guarantee from USAF of defence against planes invading Turkey. ‘He felt such guarantees was [sic] in line with NATO agreements and commitments.’ Norstad on his part had ‘great concern’ and intended to caution Tunaboylu to use the ‘greatest care to avoid such a danger’.34 Nevertheless, Tunaboylu’s attitude suggests that Turkey was seriously considering an attack on her southern neighbour, while Norstad representing NATO was most worried about the prospects of a Turkish offensive against Syria. This however, does not exclude the possibility that Washington might have felt differently. In fact, according to Saunders, there are various hints in the sources that point to the fact that it was the US who had encouraged Turkey’s belligerency.35 David Lesch supports Saunders and both agree that Washington favoured a unilateral Turkish action.36 However, Salim Yaqub rejects this view as erroneous on the basis that in early September, Eisenhower launched a series of initiatives to make Iraq and Jordan take action against Syria and to convince Turkey and Israel to sit tight. However, as we have seen, Washington obviously did not succeed in convincing Turkey, something that makes Yaqub conclude that the reluctance of the same administration to restrain Turkey had the effect of pushing Ankara.37 The day after Norstad called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on 17 September, the State Department instructed the US Embassy in Paris to inform Secretary General of NATO Paul-Henri Spaak, on the basis of ‘exceptional secrecy’, that the USA took the situation in the Middle East ‘arising out of developments’ in Syria very seriously: ‘We judge that Syria has become or is about to become a base for military and subversive activities in the M[iddle] E[ast] designed to

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destroy [the] independence of those countries and to subject them to Soviet Communist domination.’ The State Department also stated that the five nations bordering Syria – Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey – were ‘deeply concerned over [the] threat to their security represented by the impetuous pro-Soviet Syrian regime’. Furthermore, it was claimed that ‘subversive agents’ carrying explosives had already ‘infiltrated into the Lebanese territory from Syria’. The instruction stated that this situation carried a ‘special threat’ to Turkey: while Ankara had taken ‘certain defensive military precautions’ against Syria, the Kremlin was treating these Turkish actions as a threat against the Soviet Union. Gromyko’s 10 September statement was nothing less than a reversion to Kremlin’s ‘old measures’ of terrorizing the nations of the free world to break down their independence and sovereignty. To make things even worse regarding the danger of imminent war, ‘impetuous and unstable Khrushchev’ was now in control of the Soviet government. Finally, the State Department stated that the USA would go to war, if necessary, and that it had informed the Turkish government accordingly: US has informed Turkey that in the event the latter is attacked by [the] Sino-Soviet bloc [the] US will come to its assistance with armed forces. In addition [the] US has decided to that in [the] event of need [the] US would immediately reactivate MEEOC [Middle East Emergency Oil Committee] to meet [the] effects of any interruption of [the] flow of oil to [the] Free World markets which might result from closure of [the] trans-Syrian pipelines or [the] Suez Canal.[The] US will continue to deploy [the] Sixth Fleet in [the] eastern Mediterranean.38 On 18 September, Ambassador Perkins informed Spaak privately that the USA, ‘consider Russian note to Turkey [a] serious matter and hope that note would soon be available to council members’.39 Thus, the messages from the State Department to NATO did not leave much room for discussion and they first of all seems to have been

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designed to brief the organization on what the development of the relations between the superpowers might have in the store in the near future. Furthermore, while Washington initially may not have favoured a unilateral Turkish action against Syria, it was now actively attempting to convince NATO of the need to support Turkey and declared itself to be willing to stand behind Ankara, even if it would mean war. In contrast, NATO seemed less determined, while some ill-concealed irritation also surfaced: the NATO commander-in-chief of South (CINCSOUTH) feared the redeployment of Turkish troops and air force, and the likelihood of conflict on NATO’s southern border might make some ‘scheduled activities’ by the USA over Asiatic Turkey seem susceptible: it could be misinterpreted as constituting part of a concerted plan of military action between the USA and Turkey in response to the Turco–Syrian crisis. At least it could be exploited for such purposes.40 It was against this background that Ambassador Perkins asked for an elaboration on the part of Washington on the following claims made by the State Department, namely that Syria was reported to have become or was be about to become a base for military and subversive activities in the Middle East designed to destroy the independence of those countries and to subject them to Soviet Communist domination. Perkins wanted to know if that meant that Washington anticipated Syria undertaking military operations against its neighbours, in particular, Turkey. If this was the case, Perkins wanted to know on what evidence these assumptions were based. Perkins also wanted Washington to confirm that it was aware of Turkey’s ‘defensive military precautions’ and that it supported the Turkish movement of forces. Perkins felt that he needed Washington’s guidance on these matters if he were to deal effectively with Turco–Syrian crisis in the discussions with Spaak and the North Atlantic Council (NAC).41 On the following day, the State Department informed Perkins that Washington did not oppose that the movement of Turkish forces being discussed in the NAC. After all, the troops were NATO committed forces. Nevertheless, Washington did not want the USA to raise the issue and it would not wish to see ‘any NAC discussion lead to censure of Turkey’.42 Thus, the State Department did not leave any doubt that Washington stood behind the Turks.

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On 1 October 1957, Dulles and Eisenhower discussed the pros and cons of Turkey launching an attack against Syria. According to Dulles, it seemed ‘unlikely that the Arab neighbours of Syria would respond with force to the border incidents which were actually taking place’. These incidents, again according to Dulles, ‘were indicative of Syria’s aggressive intentions’. In spite of this, Dulles was not sure if Turkey would act. However, he was convinced that Menderes was a ‘man of action’ while he believed that the Turkish military was ‘holding back’. Dulles also reminded Eisenhower that ‘our philosophy had been not to take the responsibility of holding anyone back from defending their vital interests’. At the same time, it was also a principle ‘not trying to push anyone into action which might jeopardize their vital interests’. While Dulles advocated against the USA making Turkey invade Syria, he also made clear that he did not believe that Washington should attempt to hold back Turkey from attacking that country. Eisenhower’s main concern was that if the USA decided to let Turkey go ahead it would be difficult ‘rationalizing the support of Turkey if there was no provocation’. Dulles concurred: ‘even if the Turks did find [a] provocation to move against Syria’ there would be great difficulty in winding up the affair, as had proved to be the case of Britain and France in Suez. This, according to Eisenhower, was ‘clearly a problem’ and he did not see any solution. The only way to support a Turkish action against Syria would be if the Turks limited the scope of their action and made it clear that ‘their only purpose was to have a non-Communist controlled Syrian government, and that they would call upon Syria’s neighbours and Syria’s exiles to establish such a government at once. Whereupon the Turks would withdraw.’ The conversation ended here with Dulles stating that, ‘This was a theoretical possibility which we were examining, but it doubtful whether in practice it could be worked out because of difficulties on both sides.’43 Thus, Dulles and Eisenhower seem to have been of two minds. On the one hand, they badly wanted a regime change in Damascus and were willing to go a long way to obtain that objective. They even considered taking advantage of the Turco–Syrian crisis, envisaging

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the regime in Syria collapsing in the wake of a Turkish invasion of that country, because Menderes seemed willing to take military action against Syria. However, the danger of a negative backlash among the Arab states in particular, and in world opinion in general, worked against this solution. The memory of the ill-fated Suez action probably loomed large and it was feared that a military action against Syria would encounter similar troubles, this time however, with Turkey in same role as the one that Israel played in Suez and with the USA playing the part of Britain and France. On 6 October, Dulles once more briefed Senator Mansfield about the Turkish–Syrian situation. The Secretary told the Senator that he did not know what action Turkey would take. However, Dulles had the feeling that if Turkey took military action alone, it would have almost as bad an effect, although not quite, as if the Israelis took military action against Syria on their own. Comparing the situation to the abortive British–French–Israeli plot in Suez, Dulles stated that he was: ... reluctant to see the Turks act alone for the same considerations which in part contributed towards our attitude with regard to the British and French Suez landings a year ago. We could not see how an end could be reached. We had no doubts that the Turks could beat the Syrian army, but we foresaw a subsequent period of almost unending turmoil in the Middle East as a consequence of such action.44 While Dulles and Eisenhower seemed to have had second thoughts about the merits of a Turkish action against Syria, the facts on the ground contributed to further intensify the Turco–Syrian crisis from 8 October onwards when a series of clashes including exchange of fire took place between Turkish and Syrian troops. On 13 October a contingent of 1,600 Egyptian troops arrived.45 At the same time, Washington escalated its military preparedness according to the so-called ‘limited war plan for military action against Syria’ by mobilizing US military and naval forces, including the Strategic Air Command.46 The American Sixth Fleet was stationed off the Syrian coast and the USA

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initiated an airlift of arms to Syria’s neighbours, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.47 At about this time, according to Saunders who relies on a later account by White House assistant to Eisenhower, Emmet John Hughes, Under-Secretary of State, Christian A. Herter ‘reviewed in rueful detail some recent clumsy clandestine American attempts to spur Turkish forces to do some vague kind of battle with Syria’. Saunders also mentions that on 14 October, Herter warned Dulles that Turkish violations of Syrian territorial integrity would be extremely dangerous: the Arabs and the Soviet Union would blame the USA. Herter feared that Moscow, for reasons of credibility, might feel compelled to come to the aid of Syria, something that would bring the superpowers to the brink of war. Therefore, Herter advised Dulles to restrain Turkey as closely as possible without seeming to let it down.48 On 20 October, Dulles instructed the US Ambassador to Turkey Fletcher Warren, to tell the Turkish government that it must do nothing that would validate the Soviet charges that the USA was prodding Turkey to military action against Syria.49 On 22 October, Warren met Menderes, Zorlu and the Secretary General of the Foreign Office, Esenbel. Menderes and Zorlu were worn down from hectic campaigning and the prime minister’s voice was affected from hours of speaking. Warren had never seen Zorlu so tired. The Turks made it clear that they believed that Syria was acting under Soviet guidance and they suspected that Russia’s ‘age-old’ desire to reach warm water was sufficient motivation for ‘any USSR anti-Turk move’. At the same time, the Turks also left Warren with no doubt that they realized that the ‘Syrian situation’ was of great concern to the other Arab States: Menderes and Zorlu showed themselves fully aware of the ‘ticklish situation’ which faced them. This led Warren to believe that the Turkish government would not take any action which the enemies of Turkey would use to support the Syrian–Soviet charges against Turkey.50 At the same time Esenbel emphasized that, in the UN, Turkey intended to defend its position strongly and from the very beginning. It wanted its friends to explain that the Syrian and Soviet charges

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had no real basis, and that there were no similarities between Hungary – which the Soviet Union had recently invaded to quell an independence movement – and Suez and the ‘present un-founded Syrian charge’. The whole affair was a ‘Russian game’. Turkey was not contemplating any aggression. Only then would Turkey accept a mediation offer.51 In other words, the Turkish government declared itself ready to back down provided that Turkey’s friends would support it in the UN. Three days later on 25 October, Eisenhower and Dulles took up the Turco–Syrian crisis with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Selwyn Lloyd. Dulles presented the crisis in the context of the Cold War: the Soviet Union genuinely feared that the tensions between Turkey and Syria would confront it with the choice of either having to back down or fight in the Middle East. The fact that Moscow did not want to fight ‘at the present time’ offered, according to Dulles, ‘a tempting opportunity to force upon the Russians a serious loss of prestige’. On the other hand, Dulles reasoned, it would increase the danger of general war, and the situation in the Middle East was not conducive to military action: if Turkey were provoked into war with Syria, the Arab neighbours of Syria, whatever their governments felt, would feel compelled to rally to Syria’s support and it would be difficult to see how Turkey could extricate itself without leaving the Arab world allied and strongly backed by the Soviet Union. While Dulles declared the gamble of Turkey going to war with Syria to be too risky, the Secretary of State also expressed his concerned about how Ankara would react to a policy of restraint: ‘I considered it essential to take no action which could be misinterpreted by the Turks as indicating that we had lost our nerve or become frightened by Soviet bluster. The situation in this respect called for the most careful handling.’52 At the same time, there was still strong internal pressure in Washington, as well as from NATO, to make Dulles act in order prevent Turkey from taking action against Syria. General Norstad, who on 28 October told Dulles that it was ‘ridiculous’ to think of Syria attacking Turkey, stated this line of thinking very bluntly. The general was

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critical of the Turkish military conduct regarding the manoeuvres at the Syrian border, and also spoke against the movements of the Sixth Fleet, stating that it created a ‘bad impression’ with some of the NATO allies. Dulles agreed with Norstad that Syria did not intend to attack Turkey. At the same time, he tried to convince the general that the issue was related to Middle East problems and that the ‘vast shipments’ of Soviet arms into Syria and the ‘promiscuous arming of the people’ created a danger that there might be armed aggression against Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq. If fighting broke out between Syria and Iraq, Dulles continued, Turkey might get involved as a member of the Baghdad Pact, and he was sure that the presence of Turkish troops near the Syrian border would ‘cool off Syrian hotheads’; in addition, Dulles stated, Ankara had ‘legitimate concern that the Soviet Union would not establish a “second border” to the south of Turkey’.53 The crisis was defused by late October after a debate in the UN that demonstrated that NATO was deeply split on the issue. While Dulles put the blame for the crisis on Moscow in front of the UN General Assembly, condemning the Soviet Union for intimidating Turkey on its northern borders and supplying Syria with huge quantities of arms so that Turkey could be threatened on her southern border,54 the Greek representative to the UN launched a fierce attack against Turkey and supported the Syrians, stressing the strength of Arab nationalism and the fact that the Arab countries were striving to develop their economies.55 All this suggests that Washington – or at least certain groups in the government – did stimulate Ankara’s confrontational policy towards Syria. Ankara’s impatience vis-à-vis Syria exercised serious attraction on both Eisenhower and Dulles, and it goes a long way toward explaining their unequivocal and seemly unconditional expressions of support to Turkey at a juncture when calls for caution might well have contributed to de-escalate the crisis. Furthermore, it stands as a fact that there existed a clear community of interests between Ankara and the White House, including the desirability of a regime change in Syria, and that Turkey seemed to have followed the steps of a choreography designed to implement a ‘regional solution’ i.e. that Turkey intervene militarily to directly

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aid a coup. Although the collected sources do not allow us to give an unambiguous answer to the question of whether Turkey’s behaviour during the Syrian Crisis also was part of such a plan, there are strong indications that support such a conclusion. Under-Secretary of State Christian A. Herter has on a later date been quoted as stating that there were some ‘clumsy clandestine American attempts to spur Turkish forces to do some vague kind of battle with Syria’. There are also contemporary statements from high-ranking Turkish military men indicating that they believed themselves to be acting in cooperation with the USA. Chief of the Turkish General Staff İsmail Hakkı Tunaboylu’s statements suggest that he was referring to some common planning between Turkey and the USA that centred on a Turkish invasion of Syria and that he would not permit his forces to enter Syria without a firm guarantee of US military support. In other words, his understanding of the planned Turkish invasion of Syria was that it was a joint operation between Turkey and the USA. On the point of US–Turkish cooperation, General Yamanoğlu’s is even more explicit, stating that the Turkish troop movements were coordinated with those of the Sixth American Fleet off the coast of Syria and that that he only waited for a go-ahead from the highest level to invade Syria. His account also leaves no doubt that he believed the Turkish war aims to be a regime change, a conviction which is supported by Major Necati Gunakan who states that the Syrian population would have welcomed the Turkish troops because they were not satisfied with their government. All this suggests that there was a Turkish–US plan for a regime change in Syria, that Turkey was meant to play the role of the invader and that it was fear of Soviet retaliation and the prospects of a general war that caused the plan to be cancelled. Contrary to the situation during the Suez Crisis when Washington and Moscow were on the same side of the line of confrontation, the Turco–Syrian crisis saw the two superpowers eyeball to eyeball. While the Suez Crisis marked the final crescendo in a history of conflict between nationalism and colonialism, the 1957 crisis brought the Cold War to the Middle East full force. This new fact rendered local and regional developments on the Turkey’s southern border a global dimension in a bipolar world and

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developments in the Middle East would now to a great extent follow a line that ran completely counter to the intentions of the ‘local solution’. The following year saw closer Syrian–Soviet cooperation, resulting, among other things, in the conclusion of a 12-year economic and technical aid pact worth US$168 million, covering about 30 per cent of Syria’s expected budget for economic development in that period.56 This new and emerging Cold War frontline contributed to increased tensions between Turkey and Syria and to making Ankara’s position vis-à-vis Moscow more precarious. Less than year after the standoff with Turkey, the notoriously unstable and probably badly shaken Syrian regime managed to manoeuvre Nasser into accepting a fusion between Syria and Egypt, creating a union between the two countries, the United Arab Republic. In this way, Syria’s leadership found a way to stabilize its own position vis-à-vis its many internal opponents while Syria’s security vis-à-vis regional foes like Turkey and ambitious neighbours like Iraq was ameliorated significantly.57 The creation of the United Arab Republic made Nasser’s version of pan-Arabism appear victorious, posing a serious challenge to proWestern governments such as those in Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. While Iraq and Jordan responded by merging in the Hashemite ‘Arab Union’, the Lebanese government in secrecy successfully turned to the US to secure a ‘regime guarantee’ – a promise that the US would come to the aid of President Chamoun, if his position came under threat.58 All this gave Turkey a brief breathing space. According to an evaluation by the US Embassy: If the concept of an Arab Union between Jordan and Iraq was not of Turkish origin, it certainly was instantly supported by every means at the disposal of the GOT [the Government of Turkey]. On 19 February 1958, for example, Turkey extended formal diplomatic recognition of the Arab Union – this date being some months prior to the time of the formal establishment of the new government.59 However, in the early morning of 14 July 1958, seen from the point of view of Ankara, regional relations had relapsed into complete havoc:

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the Iraq army toppled the Hashemite regime, dissolved the union with Jordan and unleashed fear that Nasserism had just won another resounding victory in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arabs. Although Washington and London managed to bolster the regimes in Beirut and Amman by landing US Marines and British troops in Lebanon and Jordan, Turkey was encircled by enemies on all flanks: Greece and Bulgaria in the west, the Soviet Union in the north and Arab nationalism in the south, something that prompted the West to stabilize the internal situation in Turkey. Within a month after the Iraqi coup, the IMF and the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) decided to provide Turkey with economic assistance.60 It is important to note that the US Department of State and the Treasury Department assisted this process because, until the 1958 Middle East crisis, Washington had been very reluctant if not outright opposed to providing Turkey with further financial assistance. It was against the same background that in August 1958, West Germany decided to grant Turkey a state loan.61 The new realities in the Middle East also forced the Turkish government to reconsider its external relations in order to stabilize Turkey’s security. Less than two months after the 14 July coup d’état in Iraq, on 29–30 August 1958. Turkey and Israel reached an understanding, concluding the Peripheral Pact.62 The Pact can be seen as a formalization of the Turkish–Israeli cooperation that had taken place since end of the 1940s including, among other things, Turkey providing Israel with one of the best sources of information on developments in the Middle East.63 According to Zorlu, Israel was a ‘Western element opposed to Nasser’s ambitions in the area’. However, so as not to affront the Arab states, the Turco–Israeli connection was kept secret. Nevertheless, the US Embassy would not exclude the possibility that Turkey’s support of Israel might become strong and overt, in the event that Iraq and Egypt should settle their differences. After all, if Iraq did not exist as a counterpoint to Nasser, Turkey would have to find one.64 In September 1958, Greece threatened to pull out of NATO, something that if implemented would have left Turkey isolated from the rest of the members of the alliance. In December, Greece made an

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appeal on Cyprus in the UN and, while Athens failed to get the support of most of the Arab countries, the United Arab Republic supported Greece. This worried Zorlu, who feared that Turkey might find herself contained by a ring of neutralist countries. It was the subsequent discussions in December between Zorlu and Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs Evangelos Averoff that led to the Cyprus agreements of London and Zürich in 1959, which paved the way for the independence of that island in the following year, giving the solution a certain ‘Middle Eastern dimension’.65 This makes it reasonable to conclude that the DP government gave up its claim for taksim because of the dramatic changes in the Middle East around the time of the Iraqi coup. However, the adoption of the formula of an independent Cyprus to solve the issue left the impression that vital Turkish national interests had been sacrificed to cover the costs of the bankruptcy of Menderes’ activist Middle Eastern policy. Indicative of such sentiments are the statements by co-founder of TMT Mustapha Kemal Tanrısevdi who claimed to be sure that the great number of Turkish Cypriots would have managed to force the British to accept taksim, had it not been for Menderes’ ‘unacceptable stance’.66

Domestic repercussions The Turkish government, according to US Air Force intelligence, was ‘deeply shocked’ by the coup d’état in Baghdad. At the same time Turkish public opinion and journalists, in particular, indicated no grief for the violent death of Prime Minister Nuri-Said who, they suspected. ‘never really lost his early antipathy for Turks’.67 It was in this situation that the young and rising CHP star Bülent Ecevit chose to openly challenge the wisdom of Menderes’ pro-Western foreign policy toward the Middle East. What happened in Iraq, Ecevit stated in the CHP organ Ulus, was not unexpected. It was the West and the Turkish government who for many years had deceived themselves and failed to see the facts: sooner or later Iraq would join the United Arab Republic or at least establish a federal union with that republic. Nor did Ecevit expect Jordan to remain independent for

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long. What Ecevit predicted was the establishment of Arab unity in the shape of one large Arab state. Against this scenario, Menderes’ pro-Western policy, as represented by Ankara’s leading role in the Baghdad Pact, and Turkish hostility vis-à-vis Arab nationalism, symbolized by Menderes’ bellicose policy towards Syria, could be depicted as totally bankrupt. In an ill-disguised attack on this policy and on the US and British actions in Lebanon and Jordan, Ecevit vituperated their ‘demonstrations of power’ as no answer to the problems of the second part of the twentieth century; the West must show a better understanding of the Arabs’ aims of economic independence, he said. If the West did so and Arab nationalism kept its ambitions within the limits of its interests, the Arab world might regard the West in a neutral fashion.68 Inönü demonstrated that he, too, was ready to challenge the foreign policy of the DP, and took steps to call for convening the Grand National Assembly in a special session to discuss the Middle Eastern crisis. Although the debate of the session was secret, CHP sources hinted that they intended to ‘hit hard’ on all aspects of Menderes’ foreign policy.69 Inönü intended to criticize both the use of Adana as a deployment area for US troops destined for missions outside Turkey and the possibility that the American armoury in Turkey might have been provided with nuclear weapons without the knowledge of the Grand National Assembly.70 Inönü’s decision was somewhat unusual because it had been the norm for the opposition to abstain from public criticism of foreign policy. Nevertheless, Inönü declared that Turkey taking side in Lebanon’s internal politics was wrong and harmful; its immediate adoption of a hostile attitude toward the new Iraqi administration was wrong and unjust: ‘We should be on guard against the provocative line which may even cause an accident leaving us all one [alone].’71 Thus, Inönü took issue with Menderes’ pro-Western policy towards Nasser’s Egypt in particular, and Arab nationalism in general and he did so in an unmistakable manner. In a clear address to Menderes, CHP publication Ulus’ headline read: ‘You are leading the nation to disaster’ while an editorial in Dunya ominously warned that ‘the Iraqi opposition had been forced into armed revolt’ because the government had closed all constitutional roads for voicing objections to government policies.72

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In a reaction to this criticism, DP spokesmen told the US Embassy that the CHP was only trying to make ‘internal propaganda’.73 Nevertheless, Warren, defended Inönü and resolved that his declarations reflected classic Kemalist principles. While Inönü took a stance against Turkey taking sides in the Middle East conflicts, he did not criticize Turkey’s role in NATO. For that reason, Warren urged Secretary of State Dulles to consider Inönü’s declarations with the following in mind: the CHP is the party of Atatürk. Inönü himself is imbued with Kemalism, which among other things, gave up most claims on former Ottoman territory in the Arab world.74 In a dispatch on the significance of the Iraqi coup in Turkey, the question was raised: can it happen in Turkey? According to Robert G. Miner, US Consul General in Istanbul, ‘certain Generals in the armed forces retain an allegiance to Opposition leader Ismet Inönü’. That was also true for officers of every grade, Miner went on: Just as there are Opposition supporters in all other sectors of the Turkish population. [...] The Turkish Government’s alarm at the arrest of nine officers in January 1958 for allegedly plotting against the Government was revealing, in that it showed that the Government gave credence to these reports of dissatisfaction.75 It was further noted that ‘certain members of student organizations in Istanbul greeted the Iraqi coup as a welcome blow for freedom’ and, according to Miner’s observations, ‘strong approbation of the Iraqi coup has been privately voiced by taxi drivers, white-collar workers, and even minor Government employees – in general those elements most tightly squeezed in the vice of the economic prices’.76 In terms of the national economy, the country was on verge of bankruptcy while the costs of living had risen 150 per cent since 1953. Furthermore, political favouritism seemed to be ripe, according to Dwight J. Simpson, writing in 1958: A sizable number of Turkish industrial projects had been undertaken, not for their own intrinsic soundness, but for political

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advantages to be gained – i.e. new factories being build in provincial locations far removed from transportation facilities or raw material sources only for the reason that the inhabitants of province concerned appear, in the judgement of the Democratic Party, to need extra encouragement to vote the straight ticket on election day.77 In the beginning of 1959, opinion among the press and opinion makers was that the Menderes government was in serious trouble, both with its own party and with the public. These negative sentiments were expected to grow: if, according to Miner, the opinion of the metropolis was a reflection of national opinion, Menderes and his principal associates were most unpopular at present. This was so, in the first place because of the hardships and economic confusions of the recent months. According to Miner, the economic factor was so important that: Any significant amelioration of the economic situation, any increase in the quantity of necessities available at fair prices, or income changes such as the planned salary increases for the civil servants could alter the situation in the Government’s favor very profoundly. However, as city dwellers were only a small minority of Turks, regardless of what the Menderes government might have done to these people, he had worked a remarkable change in peasant life, and Menderes personally still has strength in rural Turkey.78 It was in this situation that the CHP decided that the time was ripe for it to assume the mantle of democracy, feeling, in the words of the CIA, that the 1957 elections had given it a popular mandate to protest against the politics of Menderes.79 The CHP accused the DP, and Menderes in particular, of curtailing political freedom.

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DP attempts to conquer the state Menderes did use more and more authoritarian methods in his manner of governing, and he acted increasingly heavy-handedly against the CHP. A series of laws passed after 1953 placed severe restrictions on Kemalist strongholds like the press and universities, as well as on the opposition parties, first and foremost the CHP.1 One law, for example, provided for compulsory retirement of judges after 25 years of service, something that made it possible to purge the courtrooms of Kemalist judges and open judgeships to persons loyal to the new government. This action must be seen as a means on the part of the DP government to conquer the Kemalist state. The same is true regarding a law passed in 1954 that gave the government the right to oust civil servants without giving them appeal.2 However, it should also be recalled that the government was in the process of dismantling the legacy of the one-party regime, in which the lines of demarcation between party and state were very thin at best, and often non-existent. The most conspicuous case in point in this respect was the government’s confiscation of most of the assets of the CHP in 1954: by seizing the financial resources of the party, the government laid hands on money that could be claimed to belong rightfully to the state and not to the CHP, whose contention to be

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synonymous with the state had made such amassment possible in the one-party era.3 The government also targeted Inönü, accusing him of dictatorship due to his role in delaying the growth of democracy and in the same vein references to Inönü were taken out of school textbooks and his portrait was removed from stamps and Lira bills.4 While we should keep in mind that Menderes was presiding over a regime change and that he was prime minister in a state whose institutions, including universities and most of the press, were still staffed by people who owed their careers to the one-party state and whose loyalty belonged to the CHP, it is clear that the legislation also provided the government with a selection of instruments that were used to suppress dissent and opposition in general. Thus, the first press law passed in 1954 punished the spread of false news or insulting or invading the privacy of public officials, while the second press law of 1956 made it possible for the authorities to close papers and jail journalists if they were found guilty of damaging public confidence in or the prestige of the government.5 As a result of these, in 1955 CHP Secretary-General Kasim Gülek was arrested for insulting the government, while Inönü’s son-in-law, Metin Toker, was jailed and five newspapers were closed, including the CHP organ Ulus. In the following years, the number of journalists in prison rose regularly.6 Faruk Logoglu mentions that more than 800 journalists were in prison between 1950 and 1958, but he does not reveal the source of this information.7 In the same vein, in 1954 electioneering and political propaganda was banned from the state radio.8 In 1956 the government came under severe criticism for not holding by-elections and was accused of violating the constitution,9 while a new election law passed in 1957 prohibited coalitions, among other things, and thus the setting up of a united opposition front. The same year, restrictions were introduced on the Grand National Assembly, limiting the number and scope of questions deputies could ask of ministers, while the government failed to publish official results of the 1957 elections against charges from the opposition that the elections had been rigged.10 In this way the government further contributed to turning the layers of modern opinion-making – such as the press, academics and students – against itself and to making them rally behind the CHP,

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including ultimately the armed forces, resulting in Menderes’ support among the urban intelligentsia dwindling to virtually nothing.11 On 16 December 1959, the polarization of Turkish politics was the subject of a long letter from Ambassador Warren to Secretary of State Herter. Warren’s report was triggered by the fact that the CHP was beginning to charge Menderes with being an American lackey. The US ambassador ascribed CHP’s action to the fact that Turkey was a ‘young republic’ and ‘very inexperienced in the operation of a democracy’. While relations between the CHP and the DP had been ‘bitter’ for years, the recent increase in ‘bitterness’, according to Warren, primarily resulted from the fact that the CHP ‘began to exert every effort to win the next elections’. Warren went on: In this contest, the press has become involved and since restrictions have been placed by the Menderes administration on press activities, the press is largely anti-Administration. Because the press does not have the background that does the press in the USA and Great Britain, its record in comparison shows irresponsibility, bias, and accentuated nationalism. [...] The Opposition is unhappy because it has not been able to use advantageously either the close American relationship to Turkey or the US Embassy in an open campaign against the Menderes administration. This led the Opposition in cooperation with the venal Turkish press, to let loose an unprecedentedly vituperative campaign against the American in Turkey and American culture. [...] The Inonu Party, feeling the frustration of what comes from the ‘imperfect’ workings of democracy under Menderes administration, has sought for ways to undermine and damage Menderes and his government. This means that [CHP] has reached a point where one of the most effective ways to strike at the Democratic Party and the present government in Turkey is to charge it with supporting a dictatorial regime or to accuse the Menderes government of being mere lackeys of the Americans.12 In fact, still according to the ambassador, there were few substantial issues between the two parties, something that made the USA attractive as a ‘whipping boy’.13

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Thus, Warren blamed the CHP for the polarization and saw the party’s frustrations at being relegated to the opposition and its ceaseless quest for returning to power as the origin of the accusations against Menderes. While he also ascribed some of the CHP’s frustration to the ‘imperfect’ workings of democracy under Menderes, his wording was far less severe in his criticism of Menderes than the style of the CHP who accused the prime minister of being a dictator.

Reaching the point of no return Aversion to the government among the CHP was further nurtured in 1959 and 1960. It turned into hostility and hatred when, on several occasions, Inönü was attacked by partisans of the DP and after Menderes allegedly ordered the armed forces to intervene against the war hero and former president. The first situation occurred in May 1959 in the democratic south-west when Inönü was cut by a rock thrown from a crowd of pro-Democratic demonstrators. After he returned to Istanbul a few days later, the Topkapi incident followed, when Inönü was met with new and very aggressive pro-Democratic demonstrations. According to CHP legend, Inönü would have been killed had it not been for the interference of soldiers. More minor incidents followed until the Kayseri incident, which took place on 2 April 1960, when Inönü and several CHP deputies travelling by train to Kayseri, in central Anatolia, were stopped by rows of soldiers blocking the tracks. However, at Inönü’s insistence the party managed to defy the governor, who allegedly acted under orders from Ankara, and to get into Kayseri, again according to the CHP legend, passing by ranks officers and soldiers who saluted Inönü, as if he still wore the general’s stars he had during the War of Independence.14 In the following two months, the confrontation between Menderes and the Kemalists reached new highs. In the wake of the Kayseri incident, on 17 April, Inönü told a group of former high-ranking officers that it was now up to them to protect the ‘ideals of Turkish progress’; on 18 April, the DP presented a motion to the Grand National Assembly for the establishment of an investigation of ‘the illegal activities’ of CHP and the press. The DP defended its decision by accusing

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the CHP of using illegal tactics in the wake of the 1957 elections because the party [CHP] realized that it could not return to power through legal methods. The nation, the DP claimed, had no intention of returning to a single party regime, but the CHP and parts of the press collaborated to bring the CHP to power, even though this action threatened the institutions of the state. At the same time, according to the DP, the press tried to deceive the public, or stated simply, the CHP was accused of ‘undermining the foundations of society by encouraging all kinds of destructive activities and defending convicted criminals’.15 The CHP, in turn, prepared a counter-motion, accusing the DP leader of ‘illegal activities’ and of wishing to establish ‘absolute supremacy’ in the country. For that reason the CHP demanded that Menderes should be impeached before the High Tribunal.16 The session took place in an atmosphere that a US official who was present in the Grand National Assembly described as ‘charged with electricity’. The waves of mutual accusations culminated when a CHP delegate pointing at DP deputy Ali Sahin shouted: ‘He has a pistol in his hand!’ While Sahin denied having drawn a pistol or having come armed to the assembly, the CHP deputy was at pains to impress on the reporting US officer that he did see a pistol in Sahin’s hand. Havoc followed: while Inönü led the CHP group out of the assembly hall, the remaining 354 DP deputies voted for the motion which was to pass through a final reading.17 On the following day, 19 April, the first public demonstrations occurred. Four days later Inönü told a visiting group of young Turks – with an ill-disguised hint at the DP-government – that the ‘enemies of national sovereignty’, no matter whether an ‘illegitimate administration of the country’ or a foreign power intending to invade the country, should be met with the same violence. On 24 April, the CHP assembly group decided to oppose DP efforts ‘both within and outside of the Grand National Assembly’.18 On 27 April, the Grand National Assembly began its session to decide on the bill that would give authority to the Investigatory Committees. The atmosphere was already tense when Inönü stood to speak. As he progressed in his speech, the reactions of DP deputies

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became more and more pronounced and louder. Inönü accused the DP leaders of having undertaken one long series of illegal action since Menderes came to power, with the sole purpose of perpetuating his hold on the government. The DP, according to Inönü, had made ‘certain new arrangements for each election that they could not afford to hold freely’. In 1951, Menderes had closed 500 villages institutes, the halkevler, set up to promote official Kemalist culture in the countryside. Prior to the 1954 elections, the DP had confiscated all the properties of the CHP, and before the 1957 elections, they had passed a law to prevent opposition parties from cooperating and combining their votes. Now, Inönü continued, their latest measures ‘shaking the regime from its very foundation, are arrangements outside the scope of the Constitution and the law’. Inönü’s speech was addressed to the anti-Menderes front of dissatisfied civilians and military men. There was nothing new in it, as Inönü simply reiterated the CHP’s well-known accusations against Menderes of illegal actions. The meaning was that the CHP had long had a moral right to governmental power, as it was only by illegal means that Menderes had managed to remain prime minister. Inönü’s final message resembled a blessing, if not an exhortation that the antiMenderes front and the military take matters into their own hands: ‘whatever You decide to do, You will be acting in self-defence; just look at South Korea and You will see what a righteous nation should have in stock for our government’. Inönü was sombrely pointing at the fate of Sygman Rhee, whose regime recently collapsed in face of popular protests in April the same year: All Administrations which have entered illegitimate pressure regimes have all spoken in the same manner. You [Menderes] are also saying that. But you will not be successful. Was Sygman Rhee saved? Furthermore, the army, police and the civil servants were at his disposal, whereas these organizations are not in your hands. [...] When a regime of pressure is established, those who establish it think that resistance will no longer exist. Those who attempt to take these measures think that the Turkish Nation does not have as much honor as the Korean nation.19

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At this point, according to the reporting officer ‘the noise from both sides of the chamber was so great [...] that the Chair announced his inability to follow the speeches and therefore adjourned the session for 15 minutes.’ When the session reopened, the DP majority of the Grand National Assembly decided, at the instigation of the Chair, to ban Inönü for 12 sessions and to strike his speech from the record on account of having used a language that insulted the Turkish army and the Turkish nation. A new series of loud cries followed, resulting in a number of CHP deputies being banned for six sessions. While the DP deputies accepted the bill, the CHP deputies walked out on the session.20 The Grand National Assembly’s acceptance of the bill and the expelling of Inönü were greeted with resentment in many quarters.21 On 28 April, professors at Istanbul University condemned the passing of the bill and students began to gather on campus. As police entered the university grounds, the rector appeared on the scene, informing the police officer in charge that the police had no permission to enter and that it should leave immediately. In an ensuing clash, the Rector was wounded, which caused the students to initiate mass demonstrations inside and outside the campus. Police riot squats and the army retaliated with cavalry charges and pistol fire, while the government proclaimed martial law for the provinces of Ankara and Istanbul. While the clashes with police and army resulted in the death of a number of students, the unrest continued.22 On 23 April, Ambassador Warren had a conversation with Menderes. The topic was the escalating crisis. Defending his heavy-handed methods, Menderes told Warren that Inönü hanged many people during his career and had anyone done during Inönü’s regime what he [Inönü] has done recently that man would have been hanged. The prime minister obviously wanted to present himself as a lenient and moderate man in his choice of response to the opposition. Menderes was also at pains to stress that he did not fear Inönü: the DP administration had done ‘too many good things for [the] Turkish people to be swayed by this decrepit old general’. Menderes continued: I know how to judge [the] temper and feeling of my people. Since I am talking to you [the US ambassador] as a friend and

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not for publication I can tell you that my standing with [the] people of Turkey is so great that Inonu does not stand a chance of upsetting my government.23 Warren then asked Menderes if Inönü’s position as a former general and his relation to the armed forces was something his government has considered. Menderes answered: ‘We can rely on [the] army 100 percent.’ To Warren’s ‘Are you sure?’, Menderes replied: ‘I have no doubt.’24 Nevertheless, Menderes also mentioned that Inönü was in rebellion and that he intended to omit nothing that would bring his party to power. The only thing, according to Menderes, that Inönü did not want was elections because he was afraid of the outcome. Instead, he was thinking in terms of a time when he was a Turkish general and he had his picture taken with 13 retired generals.25 At this point, Warren confided to Menderes that he was very much aware of the political situation in Turkey and, although it troubled him, it was his first duty to see that Americans did not become involved in Turkey’s domestic affairs: Turkey did not need advice from the US ambassador and he would do everything possible to keep America from becoming involved in this domestic controversy. It was also the reason why Warren had chosen to call Menderes on his own initiative and not under instruction from Washington. The ambassador was at pains to impress on Menderes that he was talking as a friend of his government, and as a friend of the Turkish people and that such sentiments were the motives for the following warning: the up-coming NATO conference in Istanbul (to be held on 2–4 May 1960) would make the present political situation in Turkey ‘a constant invitation to all newspapermen to write of that subject’. And Warren was sure that press reports would be ‘most critical of him [Menderes] and his government and the present controversy’. In fact, Warren would be most surprised if the foreign press did not attempt to direct the attention of the US and British governments and others to the domestic situation in Turkey. According to Warren they would be ‘particularly disposed to do so because of recent developments in Korea’.26

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On 1 May, the State Department evaluated the meaning of Turkey’s domestic political crisis. Its long-term origin was believed to relate to ‘Menderes’s intolerance of Opposition’ and the ‘Bayar–Inönü personal feud’. The short-term origin was ascribed to the ‘alleged misconduct of 1957 elections’ and the subsequent manoeuvring for the next elections. The State Department believed that it was essential to disentangle the basic causes, i.e. on the one hand the government’s posture towards political opposition, and, on the other, more immediate symptoms such as students’ demonstrations. The latter, the State Department suspected, were ‘inspired’ by the coincidence of the preceding ‘Korean development.’ The State Department was worried, in particular, about the ‘deterioration of morality’ in Turkish politics. The main concern was that the ‘sweeping powers’ accorded to the Special Grand National Assembly Investigative Committee appeared to threaten the present constitutional framework. The State Department also feared that Menderes was unstable as an individual and would fail to ‘sense [the] temper of important segments of Turkish political life and world opinion. [...] We are particularly concerned over [the] possibility [of] his taking drastic action against prominent and respected leaders of [the] Opposition’. The State Department also feared that, if the political stalemate continued, the CHP might go underground and promote civil disobedience; this, in turn, would have ‘serious implications’ for future operations of US missions in Turkey as well as for US access to Turkish facilities. The latter fear originated from the fact that Washington suspected that the CHP was involved in anti-American agitation. Although the State Department was not sure whether ‘[CHP] is as deeply involved as DP suggests or whether DP is imputing this to [CHP] in order to involve U.S. Government’, it had been reassured regarding the demonstrations ‘by [the] lack of anti-Americanism’, by the loyalty and restraint of the armed forces, and by the fact that the movement had not spread beyond the students. This was not the case with respect to the DP’s posture towards the opposition as the State Department found ‘little grounds for reassurance either in type of actions taken or in timing’.27 In May the confrontations escalated: during the Istanbul meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers held on 2–4 May, an all-day curfew

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halted civilian traffic and the streets were lined with soldiers in battle regalia. Youth Day on 19 May saw major demonstrations taking place at Atatürk’s Mausoleum in the morning and on Atatürk Boulevard in the evening. On 21 May, a thousand cadets marched towards the presidential palace, followed by a large crowd of officers and civilians.28 On 23 May, the CIA warned the National Security Council in an alarmist way that ‘tension and bitterness between Turkish government [and] opposition continues dangerously’. The agency, in particular, pointed to the fact that the growing participation by the military, exemplified by the march of cadets in Ankara on 21 May, was a serious blow to Menderes’ regime. Alluding to the recent fall of the Sygman Rhee government, the CIA warned: ‘This is how overwhelming pressures grew in South Korea.’ The agency expected senior officers on active duty to remain loyal because they were indebted to Menderes for their appointments, while junior and middle-grade officers were joining retired senior officers loyal to Inönü in civilian-led demonstrations against the government. CIA warned that a situation might well occur that could ‘force [the] army to take over’.29 Four days later, in the early morning of 27 May 1960, the armed forces took over power by a coup d’état. The nature of the coup and its causes are still debated. Cem Erogul defines the military coup on 27 May 1960 as a ‘counter-coup’ staged against ‘the coup made by the DP administration’. By the turn of 1959 and 1960, Turkey had slid into a climate of civil war and had the DP, in Erogul’s words, continued its ‘dictatorship’, civil war would have been the result. The only alternative to the 27 May coup was anarchy. The greatest damage inflicted upon Turkey by the DP was that it almost forcibly brought the army into politics.30 Logoglu’s explanation follows Erogul’s line to some degree. However, rather than invoking the sceptre of civil war and anarchy, he emphasizes the instability factor in Turkish politics, in particular after the 1954 elections. He believes the DP’s view was that their overwhelming victory at the polls meant that the people wanted them to do as they pleased without minding the opposition – that they did not need to mind the CHP’s opposition except in so far as was required by the law: their victory had entitled them to eliminate

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from political life those who had ruled the country with an iron hand for many years.31 While Kemal Karpat does not regard civil war or anarchy as alternatives to Menderes, he agrees with Erogul that 1959–60, indeed, was a turning point in the process that reached its climax in the coup d’état. Had it not been for the extremely favourable atmosphere prepared by the government itself in 1959–60, the coup probably would not have taken place at all. Even if it had, its chances of success would have been very limited. The true turning point, according to Karpat, was the galvanization of urban public opinion against Menderes, a force that had turned against the Democrats because of Menderes’ efforts to curtail freedoms of the press and assembly in 1959–60.32 The emergence of this front, in turn, must be seen as the climax of a development that had been under way for some years. According to George Harris, the intelligentsia, the press, university professors and the army officers had long seen themselves exposed to government harassment.33 Thus, if we follow Karpat and Harris, the coup d’état was only possible because the armed forces could expect to act in an atmosphere in which hatred had united the traditional Kemalist and urban classes in a common front against Menderes to the extent that they were likely to endorse even such extreme action as a coup d’état. This interpretation makes it possible to see the coup as the result of interaction between the armed forces’ grievances against a government that had reduced its political role and social prestige significantly, and a united front of civilian representatives of the old Kemalist order who also saw their role and influence reduced by the Democrats and claimed that Menderes was acting in dictatorial way. This analysis is supported by the following impressions by US Ambassador Warren, who writes: ‘When the [military government] came to power, the press, the intellectuals, the teachers, the students and the army hailed the accomplishment of the coup d’état.’34 Warren’s colleague, Robert G. Barnes, Embassy counselor goes a step further: while he rejects ‘any direct involvement’ of the CHP in the coup, he stresses that Atatürk’s party greeted the coup with ‘enthusiasm and great relief’. He also stresses that ‘[CHP] campaign activities since 1957

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and the efforts of the so-called Turkish intellectuals had so aroused the articulate public that an atmosphere had been created which made it possible for the military to plan their successful coup in secrecy’.35 A recurrent theme in the mutual recriminations between the two sides was the accusation of the other party’s intentions of making use of the armed forces in the political struggle. The CHP would point, in particular, to the Topkapi and Kayseri incidents, when the DP tried to make the armed forces intervene against Inönü. According to Karpat, at the end of the day it was the DP’s efforts to use the army against the CHP that backfired: instead of preventing Inönü from entering some towns and meetings, as they had been ordered to do, officers and soldiers put down their weapons and warmly acclaimed the old soldiery. Menderes’ relations with urban public opinion and the armed forces further deteriorated as a result of the brutal handling by police of university students and the army’s reluctance to fire or arrest the demonstrators.36 Here Karpat is supported by an assessment by the US Embassy which found the main reasons for the coup d’état in the DP administration’s frontal attack against the CHP, and saw a clear line in the series of developments which began with the government’s decision for ‘an investigation of the illegal activities of the [CHP] and the press’, the resulting demonstrations which, in turn, led to the imposition of Martial Law in the latter part of April, and the coup d’état on 27 May 1960.37 This view is supported by an assessment made by the CIA at a later date. According to the agency, the coup was staged because the putschists opposed Menderes’ efforts to ‘establish one-party rule’: They feared that this would lead to civil war or require the armed forces to act with growing frequency as the agent of Menderes in suppressing his domestic opponents – chiefly the Republican People’s Party (RPP) of former President Inonu, who as an associate of Ataturk, had great prestige with the armed forces. Faced with such a situation, a number of senior officers agreed to join a group of younger officers who apparently had been planning a coup for some time.38

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The DP, in turn, accused the CHP of trying to return to the oneparty period by illegal means. Here it should be noted that the armed forces historically had a very close relation to the CHP, so when the government ordered the army to intervene against Inönü in 1959–60 and its attempts failed, it must have given substance to the DP’s worst fears, namely that the armed forces easily could become a tool of the CHP. This was not least due to the fact that Inönü, the party leader, was also a general and a close associate of Atatürk, something which seemingly carried more weight in the eyes of officers and soldiers than orders issued by the elected government. This is perhaps also the explanation for why Menderes generally relied so little on the armed forces in governing the country. Thus, he made use of martial law much less than any other government in the history of the Republic. In the 60-year period between 1925 and 1985, Turkey, in part or as a whole, was under military regime for 24 years. In the Atatürk–Inönü period, 1923–50, nine years and nine months passed under martial law, while during the 10-year-long Menderesera martial law was imposed for only eight months. This is also small compared to the following 10-year period when Turkey was under martial law for two years and eight months, not to mention the nineyear period from 1970 to 1979, when Turkey was under martial law for five years and one month, or the period from 1980 to 1985 during which Turkey was under martial law for the entire period.39 It is against this background that we shall understand Karpat’s account of a branch leader of the DP-inspired Fatherland Front, who stated that the front’s aim was ‘protecting democracy’. Its main purpose, according to this account, should have been to prevent the CHP and, in particular, Inönü from using the army to advance their own power.40 Zürcher also mentions the CHP–army link: on 25 May, Menderes suddenly announced that the investigation committee of the assembly had finished its work in one month instead of the projected three, and that it would shortly report its findings. As the commission was known to have looked into possible links between the army and the CHP, again according to Zürcher, Menderes’ announcement might well have moved the conspirators in the army to act.41 In other words

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the conspirators should have acted to forestall unpleasant revelations and possible purges. An assessment by INR in November 1961 elaborated on the deepseated nexus between the armed forces and Atatürk’s legacy: ‘the belief that Prime Minister Menderes was disregarding Atatürk’s precepts and was destroying the nation’s unity led to the coup’.42 The bureau also stressed the imitate relations between the armed forces and the Kemalists. Although Atatürk tried to ‘de-emphasize the army’s role’, the army was essential to him: it was crucial in his endeavours to establish a ‘secular Turkish state centred on the Anatolian highlands’; Atatürk’s closest friends and allies were active or retired military leaders and the army regarded itself as ‘the guardian of the unity of the Turkish people and of Atatürk’s ideals’. In contrast, the leaders of the Democrat Party, the INR noticed, did not have close connections with the military establishment and never attempted to make the army an instrument of the Democrat Party.43 To sum up: tensions between the CHP and the DP intensified from the period around the 1957 elections onwards. The CHP’s strategy was to cast Menderes as an exponent of reaction and the forces of darkness. Here it is important to point out that by using these accusations, the CHP also leaned on the one-party era tradition as the expressions constituted two main topoi in the discourse that the Kemalists had used to denigrate and marginalize their opponents since the early days of the one-party regime. The CHP and the pro-Kemalist press also went a long way to frame Menderes’ and the DP’s toleration of non-state controlled forms of Islam and the more visible role that Islam came to play in the public space during the 1950’s as attempts to exploit religion for political purposes. One prominent CHP member, Metim Toker, went so far as to try to portray the DP’s foreign policy as an expression of the same tendencies. As a new ingredient, the CHP also took upon itself the mantle of democracy, castigating the DP for infringing the basic principles of parliamentary government. While there is good reason to see some of the DP’s actions against the CHP as measures to dismantle the oneparty state, it is also clear that the DP was most intolerant of criticism

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and did infringe on the principles of free press, arresting journalists by the hundreds. While the DP protected its power jealously and was on its guard, it is equally evident that it was most suspicious of the CHP’s intentions, and that the party still feared the power of the institutions and networks that were manned by people from the one-party era. The tensions reached their climax from late 1959 onwards and created an atmosphere of mutual suspicion. The CHP claimed that Menderes was trying to use the armed forces against Inönü, and that the Prime Minister had established a de facto dictatorship. It was in this situation that Inönü told a group of former high-ranking officers that it was up to them to protect the ‘ideals of Turkish progress’ and exhorted the youth to resist even by violence an illegitimate government like Menderes’. It was on the following day that the DP took measures to establish an investigation of what the party labelled as ‘the illegal activities’ of CHP and the press. The DP defended its decision by accusing the CHP of using illegal tactics in the wake of the 1957 elections because the party realized that it could not return to power through legal methods. It was allegedly also a means to protect democracy and to prevent the CHP and, in particular, Inönü from using the army to advance their own power that the DP had inspired the creation of the Fatherland Front. As later events will demonstrate, Menderes’ fear of CHP army cooperation against him was not just a figment of pure imagination.

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CHAPTER 10 THE MILITARY AND MENDER ES

The Democratic Party came into being in a political tradition dominated by 25 years of Kemalist rule. The party of Atatürk and Inönü, the CHP, was closely integrated with the state apparatus, not least regarding its relations with the armed forces. Until his statuary retirement in 1944, Atatürk’s lieutenant Fevzi Çakmak was the chief of the General Staff, a position he had made into a platform for efficient political influence. Responsible only to the president, Çakmak frequently attended Cabinet meetings and had direct access to all the government and parliamentary leaders.1 Although the power of the chief of staff was reduced somewhat after Çakmak’s retirement, because he subordinated his former office to the prime minister, no firm line was been drawn between governmental and CHP activity. Military men would continue to attend party gatherings without a second thought, while some local commanders found it difficult to tolerate political opposition. This was also true after the CHP’s decision in May 1949 to move the General Staff under the Ministry of National Defence to ensure stronger civilian control.2 At the same time, indications are that there was an opinion within the armed forces that favoured a multi-party system. According to the later account of General Muharrem Kızılogˇlu, in 1944 a secret organization among officers discussed the prospects of ‘freeing the people’ if the ‘single party dictatorial-type government’ under General

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Inönü was continued. However, according to Kızılogˇlu, who was a member of that organization, the officers decided to disband when the Democratic Party was organized in 1946 because they believed that a two-party system would accomplish their goals. Kızılogˇlu also stated that the officers were ‘delighted’ with the results of the 1950 elections.3 In 1948, a new group of officers was organized to prevent future election fraud. Among its members was the future minister of defence, Seyfi Kurtbek. However, in 1950, four generals approached Inönü and assured him of their support if he wanted to prevent a change of government, a proposal that Inönü declined.4 Immediately before the 1950 elections, the Chief of the General Staff gave Menderes his word that the armed forces intended to respect the result.5 Once in power, Menderes took care to change the armed forces’ leadership. At the same time, he observed the tradition of appointing a military man as minister of defence. The choice fell on Kurtbek who had recently demonstrated his support of free elections. However, the DP’s interest in the military was neither deep nor abiding. Consequently, Lt. General Fahri Belen, who had retired from the army to join the DP, resigned from the new cabinet only six months after he had become chair of the Supreme Defence Committee in parliament. He complained that the board failed to meet with any regularity and that the government was interested only in ‘partisan’ actions.6

Conspiracy begins From the second half of 1953 onwards, relations between Menderes and the armed forces became strained. In July, Kurtbek resigned in protest against Menderes and Bayar, who, according to the minister of defence, had laid him down by suddenly withdrawing their support of his reform programme. His aim was to modernize the armed forces and to discharge a number of senior officers who were considered ‘oldfashioned’ and ignorant of the methods and technologies required by a modern military. More than anything else, it was Menderes’ decision to abort the reform programme that earned him many enemies among the officers who had been the driving force behind the claims for

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change and improvement. This clash has been singled out as the first stage in an escalating spiral of estrangement between Menderes and the armed forces.7 Such trends were further accelerated by the fact that Kurtbek was succeed by a civilian with no direct links to the armed forces, depriving the military of the last tie to its traditionally intimate contacts with the government. To make things even worse, seen from the point of view of the army, important defence matters including the prestigious NATO affairs were taken over by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Zorlu.8 According to a conversation that General Kızılogˇlu had with the Minister Counsellor at the US Embassy Leon Cowles at a dinner after the 27 May coup, by 1952–53 the secret organization of military officers mentioned above was reborn. The reason, according to Kızılogˇlu, was that Menderes was repressing what they termed human rights and the ‘ideals of the Atatürk Revolution’ and because the prime minister used every means to perpetuate the party in power at all costs with a ‘tendency toward dictatorial government’. Although it is evident that Kızılogˇlu’s account was intended to justify the 27 May coup in the eyes of the Americans, it contains some details of interest. Among these was the following information: the members were mainly young officers with only a few oldsters and no civilians. The members were carefully chosen and were sworn to secrecy on the threat of being shot if they divulged any information regarding the group itself or its objectives.9 This description fits well with the diagnoses of the fault lines within the armed forces that originate from other sources. According to information passed on from an unnamed Turkish officer to US Admiral Burke, the armed forces was enraged, in particular, by the government’s meddling in army affairs. Because of this, and because of Menderes’ reliance on political favouritism in his dealing with the armed forces, again according to the unnamed officer, a schism developed between the senior army leadership whom Menderes was suspected to support and junior officers.10 This process gained pace in tandem with the influx of US aid, modern weapons and new methods of training originating from Turkey’s membership of NATO. Some officers simply lost respect for their more traditionally minded superiors who, unlike

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themselves, had not been exposed to the sophisticated techniques of modern war.11 There was also a social status dimension to the dissatisfaction: military men and members of the civilian intelligentsia were annoyed to see their places in the power structure taken by representatives of the emerging middle class, something that was made all the worse because inflation and inflexible salary structures left many officers struggling to make ends meeting. At the same time, the emerging middle class was believed to be amassing wealth, not least by means of political patronage that was practised with little restraint. The problem was so acute that a good many commissioned officers were reported to have left the military for that reason.12 On top of all this, Menderes was widely quoted as saying that he could run the army with reserve officers if he wanted.13 Karpat, too, lists the strong and rising sense of social degradation as a crucial factor for the officers’ turning against Menderes. Citing a conversation with one of the conspiring officers, he gives the following account of their inner motivations: The prestige of the army was declining. Money had become everything. An officer no longer had status in society. It hurts [...] to see officers forced to take jobs of all kinds and wear civilian clothes and feel proud in them. [...] Corruption and materialism seemed to dominate everything.14 Another milestone on the road to estrangement between the government and the officers was Menderes’ attempt to place the blame on the armed forces for the September riots in 1955. His accusations affronted their honour and hurt the pride of many officers. It is to this same period that the first vestiges of what became the backbone of the movement that masterminded the coup d’état on 27 May 1960 can be traced, like the creation of the Society of the Atatürkists in Istanbul and two similar groups in Ankara. Dündar Seyhan and Faruk Güventürk from the Staff College in Istanbul were among the founders of the former group, while the most important of the latter was centred round Talat Aydemir. In 1957 the Aydemir group merged

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with Seyhan’s and Güventürk’s.15 At about the same time, Aydemir recruited Colonel Türkeş. Initially Seyhan and Aydemir contemplated swinging into action before the 1957 elections, but decided to postpone their plan in order to probe the ranks of politicians and senior officers for support. After their overture to the grand old man of the Kemalist ranks, Inönü, was sternly declined, the conspirators contacted members of the government: on 24 December 1957 Güventürk offered Minister of Defence Semi Ergin the opportunity to become the leader of the revolution, allegedly with the following words: ‘I have a pistol; it is at your orders.’ While Ergin declined the suggestion, he did not have Güventürk arrested immediately.16 Güventürk was not arrested until 26 December when he was taken into custody along with nine other officers. According to a source which the US Consulate General in Istanbul regarded as reliable, the arrests were the result of a tip-off from an army informer, Major Samet Kuscu, with the special mission of trying to uncover dissatisfaction among Turkish army officers. Kuscu began his assignment just before the November 1957 elections: equipped with a jeep and, not least, a generous representation account, Kuscu soon became a familiar figure at officers’ messes and he got the reputation in Istanbul as an assiduous and convivial host at elaborate parties. A less well-known feature was that he had all his parties tape-recorded by the police. It was supposedly seditious talk at an informal gathering that unleashed the series of arrests when, according to Kuscu, a group of army officers agreed that the retirement of two generals had been unjust and that under a CHP regime their capabilities would have earned them a place on the general staff. Here it should be revealed that the source of all this information was the same person who represented the nine arrested officers in court. He was known to be a militant member of the CHP and to nurse a strong grudge against the DP government. He had been imprisoned in 1955–56 because of his membership of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society, which was accused of playing a leading role in the Istanbul riots in September 1955. Not very surprisingly, therefore, he describes Kuscu as ‘inept’ and confines his summary of Kuscu’s finding to what

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is mentioned above. So, it is hardly likely that he would have revealed anything that might have compromised his clients or that he might have put any conspiracy against the government in jeopardy.17 Somewhat more surprising is the fact that none of the arrested men betrayed their comrades and that they were acquitted of all charges raised against them, while Kuscu, the informer, was sentenced to dismissal from the army and two years imprisonment.18 In this way, the verdict of the military tribunal also appeared as a declaration on the part of the armed forces that there was no conspiracy in their ranks, something that may have left the government with the false belief that it had in fact succeeded in eradicating all dissident officers. From the point of view of the conspirators, the trial meant that their conspiracy had become subject to public attention for the first time, and that the group had to act more carefully. However, the case gave little impetus to speculation and rumours of a possible military intervention. According to the US Consul General in Istanbul, the ‘nine officers’ plot’ was an example of popular unwillingness to take seriously reports of military disloyalty. The same was also true in the case of the government. The consul gave the following explanation, namely that the army was ‘almost universally’ seen as the defender of the nation from foreign attack, and the ultimate preserver of law and order at home. Only in a few cases since the creation of a modern army in 1826 had the Turkish Armed Forces, again according to the consul, had been a factor in domestic politics like the armies in newer Muslim states. The exceptions were the Revolution of the Young Turks in 1908, the war against the invading Greek armies and the struggle against the conditions of the Treaty of Sèvres as well as against the Old Regime of the Sultan between 1919 and 1921.19

Attempts to widen the circle In February 1959, the conspiring junior officers tried to involve senior officers. At the end of the day, their choice fell to Commander of the Army General Cemal Gürsel, a war hero who had fought at Gallipoli during the First World War and in the War of Independence. It was his interpreter, Sadi Kocas, who took the first steps when visiting

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NATO manoeuvres around Nuremberg. Kocas told Gürsel that he and other officers felt that a direct army intervention would become necessary and asked him whether he would lead it. Gürsel agreed but warned against any premature move: a coup should only be attempted as a last resort.20 During 1959 and 1960, an increasing number of officers became dissatisfied by the fact that Menderes embroiled the military in political affairs, not least the government’s request to act against Inönü.21 In this situation Gürsel finally agreed to head a coup d’état.22 This happened after the government had removed the general because of a critical memorandum dated 3 May 1960. Although Gürsel addressed his message to Minister of Defence Etem Menderes – no relation to Adnan Menderes – the memorandum was an ultimatum directed to the whole government: The President must resign, because there is a general opinion that all the mischief is caused by this person. [...] Members of the Cabinet who are greatly disliked, and whose ill actions have widely spread as gossip throughout the country, must be dismissed. The new Cabinet must be formed of honest, logical, un-forceful persons who have feelings for justice and kindness.23 Invoking his national and patriotic duty and his concern for the peace and stability of Turkey, Gürsel listed the following reasons for his demand: The events, beginning with Kayseri and including the latest decisions and the terrible happenings, have left a deep impression on the citizen and have given rise to dislikes difficult to erase. Especially the unwise use of the army against the students has increased the danger of the situation and a lack of trust and peace has risen among the members of the army. What was most feared has happened, the army interfered in politics.24 Here Gürsel lists the same series of events that that were discussed in the previous chapter and it is hardly likely that the CHP and the

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Kemalists would have disagreed with him regarding their implications for the future of the government. In the same vein, Gürsel enumerated the following demands: the governors of Istanbul and Ankara and the security directors of the two provinces should be changed ‘in the shortest time’. The Ankara curfew administration commander had to be changed. The new Law for Investigation Commissions should be abolished. All journalists under arrest had to be pardoned; students arrested during latest events had to be let free and education institutions should reopen; all antidemocratic laws should be abolished; the citizens’ right for freedom and equal rights had to be adhered to; problems of the army should be urgently solved and exploitation of religion stopped. While Gürsel admitted that ‘you have done great things in this country’, he compared the DP government with colonial administration by claiming that what has been done by the Menderes administration ‘can be done by colony administrations also. Colony administrations have done this, are doing this and will be doing this’. This must be seen as an attempt to strip the DP government of its national credentials. He also accused the government of having failed to make ‘progress take root and to adorn the citizens’ thoughts and opinions with high and noble opinions’. Regarding the latter, Gürsel made a direct hint at ‘the innocent demonstrations staged by students for freedom’ and blamed the government for letting them ‘being dispersed by troops and security forces’ and for ‘students [...] being wounded by bullets and with truncheons’. In addition, he continued: ‘This is a terrible thing, the likes of which have never been seen in the world.’ In an emotional invocation, he recalled ‘the screams of girl students, tearing a person’s heart, and the deep wounds caused in parents and the peoples’ soul’. The lack of understanding on this subject, Gürsel continued: [i]s the result of a great fault and a sad heedlessness. Shouldn’t we will happiness for the progress in the feeling of justice, freedom and rights in our youth? Do we want to leave the future to insensitive, feelingless, cowardly souled, materialist, unhappy people? My Honored Minister, my report is certainly most

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important and even most bold. But for the benefit of country, nation, Government, and even your Party, it must certainly be taken into consideration. Respectfully, May 3 1960 Commander of the Land Forces, General Cemal Gürsel.25 According to later accounts, Etem Menderes brought the letter to the prime minister. Seeing Gürsel’s memorandum, Adnan Menderes decided to resign, but allegedly changed his mind when he learned that Bayar refused his resignation. According to the same sources, Bayar was never informed about the memorandum.26 Subsequent events make quite clear that it was a last warning and that it was made in earnest.

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CHAPTER 11 THE 27 M AY COUP D’ÉTAT AND MILITARY R EGIME

At three o’clock on the morning of 27 May, the conspirators carried out the takeover. Later the same day, Türkeş read a declaration which was broadcast on Turkish radio announcing that the armed forces had taken over the administration of the country: Honourable Fellow Countrymen: Owing to the crisis into which our democracy has fallen [...] and in order to prevent fratricide, the Turkish armed forces have taken over the administration of the country. Our armed forces have taken this initiative for the purpose of extricating the parties from the irreconcilable situation into which they had fallen and for the purpose of having just and free elections, to be held as soon as possible under the supervision and arbitration of an above-party and impartial administration, and for the handling over the administration to whichever party wins the elections.1 Here it is worth noticing that the announcement – in contrast to Gürsel’s memorandum – blames both parties for the situation. This must be seen as attempt to appease DP supporters who – unlike those of the CHP – could be expected to react against the coup. Furthermore, the plotters used the same excuse as most putschists do, namely that

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the country was on the brink of civil war and that the military was forced to intervene in order to save the nation. In a later statement intended for an international public, the new regime also justified its intervention by its ‘purpose to putting an end to the policy which led the country to inflation because of its irrational and unwise investment programme, violating the principles of economic planning’.2 The intervention was also depicted as an attempt to save democracy in Turkey and to assist the political parties in playing the game by the rules. While the coup d’état was greeted by public joy in Ankara and Istanbul among Kemalist groups – in particular, students and the intelligentsia – the rest of the country did not show signs of such reactions. Menderes’ stronghold, the countryside, remained ‘ominously’ silent.3 The power was in the hands of a 38-man Committee of National Unity (Milli Birlik Komitesi) (CNU). On the day of the coup, the new regime summoned five law professors from the University of Istanbul and gave them the task of drawing up a new constitution. The following day the legal experts issued a declaration, which justified the coup on the grounds that the DP had acted against the constitution and made itself illegal.4 In this way, the new regime had been provided with entirely new reasons for toppling the government and legitimacy for remaining in power.5 At the same time, the declaration of the law professors was in line with the gist of Gürsel’s May 3 memorandum that put the blame on the DP government. The hostile attitude against the DP hardened on 31 August when the party was suspended and even more so on 29 September when it was dissolved.6 In October 1960, the regime gave a constituent assembly the task of finalizing the text of a new constitution. The assembly consisted of an upper house, the CNU, and a lower house composed of the remaining political parties, of professional groups and of the provinces giving the CHP a dominant role among the political parties. The assembly convened for the first time on 6 January 1961 at a juncture when a 20-member constitutional committee had done most of the work on the new constitution.7 The aim of the charter was to prevent a repetition of the power monopoly such as the one that the DP had held – something the new

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regime formulated in the following way: the introduction of changes in the structure of the state and the administration were all means to ‘preclude abuses of civil power’ and as guarantees ‘against the danger of party oligarchy’.8 In practical terms, these intentions were reflected in the creation of a second chamber, the senate, to counterbalance the national assembly because all legislation had to pass both chambers. One third of the members of the senate were to be elected, one third were to represent corporate groups and one third would consist of the original members from the CNU. As a further means of containing the power of the lower house – and in that way also the power of the Turkish voter – an independent constitutional court was introduced to ban legislation that it regarded as unconstitutional.9 The new regime claimed that the constitution had brought government power ‘under the control of law and popular will so that the Republic founded by Atatürk upon the individual’s rights and freedom would perpetuate the principle of secularism and thus acquire a social character’.10 This, of course, would favour Kemalism and those who held this world view at the expense of opposition to Atatürk’s credo and those who challenged this model, the DP and its voters. A full bill of civil rights was included, but its liberating potential was severely circumscribed by the fact that the armed forces were given a constitutional role through the establishment of a National Security Council (NSC) (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu). The function of this body was to advise the government on internal and external security. It consisted of the minister provided by law, the chief of the general staff and representatives of the armed forces. The president, himself a retired general, presided over it. Furthermore, Article 110 made the chief of the general staff a powerful deputy prime minister because it made him responsible to the latter and not to the minister of defence.11 All this makes it difficult to see the new constitution simply as a liberating paper intended to bring more comprehensive freedoms and rights to the citizens. The provisions sanctioning the influence of nonelected bodies like the armed forces (through the NSC), the Kemalist intelligentsia (through the constitutional court), and persons loyal to the new regime (in the shape of the appointed senators), indicate

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that the aim also was to prevent the popular vote from prevailing, if it brought someone like Menderes into power, and to secure the Kemalists a leading role in political process. This raises the question of CHP involvement in the military takeover, as the coup so obviously served the interests of that party. According to a report by the US Embassy, one of its representatives had talked to a CHP official on 24 May 1960, three days before the coup. Referring to a reported offer by the army leaders some three weeks earlier to ‘make themselves available’ to Inönü, the CHP official recognized the nature of that offer, but claimed that the proposal had been rejected, and that ‘ever since [CHP] contacts with the army leaders had been rather distant’. Nevertheless, the party headquarters, according to the CHP official, were convinced that ‘something was going on’.12 After the coup, the same embassy representative had a new conversation with the same CHP official. Asked if the CHP had in fact known of the coup, the official answered that the CHP had not had any knowledge whatsoever, adding, however that ‘some of them in the party headquarters “suspected” that perhaps Inönü was informed before the coup occurred’. The embassy representative, who was also drafting the report, then saw notes taken by Inönü’s son-in-law, Metin Toker, while ‘he acted as ears and voice for the Pasha’ during a telephone call with General Gürsel, the leader of the coup, early on the morning of 28 May. This contact was supposed to have been the first one between Gürsel and Inönü that related to the coup. According to the notes, Gürsel started by extending his greetings and expressing the hope that Inönü would not be angry for the action that the armed forces had taken. It had been necessary to prevent the political situation in Turkey from degenerating into a hopeless morass. Gürsel then expressed the hope that Inönü would offer such advice as he might feel able to give. Inönü replied by urging Gürsel to persevere in the great historic and national mission he had assumed and to remain steadfast in pursuit of his announced goals. Inönü added that he would of course be available at any time Gürsel might wish to call upon him for advice.13 This demonstrates that Inönü welcomed the coup and that he let its leader, Gürsel, know that he was ready to cooperate. However, while

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it remains a moot point as to what degree the CHP and Inönü were informed about the planning of the coup, if they were informed at all, the DP’s worst suspicions were confirmed, namely that the armed forces did intend to move against Menderes and create conditions that were favourable to the CHP. On the whole, it was not until after the coup that the armed forces began to rationalize their aversion to the DP and turn it into a more coherent ideology. This clearly transpires from a textbook used at the military academies after the 1960 coup d’état that, among other things, stated: With the beginning of the multi-party era it became clear that the reforms of Atatürk had not yet taken a firm hold in society, and that a substantial number of votes would be cast to hinder reformist efforts. In their struggle for power, political parties capitalized on such votes and began to make concessions on the reforms. Throughout the period 1950–60, religion was consistently and increasingly exploited for political ends and an anti-reformist attitude was adopted. It therefore became apparent that measures had to be taken in 1960 to safeguard the reforms which in 1945 had required no protection.14 In the next year and a half, the CHP collaborated with the military rulers, and the party proved ready to provide the officers with a platform from which power could be transferred to the politicians while at the same time the armed forces were left free to retain their much enhanced role in the political life of Turkey. According to US sources, it was the top commanders who wanted a return to civilian government with the military holding a ‘watching brief’ on the conduct of that government, while a group of younger officers were so ‘disenchanted’ with the politicians that they never favoured a return to civil government.15 At the same time, ‘something had happened in the mentality of the Turkish military man’. This was the diagnosis of Ambassador Warren who believed that the coup d’état had shaken the Turkish military ‘much beyond the realization of any of us’. By violation of the

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oath to not intervene in the political affairs of the nation, the individual officers and enlisted men had lost all of what they were proud of because they knew that in their rebellion they had abandoned the ‘Ataturkian precepts’. According to Warren, they also knew that had the coup been attempted unsuccessfully against Atatürk, everyone of them would have been executed.16 If we take this analysis at its face value, we should add fear for personal safety to the conflicting visions of Turkey’s political future; it was among the factors that decided the trajectory of transition from military rule to civilian government.

The transition issue: senior commanders versus junior officers The involvement of senior officers in the coup d’état on 27 May 1960 influenced intra-military relations and created a cleavage between senior military commanders and junior officers. The CNU had schisms and varying opinions, and, according to Warren, was too inexperienced, too young and too impressed by its own mission. Gürsel was the leader of the CNU. Next to Gürsel as the most important member of the junta, the US ambassador ranked Colonel Türkeş. He was ‘the man with the fanatical zeal, the inferiority complex, the rankling feelings that will supply energy and motivation for much that the CNU will do or want done’ and, should there be a serious split in the CNU, the ambassador expected that it was Türkeş who would do the manoeuvring.17 Warren also reported that Türkeş was acting as a prime minister and that he decided many matters that never reached Gürsel. In fact, there had been hints of friction, that Türkeş had been out of line and that he was acting as the leader of the younger element of the CNU.18 The CIA concurred: there was a serious split between a group of younger officers who wanted the CNU to retain power indefinitely, the radicals, and more conservative members of the CNU who believed that power should be returned to civilian hands.19 On 3 August, the radicals forced the CNU to retire 235 out of 260 generals and some 5,000 colonels and majors, while in October the Türkeş group managed to make the CNU sack 147 university

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professors and lecturers. In the same month, Türkeş and his group were contemplating the creation of a ‘Turkish Union of Ideals and Culture’. This new body was intended to take over the functions of the Ministry of Education, the Directorates of Religious Affairs and Pious Foundations as well as the press and the radio, thus establishing a totalitarian hold on the whole of the cultural life of the country. However, the forced retirement of the officers and not least the sacking of the professors caused strong reactions of disapproval. The fact that the CNU’s action were perceived to be politically motivated also embarrassed the military leaders.20 This, in turn, only increased the existing tensions between the radicals and the more senior officers. The conflict culminated on 13 November 1960 when the latter group managed to out-manoeuvre Türkeş’ men and ousted 14 members of the CNU. These 14 were posted as attachés to Turkish embassies around the world and were flown out of the country.21 However, in spite of the purge of the radicals, a great number of issues remained unsolved and Turkey was far from facing a smooth transition back to civilian government. While the CNU took steps to prevent a repetition of the alleged ‘political abuse’ that the armed forces held Menderes responsible for, the junior officers were doing all in their power to prevent Menderes and his supporters from re-emerging as a serious political force. In this way, the senior officers were focusing on institution building and on creating mechanisms that would prevent such an event, while the junior officers were more worried about the conditions that had brought Menderes to power. Hale connects the serious rumblings of discontent that marred the armed forces with frictions, in particular, between the ‘Armed Forces’ Union’ (AFU) – Silahli Kuvvetler Birligi – and the more senior members of the CNU.22 The AFU was set up in Istanbul as a radical pressure group probably around November or December of 1960. According to a later account by the old schemer and co-founder of AFU, Güventürk, his former consorts Aydemir and Seyhan, who had founded a similar group in Ankara – the so-called Mürted group – joined up with the AFU in the spring of 1961. They were held together by a shared fear that if

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power were handed back to the politicians too abruptly, the aims of 27 May coup would be betrayed. The fact that some top commanders also joined the AFU should, according to Hale, be seen as an attempt to control the body from the top and keep its members loyal to hierarchy.23 Zürcher explains the involvement of senior officers as a founding act and as an attempt to retain the initiative and forestall independent action by radical officers who opposed any return to civilian politics.24 Nevertheless, the very existence of the AFU made it clear that Gürsel and his colleagues among the senior officers did not have universal support in the armed forces, and that the danger of a split within the military was still real. In this way, the AFU at times acted as a ‘counter-junta’ to the CNU. At the same time, the CNU also faced problems in the political world. Although most CNU members favoured the CHP, according to the CIA, they did not want, the party to sideline the military by winning an overwhelming victory and to be tempted to resort to authoritarian rule as the DP had done. For that reason, the CNU wanted the creation of a new party, or group of parties, that could replace the dissolved Democratic Party without being merely that party under a new name. However, by May 1961, according to CIA, only little progress had been made towards that goal.25 One reason was that political bitterness continued to be strong between the CHP and ‘the leaderless but still loyal DP members’.

The shadow of Menderes The heart of the matter, according to the CIA, was that the CNU feared that Menderes had catered extensively to the peasants and retained the loyalties of many former DP supporters. Although the regime denied this, it posed a dilemma. On the one hand, the CNU was in favour of new parties seeking to obtain the support of former DP members; on the other, they feared that new parties might simply become captives of their DP members, a fear that, according to the CIA, had considerable justification because informal ties between local DP units continued to exist.26

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In order to probe the nature of the pro-Menderes opinion and see if it truly had the potential to coalesce into a ‘real’ political force, as the CIA believed, the State Department requested the Consulate General to evaluate the attitude among former DP followers. The report concluded that there existed a hard core of DP supporters and that it had not been weakened by the coup d’état or the intense campaign waged by the regime against the DP and its leaders. On the contrary: cohesion originally conditioned by common ties of interest and bonds of family connections had assumed the character of an allegiance of a ‘somewhat less selfish character’. This, the Consulate believed, was the result of a revival of sentiments of loyalty towards the ex-leaders, ‘who as days go by, in the eyes of their following appear more and more as martyrized men’. Furthermore, increasing popular disappointment over the new regime helped the DP partisans to remain self-confident and inspire them with the desire for moral rehabilitation. The report concluded: Although their party organization has been dissolved, one can clearly observe a growing sense of strength and solidarity among the DP following. Much of the foregoing is due to the realization of the support flowing to them from the agrarian population. Events and efforts since May 27 do not appear to have alienated such support.27 Thus, the Consulate believed that a pro-Menderes movement was taking shape. As an additional fear factor, seen from the point of the view of the new regime, we should recall that Menderes’ surviving the aircraft crash at Gatwick was nothing less than a miracle to the broad public and that Islamic opinion had taken the opportunity to frame it in a religious context – that God had chosen Menderes as the leader. All this nurtured fear that Menderes would be able to rally substantial popular support even after the DP’s formal networks had been neutralized and that he would eventually make a comeback. The referendum on the new constitution on 9 July 1961 gave some indication of the strength of Menderes’ voters. His supporters urged a

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‘No’ vote because a big popular majority in favour of the new constitution would be taken as a public endorsement of the 27 May coup. In the event, the ‘No’ votes accounted for 38 per cent of the poll. Although the constitution was officially accepted, the vote it demonstrated the extent of Menderes’ support in the country.28 The INR saw the ‘sizable’ negative vote as a protest vote against the CHP because it ‘collaborated’ with the military. Another important factor was that the formation of an upper house, composed of elected and appointed members, the establishment of a constitutional court and the introduction of a system of proportional representation for elections to the lower house were provisions, as the INR put it, designed to prevent ‘one-party dictatorial rule’ in the future.29 In this way, the INR regarded the new constitution as an anti-Menderes measure. The CIA put it in the following way: ‘The entire document is designed to provide the necessary checks and balances to prevent a new government from ruling in the authoritarian manner of Menderes.’30 As a further means to thwart an eventual comeback by Menderes, on 3 September all parties except the Republican Peasant’s Party signed the so-called National Declaration, undertaking to not resurrect the ‘Democrat Party mentality’ and to preserve Atatürk’s revolution. In an addendum, the party leaders also agreed to condemn Menderes for his alleged misdeeds. The condemnation was not to be made public until after the outcome of the so-called Yassiada court.31

The Yassiada trial and the question of Menderes’ fate Immediately following the coup d’état, a large number of members of the Menderes government were arrested and imprisoned on the small island of Yassiada in the Sea of Marmara just outside Istanbul. The islet was a virtual fortress ready to meet any attack: constant naval patrol kept all boats well away from the island, while barbed wire, and anti-aircraft and machine guns emplacements surrounded the prison. This level of military preparedness must also be seen as reflection of the state of mind of the putschists who obviously feared the vengeance of the sympathizers of the former regime.

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Among those incarcerated were Bayar, Menderes, the chief of staff, the chief of the air force, deputies, governors, mayors and prefects. According to the CIA, this was probably the first time in history that the entire leadership of a regime was imprisoned in such a manner.32 Warren believed that the regime felt that it had to eradicate and destroy every vestige of ‘the Menderes power’ in order to be sure that in the future representatives or friends of that power would never come to power again, because if they did the putschists ‘know that they will then be executed’.33 According to leading CHP politicians such as Ecevit and Feyzioglu, the fate of the imprisoned was predestined in the sense that the military junta needed to ‘prove’ the Menderes government guilty of some form of ‘political crime’. This was so not least because the holding of elections and transferring power to a new government could not take place before the trials were completed.34 Warren concurred, stressing the fact that the putschists’ original plan to turn over authority to a new civilian government within only a few days of the coup d’état required the holding of free elections. This ambition, in turn, created a nexus between presenting Menderes as an outlaw, writing a new constitution and holding elections.35 In this way, the fate of the arrested DP ministers in general, and Menderes in particular, became an urgent and most contested issue. Those who supported CNU rule would strive to ‘prove’ the DP leaders guilty and declare the defenders of Menderes to be ‘subversives’ or ‘reactionaries’. This state of affairs was clear from a conversation with a leading member of the CHP. According to the American consul at Izmir, Byrns, many CHP members were out for the blood of Menderes and the other DP leaders. The feeling was that only two or three of the former cabinet members would escape hanging. Although world opinion was expected to be critical of death sentences, the leading CHP member believed that this could be overcome because the trials should be ‘fair and open’. The main accusation against the former government would, according to the same source, be its ‘unconstitutional actions’, while corruption and the death of students would be issues too.

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Byrns also had a talk with the new public prosecutor of Izmir, Ömer Egesel, who was convinced that the DP leaders were corrupt and ‘deserving of punishment’. Byrns found the public prosecutor ‘forceful and determined’ and mentioned that he had gone to Ankara to report to the CNU about embezzlements in the Province of Izmir. All this left Byrns with the impression that the ideas of justice among the CHP members ‘might tend somewhat in the direction of vengeance’.36 The morale among the detained DPs was low and their mental condition was dominated by fear. A reliable informant of the US Consulate General in Istanbul reported the following. A medical officer had recently questioned the former mayor of Istanbul and local DP leader, Kemal Aygun, on Yassiada. The colonel, who had known Aygun for years, told the US Consulate’s informant that ‘he was shocked to find that Aygun had lost his self-control completely’. Weeping frequently, Aygun said that ‘he knew that he would be executed and thought he should be and that he wanted to confess to everything he had done and knew’. The colonel’s opinion was that Aygun was perfectly sane and had not been mistreated, but that his characteristic self-confidence and morale had collapsed. The Consulate General concluded that Aygun, whom they knew as one of the more intelligent and the most adroit of the DP organizers, was in position to provide much information about himself and his colleagues.37 However, Aygun’s readiness to make ‘confessions’ might well have been conditioned by a strong will to cooperate at any price to save his life, as he obviously feared execution. This atmosphere of immanent vengeance was also reflected in a personal letter by the US ambassador when, on 11 August 1960, he informally confided to Under-Secretary of State Lewis Jones Jr that: In all my service I have not found elsewhere the hate which is among the intelligentsia and [m]ilitary today for Menderes and his leaders. People, who in another country would be the ones expected to stand up for impartial trials, leniency, moderation, today in Turkey are calling for the execution, the hanging of Bayar, Koraltan, Menderes, Zorlu, Polatkan. This is frightening and it lends a new light on the ferocity of the riots of ‘55. This

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feeling is behind the revolutionary zeal, the post facto changing of the law to permit the execution of Bayar, the procedures and methods set up for the trial, the mass imprisonment of an entire party representation in the National Assembly and probably others. It makes possible the mass trial of members of the Grand National Assembly and probably others. But I do not want to get too deeply into the question of the trials. They will speak for themselves when they are held. It is sufficient for me to say here that one wonders how reliable an ally is a country whose Government is motivated by hate and can only see the trial of the culprits of the previous regime in the light of that hate.38 About three weeks later Warren wrote: The cry for bloodshed is widespread. We heard yesterday from three different sources that the trials will be held in October and that Bayar, Menderes, Zorlu and forty-seven others will be hanged. This state of affairs shows a facet of Turkish character that has surprised all but the oldest foreign residents of Turkey who remember Atatürk’s methods and the ways of the Sultanate.39 According to the CIA, the new regime committed many resources to prepare an indictment of the Bayar–Menderes government. The basic reasons behind these efforts were to establish that the Menderes government was ‘illegal’. This, according to the CIA, ‘would give legal justification for the revolutionary coup itself’. While the CIA was of the opinion that the Menderes government was guilty of harsh repression of liberty, notably of the press, of waste, of dishonesty and of electoral shenanigans, the agency believed the accusations made by the junta in public to be gross exaggerations. These ran as follows: ‘Menderes’ police had killed hundreds of students during the riots preceding the coup; the bodies had been ground up for fertilizer or hidden in refrigerators’. Such accusations primarily revealed that the anti-Menderes coalition was in a most revengeful mood. That it wanted blood is indicated by the fact that the new regime removed the 65-year-old age

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limit for the imposing of death penalty, an action which, according to the CIA, had the 74-year-old Bayar as its target.40

The trials One the eve of the Yassiada trials, which were due to begin on 14 October 1960, rumours were rife that ‘anti-revolutionary’ activities were simmering. Press reports were that a number of persons had been arrested, including a leader of the 40,000-strong Usaki dervish sect. However, according to the American Consulate General in Izmir, ‘one senses in talking to Turks in Izmir about the current political situation a feeling of suspense and beneath-the-surface tension’. Extremist DP partisans boasted among themselves that they were willing to shed their own blood to save Menderes. However, the reporting American officer did not really believe an uprising would get very far, unless ‘the enlisted men of the Turkish Army lost confidence in their own officers and the present government to such an extent that the army could not be relied upon to suppress disturbances effectively’, something he did not believe was the case yet. On the other hand, he had information from one source ‘which often has good inside information’ that the governor of Menderes’ hometown, Aydin, ‘strongly advised’ Gürsel against visiting his town, because ‘things [were] pretty bad down there’. Gürsel then should have cancelled his planned trip and relieved the Governor of his duties, because he [Gürsel] held the governor responsible for the situation in Aydin. In Izmir, pictures in the newspapers taken at Yassiada of Menderes mopping his brow made ‘quite an impression and an undesirable one from the standpoint of the government’. They were reported to have elicited sympathy for Menderes.41 The US Consul General was also contacted personally by petitioners begging for help to save the life of Menderes and the other DP members held at Yassiada. Two women from the upper middle class called his residence claiming that if Menderes and Bayar were pronounced innocent, the CHP itself would have them assassinated. To give substance to their fears, they claimed that the Istanbul chief of police – who was also held

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on Yassiada – should have been killed because of his knowledge of the 1955 September riots, while the authorities maintained that the cause of his death was a heart attack. Ninety per cent, of the Turkish people were in favour of Menderes, they went on, but could do nothing without weapons and they all feared the army. People did not dare to speak their criticism of the military regime openly out of fear of arrest. The Consul General believed the call to be significant because it indicated the feeling of many people in his district: ‘With their undying admiration for Menderes, their inability to do anything to help him leads them into frustration bordering on despair. If it leads them into desperation we can have some serious incidents here.’ These were also the motives for the General Consul to make sure that a written copy of the conversation was send directly to the Office of Greek, Turkish and Iranian Affairs at the State Department in addition to the one dispatched to the Embassy in Ankara.42 Although many of the stories circulating were sheer rumours, it is equally evident that the mood among the populace made the authorities ill at ease and unwilling to take any chances. Security measures in the Izmir area were tightened: personnel were transferred to the police headquarters in order to have a ready force available 24 hours a day to cope with any emergency. Leave was cancelled and military forces were reported to have been ‘beefed up’.43 Concern for the fate of the arrested DP members also affected public opinion among Turkey’s allies. NATO commander, General Norstad, suggested that President Eisenhower send a personal letter to Gürsel explaining ‘the US concern lest the current trial of members of the former government result in extreme sentences offensive to Western public opinion’.44 Secretary of State Herter, however, recommended that the president not send a personal letter to Gürsel at that present moment: I believe that it is well known to General Gursel and other officials of the Turkish government that the USA hopes that the result of the trials will be such that the entire Turkish Nation can unreservedly accept the sentences.

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As further grounds to delay the letter, Herter gave the following reasons: although the charges against the former leaders of the Turkish government might lead to death sentences, the trials might continue for another half year, if not more. Furthermore, if the sentences ultimately handed down involve capital punishments, the CNU must review them. Only then, if should such action be warranted, should Eisenhower take the opportunity ‘to counsel the Turks against action which might offend Western public opinion.’45 Herter obviously wanted avoid offending the regime and, at the end of the day, Eisenhower followed Herter’s advice to wait and see. This, in turn, made the CNU’s attitude regarding the fate of Menderes topical. To many members of the CNU, according to the CIA, the fate of Menderes was a pivotal issue regarding the question of their own personal security: preventing Menderes’ followers from regaining power was simply seen as a way to protecting themselves against vengeance.46 This was true, in particular, regarding the AFU that, according to Cem Erogul, feared that as long as Menderes remained alive, their future would be in constant jeopardy.47 The CIA was of the opinion that no matter what decision the regime made regarding Menderes, it would cause numerous difficulties: if it executed the DP’s political leaders, political tensions were likely to increase sharply – including anti-regime demonstrations; Turkey’s international reputation would suffer. On the other hand, ‘if the military leaders do not eliminate Bayar and Menderes’, the CIA went on: ‘they can not feel safe in relinquishing power lest the former DP leaders later regain positions of authority.’48 The split within the CNU became increasingly apparent as the fateful date of a final decision approached. During the trials, from their opening on 14 October 1960 to their closing on 15 September 1961, 202 sessions were held, with the total number of defendants amounting to 592. Of the 19 cases tried, three involved criminal charges – including murder, inciting riots, wilfully causing injuries and property damage – nine cases of corruption were tried and seven cases were of a political nature involving violation of various guarantees in the Constitution. Among the more bizarre

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cases was the conviction of Bayar for having forced the zoo to buy a rare and expensive dog which he had received from the King of Afghanistan as a present, and the case against Menderes for having killed his illegitimate baby, a charge of which he was acquitted. More seriously, Menderes was convicted of causing injuries and damage by deliberately inciting riots against the Istanbul Greeks in September 1955; of foreign exchange violation; of illegal use of the prime minister’s discretionary funds; of using the state radio for partisan political aims and prohibiting the same to the opposition, in violation of the Turkish Constitution; of inciting riots on 4 May 1959 with the intent to harm a deputy, the opposition leader Inönü (Topkapi incident); of impeding the freedom of movement of two opposition deputies on 19 and 23 September 1959 (the Canakkale incident); of impeding the freedom of movement of a deputy, former opposition leader Inönü (the Kayseri incident); of entering university grounds, firing on citizens without cause, and declaring martial law in an illegal manner and without cause; of inciting the destruction of a printing plant of a antigovernment newspaper in Izmir on 2 May 1959; and of expropriating property for construction in Istanbul without proper compensation.49 According to the West German Embassy, the trials were conducted in an atmosphere of peace and order. Hinting on the one hand at the example of kangaroo courts, the embassy mentioned that there were never episodes reminiscent of political processes tried at peoples’ courts; on the other hand, the mere fact that the proceedings at Yassiada constituted a ‘monster process’ combined with the enormous number of defendants did demonstrate that the trials were not ordinary ones: more than anything, it was a new regime bringing the old one collectively to a court which it had established itself.50 The sentences for violating the constitution were based on paragraph 146 in the Turkish criminal code which, according to Article 1, made punishable by death anyone ‘who violently attempts to change the Turkish constitution as a whole or in part or anyone who attempts to break the Grand National Assembly or attempts obstruct its functioning’. In addition, the court reactivated Article 3, which punished anyone who attempts to assist in such acts with 5 to 15 years of prison. The court had overruled objections that paragraph 146 only applied to

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physical violence and interpreted its meaning to also include ‘intellectually’ unconstitutional actions.51 Most of the sessions were open to the public and seats were assigned through an allotment system intended to bring visitors from the provinces as well as from Istanbul and Ankara. The trials pulled in an impressive public and the total number of spectators was estimated at 150,000. Press coverage was extensive, and the radio, which was the most effective means of publicity, aired tapes of the proceedings each night for an hour during prime time. Supplementing the radio, two full-length movies of the trials were shown throughout the country. According to Weiker, the psychological impact of the trials on the peasantry was the reverse of what the CNU had hoped. The attempts to tarnish the images of Bayar and Menderes through the ‘dog’ and ‘baby’ cases were dismal failures. The corruption and political cases had only minimal effect. Thus, Menderes remained popular with a large percentage of the rural population, and most detached observers were of the opinion that his chances for re-election in 1960 would have been very good.52 This was so despite the fact that Menderes’ appearance at Yassiada showed a very different personality from the one that the public knew when he was prime minister. Menderes was transformed from a man secure about himself into a depressed and anxious person fearing for his life. Further stress was added by the fact that during his entire imprisonment, Menderes was kept under the most severe control and isolation: he was not allowed to talk to anyone, not even his prison guards. Thus, when he first appeared in court, he was tired and exhausted and complained that five months of isolation had deprived him of his oratorial skills and his spiritual strength: I spend 24 hours in the same room, my guard is changed every hour and I am not allowed to speak a word with any of them. Please give me a chance to reconstitute my morale and my nerves; only then can I defend myself in a proper way.53 Menderes’ pleas did not move the court and he had to continue his defence under these conditions.

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A blood bath – that was what the minister of finance in the CNU government, Kemal Kurdas, feared, as he confided to the US Embassy on 12 September 1961 a few days before the Yassiada court was expected to reach its verdict. Kurdas was so upset that, on the one hand, he wanted to resign and, on the other, he intended to do what was possible in order to prevent executions.54 Twenty-four hours before the sentences were due, Istanbul was ‘unusually quiet’ but its ‘atmosphere tense’. The military was reported to be ‘in vengeful mood’ and the general opinion, according to the US Consulate, was that Menderes and Bayar would be hanged.55 It was still not clear when the verdicts would be released, but many people had planned to stay home or return to their houses by mid-afternoon, at which time the public expected the verdicts to be broadcast. All the local newspapers had been ordered to print the news only after the CNU gave permission, and then only the material authorized by the press ministry. The armed forces were ready to take their positions, while the behaviour of pro-Menderes elements indicated that they did not plan immediate ‘retaliatory action’. However, no one dared to preclude, the report went on, that ‘when verdicts have fermented in raki in slum areas local violence may occur’. Therefore, ‘all military sources have made clear that [the] army [was] ready and willing to deal promptly and harshly with any attempted disorder.’56

The verdicts At 8 o’clock in the evening, the public was finally informed of the verdicts in a 4-hour-long radio transmission broadcasting a tape-recorded reading of the sentences.57 Menderes, Bayar, Koraltan, Zorlu, and 11 others were sentenced to death, 12 to life imprisonment, 402 received lesser jail terms and 133 were acquitted.58 The reaction of the ordinary citizen was one of shock. While Ankara and Istanbul were reported to be calm, unconfirmed rumours told of pro-Menderes demonstrations in the towns of Bursa and Manisa.59 Furthermore, according to the West German Embassy, it was obvious that the regime, and consequently the court, really regarded Menderes

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and Bayar as guilty. While the embassy believed that the court did prove that the two men did indeed attempt to suppress opposition, it was hard to see what made Zorlu and Polatkan guiltier than any other member of the cabinet. After all, as ministers they had all approved and implemented Menderes’ policy and the embassy could only understand the verdicts against Zorlu and Polatkan as ‘political sentences’: next to Menderes, these two men were the persons whom the new regime feared most.60 It was in this situation that Washington decided to attempt to persuade the military rulers to spare the life of Menderes and all those who had received death sentences. A message from President Kennedy to this effect was given to Gürsel.61 The British, German, French and Pakistani governments made similar pleas. The CNU also received appeals for clemency from Queen Elizabeth, Ayub Khan, Türkeş and Inönü.62 The latter also warned Gürsel that it would stain Turkish political life forever and that the ultimate blame would be placed on the army. No democracy implements death penalties for political crimes and, if Turkey did so, Inönü sombrely warned, then her allies and friends would not look kindly on the matter.63 Now it was for CNU to make the final decision. Late in the evening of 15 September, Ambassador Raymond A. Hare informed Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the Turkish cabinet was spilt on the issue of the death penalties. The following persons had advised ‘strongly’ against carrying out the death penalties: the Minister of Finance Kurdas, Minister of Justice Turkoglu, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Selim Sarper. Outside the Cabinet, Gürsel and all the armed forces commanders shared this view. The CNU was divided too, but a majority seemed to be against carrying out the sentences. Nevertheless, the issue was a most contested one and Hare informed Rusk that during the past week the Turkish cabinet had been in session and had met with the CNU on two occasions. Hare’s source was Sarper, who had asked Hare to hold their conversation ‘very closely since any leak could be quite disastrous’. Whatever the outcome might be, the decision would, still according to Sarper, constitute a turning point in Turkey’s history and both parties were aware of that. The crux of the matter was that ‘reason

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and experience’ was up against ‘rashness and disposition to resort to brute force’.64 The latter approach was that of the radicals, of course. Later that evening, the CNU finally decided to commute 11 of the death sentences, including Bayar’s – officially due to his age – while it stuck to the death penalties meted out for Menderes, Zorlu and Polatkan. On the following day, Zorlu and Polatkan were hanged, while the guards found Menderes lifeless in his cell. He had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Nevertheless, doctors’ intervention quickly restored him to health, so that he could be executed on 17 September. The regime took no chances. It made the newspapers run front-page pictures of Menderes after his attempted suicide, pictures designed to counter the image of Menderes the ‘immortal’ and ‘God-chosen’ by showing the former prime minister in a state of coma with tubes and pipes. Likewise, the regime provided the newspapers with pictures of each of the three men hanging dead from the gallows.65 The West German Embassy found the pictures disgusting, a feeling that it believed was shared by the Turkish public.66 Furthermore, again according to the Germans, a large part of Istanbul’s population held the CHP responsible for the executions. The reasoning was the following: the three men who were hanged and those who received the most severe punishments were also those who had also been most hostile towards Inönü.67 The executions have been subject of much discussion. According to Hale, they were the gravest mistake – if not crimes – which the military regime committed, casting long shadows over Turkish politics ever since. Hale mentions that it was strong pressure from the AFU that finally prompted the decision to hang the three men. Two factors, in particular, according to Hale, made the majority of the committee decide as they did. In the first place, there was the danger of serious unrest in the army, especially from the middle ranks of the AFU, if Menderes was not executed; according to an unconfirmed story, a group of officers threatened to bomb Yassiada in order to kill Menderes and all the other prisoners if the sentences were not carried out. Second, if Menderes was merely imprisoned or sent into exile, there would always be the possibility that he might eventually make a triumphant return

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and wreck his revenge on the putschists. With this in mind, again according to Hale, it was virtually a case of ‘kill or be killed’.68 Weiker also mentions the Gatwick factor as a reason, namely that if Menderes’ life was spared, the peasants would again think of him as supernatural: ‘they found him guilty and even the army can’t kill him’.69 According to the West German Embassy, the crucial question for the CNU was whether Menderes was more dangerous alive or dead. In the end it was pressure from the officers which forced the CNU to decide that Menderes’ execution would be such a shock for his supporters that it would also serve as a warning in the future.70 The same day that Zorlu and Polatkan were hanged, Hare met Sarper. The latter was in a state of great emotional stress but gave the ambassador a detailed account of the proceedings leading to the executions: although the CNU and the cabinet met separately, they convened at the same hour and they kept in constant contact; Gürsel, the service chiefs and the majority of the CNU were in favour of moderation, while a group of younger army officers demanded the heads of Menderes and his associates. This group also kept in touch with the CNU and there was a risk that the guards at Yassiada would have taken matters into their ‘own hands’, if all the defendants had been treated with clemency. At the same time, Sarper was at pains to stress that the strong pressure for clemency from within the government itself, from the political leaders and from foreign governments, especially the USA, had forced the CNU to go ‘a certain distance’. However, it could not go too far: the army had great hatred of the previous regime and it might well be a problem to get the army back into its ‘proper place’. However, as a whole, the army seemed more or less satisfied with the outcome.71 Thus, according to Sarper, the lives of Menderes and his close associates were sacrificed in order to satisfy the vengeance of the army, in particular among the junior officers and the AFU. On 18 September, the day after Menderes’ hanging, Hare met Kurdas whom he found ‘tired and depressed’. However, he was also anxious to discuss his role in the chain of decisions, which led to the fulfilment of the death penalties. According to Kurdas, the fight for moderation seemed to have been won ‘up until the last moment’.

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He was very distressed at not having been able to prevent the executions entirely but refused to elaborate as to what had been interjected into the picture at the last moment. However, according to Hare, it was clear that military involvement was decisive. The whole thing had been a ‘terrible experience’, Kurdas concluded; his only hope was that ‘out of agony and torment something good might emerge’. By this remark Kurdas wanted to emphasize his hope that the people would come to understand the ‘perils of military intervention in politics’ and stand up against any recurrence; furthermore, following the executions, there was a ‘natural disposition’ among many in the cabinet to resign; however, according to Kurdas, they had decided to remain as a stabilizing element in order not to upset the prospects of orderly elections.72 Kurdas’ account also points out the role of the military as decisive for the fulfilment of the death penalties. He also hinted at the possibility that executions would have long-term effects on Turkey. The West German Embassy was sure that the executions, in particular of Menderes, would cast long shadows on Turkish politics and wondered how it would affect the elections to be held on 15 October 1961.73

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CHAPTER 12 TR ANSITION FROM MILITARY R EGIME TO CIVILIAN GOVER NMENT

On the eve of the elections, the CHP was widely expected to win a majority in the new parliament.1 According to the CIA, the party was simply in the best position: it had a large and loyal following, particularly in urban areas, and it was the best-organized party; but the agency also had some reservations: its popularity had declined due to its cooperation with the ‘occasionally inept military regime’. The latter analysis was based on a belief that the military government was not popular. At the same time, the military’s poor standing with the public was, in turn, exactly the reason why the agency was convinced that the leaders of the armed forces were likely to play a more active role in Turkish affairs, as a way to assure their safety under future governments.2 Observers were taken by surprise when it turned out that the DP’s successor parties, the Justice Party and the New Turkish Party, won 48.5 per cent of the votes against CHP’s 36.3 percent.3 The results have been seen as a tribute to the power that Menderes continued to exercise from his grave. It was also a vote of censure against the military regime which had ousted him: Menderes had become a martyr and his memory was exploited for political ends by virtually every politician and party and the DP’s political base remained a much sought-after prize by all neo-Democrat parties.4

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The INR saw the outcome in pretty much the same light. Both the referendum held to ‘rubber-stamp’ the constitution and the general elections demonstrated that the Turkish people were dissatisfied with military rule; the trials at Yassiada, in particular, were a source of embarrassment for the military and the bureau believed that the execution of Menderes had damaged the standing not only of the CNU but also of the CHP. Pointing to the Justice Party’s success, the INR concluded that the elections made it clear that the DP still had considerable strength in the country.5 As an ill-disguised reaction to this, the AFU gave a clear warning that it did not intend to refrain from a new military takeover.6 There was no question of it permitting a neo-DP coalition to form a government. At the same time, it was obvious that the armed forces and CNU wanted the CHP to lead a new cabinet. According to the US ambassador, the reasons were the following: like the armed forces, the CHP nurtured strong resentment against the DP regime; in contrast to the other major parties, the CHP was prepared to accept the CNU reforms and was expected to refrain from punitive measures against the putschists once the transition had taken place. In other words, the armed forces felt that the CHP was ‘safe’.7 As a further reason, the US ambassador mentioned that many officers and some CNU members were ‘emotionally prejudiced’ in favour of the CHP. At the same time, Hare warned against believing that the CHP was a mere tool of the military: the CHP party leaders simply considered cooperation with the armed forces the best means of gaining power and re-establishing a proper balance between military and civil authority.8 The Justice Party, on the other hand, had successfully appealed to voters in wide areas of the country as the ‘logical successor’ to the DP. These voters were primarily interested in rectifying the wrongs of the 27 May regime and some of them wanted revenge for the execution of their leader, Menderes. If the Justice Party came to power, according to Hare, it would only offer ‘little physical security’ to former CNU members and it was unlikely that it would support the ‘so-called’ reforms, which the CNU considered so important.9 As an instance of

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the quest for revenge among certain Justice Party members, the West German Embassy cited the case of Melahat Gedik. She was the widow of the late minister of the interior, Namik Gedik, who had committed suicide by jumping from his hotel room in Ankara as he was about to be arrested by members of the CNU. Melahat Gedik and the wife of the former minister of commerce, Agˇaogˇlu – who was serving a life sentence – publicly demanded satisfaction and were involved in a clash with the guards in the visitors’ room at the Kayseri prison where a number of the DPs were detained.10 At the same time, it was clear that the armed forces were not a monolith. There was no uniformity of thought and objective, and they were not united in their political goals. According to Hare, the top commanders probably wanted a return to civilian government, with the military holding a ‘watching brief’ on the conduct of that government. But there was also a group of younger officers who were disenchanted with the politicians and had never favoured a return to civil government.11 It was in this situation that Inönü proposed a compromise solution: the political parties and the armed forces should accept him as head of a coalition government based on the CHP and the Justice Party.12 At the end of the day, Inönü’s suggestion was adopted on the basis of an understanding that precluded the reinstatement of the officers purged on 2 August 1960 and stipulated that no amnesty should be given to former members of the DP. The new government was formed on 10 November 1961. Gürsel was elected President. It was a most precarious accord. The Justice Party, on the one hand, was troubled by internal divisions between pragmatics and ‘unrepentant’ supporters of the DP, with the latter group demanding that the reforms of the 27 May regime be dismantled and amnesty granted to the detained DP members.13 The armed forces, on the other, were equally afflicted by cleavages in its attempts to achieve the conflicting goals of defending the legacy of the 27 May regime and protecting parliamentary government.14 The Justice Party’s decision to accept a compromise with the CHP and the army was only made possible because of strong pressure from the armed forces, while the AFU’s reason for accepting the deal was that it had a firm conviction that civilian government could only survive as long as it

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was tolerated by the armed forces.15 This evaluation is supported by the INR. According to the bureau, some officers pressed for an ‘immediate military takeover’ when the difficulties of forming a civilian government became apparent. The INR believed that it was most doubtful that a civilian government formed under the threat of another military takeover would be able perform effectively. For these reasons the bureau imagined that the military would keep ‘very tight reins on any civilian government’ and that another takeover by the military was a ‘distinct possibility’.16 The INR concluded: The present situation in Turkey does not augur well for the reestablishment of democratic processes in Turkey. On the contrary, unless the situation changes, unexpectedly, it is likely that the military influence in political matters will perpetuate itself rather than fade. The end result may well be a return to military rule. In that case, the military government will probably be dominated by forces which favour a prolonged period of military rule. The government would then largely lose the transitional character of the CNU regime and might approach more closely the type of long-term military government which has emerged in other countries in the Middle East.17 Here the INR gives a very different and less glorifying picture of the Turkish armed forces than the one we often meet in that the bureau depicts its political mission as being the same as that of the armed forces in the neighbouring countries in the Middle East. By the end of 1961, the balance was the following. While Turkey was under de jure civilian rule, the government was more or less at the mercy of the whims of the armed forces. In this relationship, Inönü’s political persona was pivotal: he played the role of the swingman ‘in reverse’, i.e. as the person around whom the transition from military rule to civilian government revolved. Normally, the swingman is an officer who will see to that the soldiers return to the barracks in good order and stay there while the new civilian government consolidates its power. In the case of the Turkish transition, the armed forces were so powerful that the price for their returning to the barracks was to

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get a prime minister who they trusted could see to it that the civilian government would not act against the interests of the armed forces. Thus, Inönü’s role was to give the new government the appearance of being a civilian one while at the same time to make sure that it would not challenge the power of the military.

The amnesty issue and the radical officers Soon prophecies of another military takeover threatened to materialize. Calls from the Justice Party and the New Turkish Party that amnesty should be given to the detained DP members made retired Turkish Air Force Major Muncip Atakli warn that such an action would unleash military intervention far more ‘terrifying’ than the previous one.18 According to unconfirmed US information, the Istanbul Staff College was the place where the organizing of a coup was undertaken. In December 1961, the same institution had distributed sealed orders across the country for use in the event of a military takeover. However, the chief of the general staff was aware of the planning and had made it clear to the plotters that a coup would only be carried out under his authority.19 There was also information from other sources about a planned coup: on 11 January 1962, a US Navy intelligence agent indicated that dissatisfaction was widespread and increasing in the armed forces. The same agent pointed to Istanbul as the trouble spot, too: a group there was working on plans to take over the government for a brief period, promulgate a new constitution, draw up a legislative programme and then turn over the reins of government to a civilian group in the form of a ‘mild dictatorship headed by Inönü’. The plan was to retain Gürsel and most of the CHP ministers, while the all other civilian ministers would be selected by the military. The aim clearly was to purge the government of its pro-DP members.20 It seems very likely that the US Navy agent was referring to the Istanbul Staff College and the same planning which the other US intelligence source was reporting on. The US Navy agent also mentioned that Inönü was aware of the plan, but that he was not believed to have taken an active part. The decision to set in motion a coup would be

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at the discretion of Chief of the General Staff General, Cevdet Sunay. Although Sunay was regarded as one of the more tolerant among military men vis-à-vis Justice Party participation in the government, and although he was seen as a moderating force, it was believed that Sunay’s ‘patience’ with the DP successor party would run out if Inönü was forced make concessions on the issue of amnesty for the imprisoned DP members.21 Thus, the spectre of DP-resurgence loomed large and, although the armed forces were split, the question of amnesty seemed to be the issue that really had the potential to unite all factions and eventually make the senior officers support a new coup d’état. It is against this background we shall understand Inönü’s stubborn resistance to the demands for amnesty and Sunay’s efforts to contain the radical officers. On 19 January 1962, Inönü demanded that the AFU be dissolved. This, in turn, infuriated the radicals who turned their anger against the chief of the General Staff, something which made the CIA conclude that ‘the internal situation in Turkey today is bad and the future not promising’. The agency listed more than 20 officers as ‘leaders of the military Junta’ who ‘believe that [the] Chief of the Turkish General Staff, Cevdet Sunay, is too hesitant and passive and [...] do not consider him as a leader suitable to their purposes’. Among the dissatisfied were Colonel Aydemir and Brigadier General Güventürk, senators and all former members of the CNU, i.e. the ‘old guard’ of the former military regime and those who owed their position to that government, namely the senators. The two archconspirators Aydemir and Güventürk had been crucial members in the early conspiracy that culminated in the 27 May coup d’état.22 The CIA warned that the activities of these men were affecting the conduct of the government and the parliament, creating an atmosphere of fear and anxiety.23 In other words, the lopsided balance of power between the elected institutions and the armed forces and fear of military intervention obviously impaired normal parliamentary processes. Nevertheless, Inönü was well aware of the situation and was reported not to be concerned. The fact that Sunay was ‘completely devoted’ to him and kept him constantly informed of all activities in the armed

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forces made the CIA expect that the ‘junta’ would not act as long as Inönü was Prime Minister. However, should the military revolt, it would be a calamity for Turkey: there was, in the words of the CIA, ‘no tolerance of a second revolution’. The public was against it and a new coup would lead to violent clashes within the armed forces. Although the radical officers refused to believe that enlisted men and NCOs would fire at their commanders, the CIA thought otherwise. It had happened before and the CIA stressed the fact that former Democratic Party members were preparing the young conscripts entering and leaving the military service for such a situation. In addition, the CIA did not believe that the military as a whole would support the junta.24 Thus, the agency pictured a Turkey whose populace at large was against another coup and an army that was divided to the degree that the CIA would not exclude the scenario of soldiers taking up arms against their fellow soldiers. This assessment was very much to the point. During the month of February, the crisis escalated: on 9 February 1962, the radicals warned that they would take some ‘unspecified’ steps on 28 February 1962. Reacting against the arrests of ex-officials of the DP on 13–14 February, a number of Justice Party deputies attacked the legality of what was now labelled the 27 May military revolution. This, in turn, prompted Sunay to speak out against a coup d’état, notifying his fellow officers on 18 February that only Inönü’s death or resignation would make him support such proceedings.25 Three days later, on 21 February, the General Staff ordered the transfer of several key dissident officers. The following day, on 22 February Aydemir swung into action supported by a number of those officers who had been transferred and other radicals.26

Aydemir’s first attempt: the 22 February abortive coup d’état There exist two versions of the story of the attempted coup. While both accounts agree that Aydemir failed to get the most important military men and politicians on his side – Inönü, Gürsel and Sunay in

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particular – they differ in how events evolved. According to one story, Aydemir held the three leaders captive in Çankaya Presidential Palace and only let them leave when he realized that units loyal to the government surrounded the palace. According to the other version, Inönü, Gürsel and Sunay managed to escape on their own. Nevertheless, it stands as fact that Aydemir’s move caused fear – even panic – and was taken deadly seriously and, according to Hale, the putschists were much nearer to success than conventional wisdom normally has it.27 Aydemir’s attempted coup demonstrated the loyalty of the senior commanders vis-à-vis the government. Their loyalty is often ascribed to the fact that Inönü was the only prominent survivor of the Atatürk era.28 However, according to a long report from the Canadian Embassy, there were also internal reasons for this loyalty: The commanders have seen the unhappy effects on authority and discipline in the army of one coup d’état and its aftermath, and may fear that another military takeover could seriously damage the armed forces’ effectiveness. And there is good reason to believe that concern for the armed forces was a most important motive. Thus, according to the same source, nobody in the army was ‘very vocal’ in condemning the so-called 22 February dissidents. Sunay attempted to heap most of the blame on imaginary ‘foreign provocations’ and the first army commander in Istanbul, Lieutenant General Irfan Tansel, placed the blame on the politicians. In a letter to Inönü, he demanded that the situation in the Grand National Assembly improve and that the government take urgent action to secure the economic revival of the country. He also claimed that certain newspapers had done much damage and stressed that the most important task was to get on without delay with the business of running the state. Tural obviously had in mind pro-DP elements in parliament and the press. General Tansel, Chief of the Air Force, was reported to have reacted similarly. He had been the leader of those who on 14 and 15 September 1961 had put pressure on the CNU to achieve the execution of Menderes. He was also believed to have been in touch with

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‘radical young elements’ in the armed forces and was considered to be their spokesman. The British Embassy believed that Tansel and several other senior commanders had asked for something in return from Inönü for their ‘crucial support for his regime’.29

The crucial goodwill of the senior commanders Taking into account the government’s dependence on the goodwill of the senior commanders, Inönü was hardly in a position to refuse very much. This state of affairs was soon reflected in government–army relations, namely by the fact that although the 22 February dissidents were reported to be ‘completely unrepentant’ and to have said that they would ‘do it again’, the government confined itself to having the chief plotters dismissed or transferred. Inönü did nothing more than simply discredit these individuals by referring to them as ‘ambitious and self-seeking’.30 As a further indication of the lopsided power balance between the armed forces and the civilian government, on 23 February, the day after the attempted coup, the government and military reached an agreement which required a law to exempt from prosecution the officers involved in the Aydemir putsch. A draft law to this effect was due to come up for a reading in parliament in April. The Justice Party was expected to create difficulties for Inönü vis-à-vis the armed forces by making it a condition for its support that steps were taken to give amnesty the imprisoned ex-DP leaders at the same time. The INR expected this situation to create ‘serious difficulties’ for the coalition government as the military was ‘seriously opposed’ to using the draft law as an ‘excuse for political amnesty’.31 Seen against the background of the full course of events since the transition to civilian government in 1961, Aydemir’s abortive coup d’état was regarded by the INR as ‘symptomatic’ of the officer-corps’ dissatisfaction: although senior officers had continued to support the coalition government, field-grade officers in both Ankara and Istanbul began to plan its overthrow shortly after it assumed power. They considered the government ineffectual and believed that the Justice

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Party posed a threat to the officer corps. The senior officers put down the revolt ‘not because of unqualified approval of the coalition’ but because they considered it the best alternative at present. They were more aware than were the junior officers of the adverse effects of a resumption of military rule: it would not only harm Turkey but also the armed forces.32 All this suggests that the government felt compelled to watch its steps most carefully in order not to fall out with its supporters among the senior commanders and risk another military coup d’état. It is probably also in the light of these uneven power relations that we should understand the substantial enhancement of the legal position of the National Security Council in March 1962. Originally, NSC was created by Article III in the 1961 Constitution and the new bill allowed the council to interfere in the deliberations of the cabinet through regular consultations and participation in preparatory discussions.33 At the same time, it is noteworthy that the strengthening of NSC took place at a juncture when the AFU was dissolved, and it is tempting to see this decision as an attempt to make the NSC a formally sanctioned alternative to that body. In contrast to the clandestine and conspiratorial AFU, the NSC was better trimmed to co-exist with a parliamentary system; although essentially un-democratic, its existence was sanctioned by the Constitution. And as an established institution, it could provide a stable channel for the military to perpetuate its influence on the political process in ways that were much more discreet to the public eye than naked intervention. However, the NSC was an institution for the most senior officers only. Given the severe frictions between the senior military leadership and junior officers, the NSC alone could therefore hardly prevent military unrest from continuing. This created a fear that any outward signs of impending troubles in the armed forces would be more elusive and that plotters would work more discreetly and might go undetected by the government and foreign observers. At the same time, foreign observers expected that the senior officers would function as a brake on such tendencies. After all, according to one such source referring to the choreography of Aydemir’s abortive coup, the General Staff would hate to witness once more the less than dignified scene of ‘the Government

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of a sizable NATO power [...] scurry[ing] down Cankaya hill from the Presidential Palace and moving to Air Forces Headquarters outside the city because, so to speak, the Cadets and their Commanders were in a bad mood’.34 During the first months following Aydemir’s attempted coup, the government in Ankara was believed to be almost out of danger, while the US Embassy expected Istanbul to be the scene to watch. The Staff College was regarded as the ‘main centre’ of political agitation. The Swedish ambassador, who had sources within the armed forces, also pointed out a military group with civilian elements and cells in Izmir and several other centres.35 In short, destabilization on all levels seemed to be endemic: on the one hand, ‘ill will’ at the lower levels between the Land Forces and the Air Force was reported to have made the latter threaten to bomb the War School;36 on the other, some Justice Party deputies were pressing for an amnesty for the imprisoned DP leaders. This makes it tempting to conclude that the continued survival of civilian government was almost entirely depending on the grace of the armed forces.

Inönü’s role in the amnesty issue and the coming of permanent instability The issue of amnesty for the ex-DP leaders continued to be a highly contested one. In the months following Aydemir’s abortive coup, it intersected with the question of the treatment meted out to the rebels. Pro-DP supporters demanded quid pro quo: if, as Inönü had promised, an amnesty was extended to Aydemir’s men, it should also be granted to the survivors of the Menderes government. This made the armed forces react and, on 23 April Sunay warned that it was ‘an ugly trick to mix the military amnesty with the other’.37 In this situation, Inönü attempted a compromise solution: amnesty was extended to the military rebels while the sentences passed at Yassiada were reduced. However, pro-DP deputies from his Justice Party coalition partner rejected this way out as being insufficient.38 In response, on 30 May, Inönü declared that he would resign. This decision was a challenge to the senior officers who had

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put their stakes on Inönü in the power struggle with the junior officers. The CIA warned that this scenario resembled ‘the critical situation which existed in the Armed Forces prior to 22 February 1962’ and that a déjà-vu of the chain of events might well occur. According to the agency, Inönü’s decision had come as a surprise to most military officers in Ankara and the CIA noticed that as late as 9 pm, neither the Turkish General Staff duty officer nor the ground forces duty officers were aware of Inönü’s resignation. The CIA also remarked that immediately before Inönü announced his decision, Tansel and several other generals pleaded with him not to resign. These actions indicate that the decision was Inönü’s own, that the senior commanders regarded Inönü’s continuance as prime minister as the preferable option and that they wanted to avoid another coup d’état.39 Naked military intervention, in turn, was exactly the sort of action that was preferred by the junior officers. Inönü’s resignation unleashed a new series of conspiratorial activities. This state of affairs is reflected in a number of US intelligence reports written between June 1962 and May 1963. These provide important new evidence which can help to correct or supplement the existing, often self-serving, statements and later accounts by the actors involved. We shall try to reconstruct the basic lines of the power struggle within the armed forces and the conflicting views vis-à-vis the pros and cons of the continuance of civilian government and direct military intervention. On 6 June, the CIA reported that planning for a military takeover of the government was in progress. It took the form of cooperation between junior officers and commanders placed at ‘the highest level of Turkish Military’.40 According to one source,41 Yildiz Commandant Brigadier General Faruk Gurler was a leading figure. The army, navy and air force were also reported to be involved.42 The latter observation was confirmed by other sources: ‘An unidentified Colonel’ who was serving as a courier between the groups planning a military takeover in Ankara and Istanbul stated to a former CHP official on 4 June that the military, under the leadership of its highest commanders, was

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ready to take over the government in ten days if the political crisis continued. Even if Inönü was successful in his efforts to form a new cabinet, the military leaders assumed that their intervention would ‘be required in at the most a few months’. The junior officers, in particular, majors and lieutenant colonels at Yildiz, were complaining that they were ‘fed up’ with political parties and instead wanted a government comprised of ‘civilian experts’, like ‘reliable’ members of the press, to become future deputies and senators.43 The anatomy of this conspiracy indicates a certain willingness on the part of the senior officers to cooperate with their juniors and it differs from the movement that Aydemir was heading. Here it worth noting that the conspiracy took place in the shadow of Inönü’s resignation, meaning that the more senior officers were facing the danger of loosing ‘their man’, the one who had made it possible for them to overrule the resistance of the radicals to transferring power to a civilian government. Furthermore, the senior officers no doubt feared the strength of the radicals, something that was reflected in their reactions to Aydemir’s putsch and their recommending impunity for his actions. For that reason, we should also expect them to have been more willing than previously to strike a deal with the junior officers even if it meant obvious military intervention.

Planning for a ‘Kemalist philosophers’ regime’ The goal of the conspiracy was to establish a two-house legislature of selected civilian leaders from various fields, a kind of a Plato’s Republic with the Kemalist intelligentsia in the role of the ‘philosophers’. The intention was not to act ‘against’ Inönü because he was believed to be ‘sympathetic’ to their intervention if he should fail to form a government. This indicates that the officers believed that there was some kind of a common front between Inönü, the armed forces and the Kemalist establishment that stood united vis-à-vis the Justice Party, in particular those within it who were seen as pro-DP.44 Therefore, the fact that Inönü was attempting to form a new government without the Justice Party’s participation, according to the CIA,

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had delayed the military’s plans ‘for the time being’. Nevertheless, the agency was of the opinion that the military was merely waiting for ‘a complete political crisis’, for the right moment to act, because the officers believed that such a crisis was inevitable because of the ‘critically different’ attitudes of the leading political parties. This indicates that the plotters were aware that a new military intervention would most likely offend public opinion and that they feared adverse publicity unless it could be convincingly claimed that it was the civilian politicians who had bankrupted the government.45 The coup in question was not intended to constitute a ‘revolution’. To ensure this, a group of four Istanbul University law professors were reported to be working on the problem of ‘reconciling’ the takeover with the Turkish Constitution. Attempts to engage the Kemalist elite on the side of the coup were further strengthened by a desire to involve ‘certain leading press figures’, including Dunya co-owner director Falih Rıfkı Atay, in the planning. At the same time, it is clear that the plotters wanted to limit the influence of the radicals, as the leaders of the Aydemir Revolt were excluded. These plans betray a certain desire to return Turkey to the situation that existed during the CNU period. This time, however, the intention seems to have been to establish, on a more permanent basis, a kind of ‘Kemalist philosophers’ regime’ of ‘enlightened’ civilians selected from various fields, with the armed forces playing the role of the guardians. This, in turn, also indicates a wish to base the government on the same power nexus that dominated the period of the single party, namely the CHP and the armed forces. In fact, certain CHP people, according to the CIA, were openly endorsing these plans and the agency saw indications that Inönü would also prefer military intervention to increased Justice Party influence.46 His attitude, in turn, was appreciated by the armed forces to the degree that lifetime senators Mucip Atakli and Emanullah Celebi believed that the current military planning was favouring Inönü for the presidency.47 Regarding the prospects of the coming of a Kemalist philosophers’ Republic, it is noteworthy that the CIA reported that CHP officials

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favourable to such a model termed it as a return of ‘Ataturk Democracy’ with Inönü as a ‘Turkish de Gaulle’.48 The depth of CHP involvement was also the theme in a report from another CIA source, a high-ranking Turkish National Police official, who recounted that, according to the Istanbul CHP deputy Orhan Eyuboglu, Inönü was ‘scanning’ the military for a possible successor to him.49 However, there are also signs that Inönü feared becoming a mere puppet in the hands of the armed forces. Thus, the CIA reported that Sunay and other senior generals were deeply concerned about recent political developments, particularly Inönü’s refusal to form a new government. Thus, since 18 June, according to a high level Turkish government official, the generals had been meeting daily and sometimes twice daily with Inönü. They were convinced that Inönü would ‘not be very successful’ in forming an effective coalition. Therefore, the goal of their mission was to make him announce publicly that ‘the armed forces found it necessary to assist in establishing a government with Inönü as Prime Minister and Gursel as President’. In other words, they wanted him to accept military intervention in return for which the generals would make him prime minister. However, Inönü rejected the proposal and informed Sunay that he would only accept the position of prime minister through a democratic process. According to the CIA, the officers then tried to convince him that ‘they feel as strongly about democracy as he does, but for the time being democracy in Turkey must be suspended’. They also warned Inönü that if he did not become prime minister, they would not be responsible for the activities and action of their subordinates.50 The generals were pointing at the endemic cleavages between junior officers and senior commanders and attempted to raise the spectre of another coup in the style of Aydemir’s abortive one. In fact, the younger officers were reported to be very upset at the current political situation and wanted to do ‘something’ but sorely felt a lack of effective leadership. This desire to act, the agency went on, was based on the belief that democracy had had its chance and on Inönü’s ‘inability’ to form a government. The CIA believed that while

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‘most younger officers’ were in favour of a military intervention ‘under any circumstances’, the more senior officers believed intervention to be necessary only if it turned out that Inönü or someone else from the CHP was unable to form a government.51 Thus, the disagreements followed the same fault line as they had since the 27 May coup. The junior officers were pressing for overt military government while the more senior commanders favoured a pronunciamento model; they wanted to limit the role of the armed forces to the sole goal of bringing the CHP to power. On 25 June, Inönü formed a new cabinet, this time, however, without the participation of the Justice Party. Nevertheless, the spectre of a DP resurgence continued to occupy the minds of the officers and, at times, it unleashed reactions too. Among the triggers was the issue of amnesty. It all came to a head on the first anniversary of the execution of Menderes, on 17 September 1962. His supporters used the occasion to stage demonstrations, something that provoked the army. Clandestine groups of supporters of the army circulated leaflets promising dire punishments for Menderes loyalists when ‘the second revolution’ came.52 On 20 September, the CIA reported that the chiefs of staff of Turkey’s three armies had been urgently invited to Ankara for discussions. Sunay was reported to have come to the conviction that the military might ‘have to move’. If the armed forces did move it, was expected to be a ‘chain of command operation’ and the CIA warned that ‘the Armed Forces will take over the government the evening of 2 October 62’ if the current political situation did not clear up.53 It is not quite clear if these reactions were spurred by the Menderes memorial demonstrations, by internal troubles in the armed forces or both. What is certain, however, is the fact that Aydemir was continuing his conspiratorial activities. In July, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned for a personal attack on Inönü. He maintained his links with the Military College (War School) cadets who regularly filed past his home in Ankara, to the embarrassment of Sunay and Önür who both lived in the same apartment block as Aydemir.54

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Preparing for a showdown with the senior officers: Aydemir’s return On 27 September, CIA explicitly identified Aydemir as the leader of a conspiratorial group: In spite of the restrictive measures imposed by the government on political activities of officers on active duty in the armed forces, during the past two months a group led by retired Colonel Talat Aydemir has continued to strengthen and expand its underground organization in the Turkish Armed Forces through officers still loyal to the group.55 Aydemir was well informed through his network of the officers mentioned above and through sympathizers in other branches of the government. Thus, he knew that Inönü intended to continue his rule even if his second coalition government collapsed. Aydemir was also aware that Inönü knew about his plans and was taking counter measures through Sunay, Tansel and Ground Forces Commander Lieutenant General Ali Keskiner to curb the influence of his group within the military and to reduce his potential threat to the government.56 In fact, these officers were said to consider Inönü to be the only person capable of directing Turkey through its crisis and sought to convince him that they controlled the armed forces and that they could overcome the Aydemir group if it attempted to overthrow the government.57 At the same time, again according to the CIA, the very same people – namely Sunay, Tansel, Keskiner, and several other generals, members of the CHP loyal to Inönü, and most of the non-elected senators – were jockeying among themselves for power..58 This state of affairs created the following two scenarios. The first aimed at sneaking in a strongman’s rule: although on the surface, Inönü and the senior military officers appear to have been united, Inönü, Sunay and Tansel were reported to be conspiring to remove Gürsel as president. The plan was to persuade him to go to

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Switzerland for prolonged treatment for his health. Once Gürsel was there, the president of the senate, Suat Hayri Ürgüplü, would become acting president and it was planned that he should inform the Grand National Assembly that because of illness or for some other reason Gürsel could no longer carry on his duties as president. At this point Sunay would assume the office of president, giving Inönü the full powers of government to destroy any opposition. However, it was also reported that Inönü and his supporters had little confidence that the plan would succeed.59 Scenario number two contemplated a situation in which the second coalition government collapsed. In this case, Gürsel, supported by Inönü and the generals, would dissolve the assembly, close all political parties, and assign Inönü the task of forming a new government made up of people who were loyal to him. This manoeuvre would give Inönü almost dictatorial powers.60 While we do not know the odds for either of the scenarios to have actually unfolded, it is clear that the CIA took them seriously. Furthermore, a common denominator for both was that they were the objects of senior officers’ plotting and that they both aimed at increasing the power of Inönü.61 The Aydemir group was watching the manoeuvring of Inönü and the senior officers. So far as scenario number one was concerned, the Aydemir group had agreed that if Inönü did try to remove Gürsel, they would move immediately to take over the government. On the other hand, regarding scenario number two, if, as a result of disagreements on major issues in the national assembly, it did become apparent that the second coalition government could no longer operate efficiently, the Aydemir group would support the generals in establishing a strong government led by Inönü. However, the latter plan had not been decided upon yet because Aydemir and his group were convinced that strong popular support was needed to stage an effective coup, something they felt they still lacked.62 This made a third scenario topical: if Inönü were given a third chance to form a government and failed again, they expected that there would be a tremendous popular reaction against him, something

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that the Aydemir group believed it could utilize to justify its assuming control of the government.63 It is obvious that all the plotters feared the reaction of the public. They seemed to be aware that military rule had not been popular with the majority of the Turkish citizens. This made its mode of execution and the timing of a coup crucial. All this means that, by end of September, there was good reason to fear a military intervention and it seemed to be only a matter of timing. This state of affairs is reflected in the intelligence reports that were disseminated in the following days. On 28 September the CIA warned: ‘A bloodless military takeover of the government is planned for late October 2 or early 3 October 62.’ Another warning sounded: There will be a military takeover of the government before 29 October 1962.64 On 29 September, a CIA report declared that a military coup was ‘inevitable as the present government is unable to function efficiently’.65 However, four days later the CIA was less sure. It now concluded that there was indeed plotting of a coup within the armed forces, but that the ‘top military commanders will not take over the government and any attempted coup by the junior officers will be crushed by the high command’. For that reason, the agency did not believe that a successful military takeover was feasible: the officers were not united and the dissatisfaction about the government was not strong enough to support a military regime. The CIA also noted that many senior and junior officers were concerned that a coup attempt could result in civil war and might bring about Soviet intervention.66 The CIA now concluded that a military takeover might not materialize until the 1965 general elections when the Justice Party was expected to win. However, by 1965, the evaluation went on, the Justice Party might be splintered into several factions and its main leadership might have come under the control of its moderate element.67 The scene now changed as Inönü took charge. On 10 October, the Prime Minister held an off-the-record briefing. According to the CIA, Inönü believed that ‘A revolution can break out at any moment. [...]

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[W]e have over the past few days entered a dangerous period.’ Inönü revealed that the army had come to the conclusion that parliament could not operate and that the government had lost its authority. For that reason, Inönü went on: ‘We must prove that parliament can work.’ According to the prime minister, the parliament was going through an adjustment period, and every day things got better: ‘if we are given a month, we will have made great progress’. Inönü also promised that he would not retire any groups of officers, pointing to the fact that several thousand were retired after the 27 May coup and that since then they had only been an irritation to the government. Finally, Inönü stated that the amnesty legislation for the DP political prisoners at Kayseri and Adana would pass through parliament in the form he had recommended.68 Thus, Inönü’s recipe for overcoming the crisis was a genuine political compromise. He declared his intention to let the government carry on. In this way, he took some of the wind out of the sails of the plotters who hoped that a collapse of the government would create the ‘right mood’ among the public to carry out a military intervention. He also attempted to appease the Justice Party opposition and those within his own government who demanded some kind of gesture of leniency towards the DP prisoners. Finally, he tried to calm those military men who were likely to fear that their careers might be in jeopardy because of their involvement in various plots. On 18 October, the government decided to grant a limited amnesty to the DP members, consisting of a reduction of prison terms by four years and resulting in the release of 266 prisoners from Kayseri Prison. According to the West German Embassy, Inönü did wisely by decreeing only a limited amnesty. A general amnesty would have discredited the Yassiada court and, in that way also, the 27 May revolution.69 Ten months later, on 28 March 1963, Bayar was conditionally released from his prison in Kayseri. However, when it became evident that his supporters had decided to make the old man’s return to Ankara a triumphant demonstration against the government, he was quickly send back again while the pro-DP section of the Justice Party demanded amnesty.70

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Aydemir’s second attempted coup and the end of the radicals On the night of 20 May, Aydemir and his collaborators entered the Military Academy proclaiming that the armed forces were rising up and that the cadets had a duty to follow suit. Concurrently his agents in other units in Ankara and Istanbul began to converge on strategic spots, capturing, among other things, the radio station: it was announced that Aydemir, in the name of the armed forces, had taken over the government, dissolved the parliament and abolished all political parties. However, soon afterwards, the same radio station carried a denial of these claims as an officer loyal to the government managed to get control over the radio. Planes from a nearby airbase, which were supposed to support Aydemir, were grounded while loyal air units took off and ruled the sky. At sunrise, loyal troops were in complete control and Aydemir and his associates were in army custody.71 This time, the senior command demonstrated more self confidence for it did not hesitate to organize itself against the revolt; it detained some 50 to 100 officers.72 Aydemir was put on trial and hanged, along with seven other officers.73 On 29 May 1963, a US intelligence report concluded that after the failure of Aydemir’s attempted coup, Turkey returned to normal with the senior Turkish military leaders placing a renewed emphasis on ‘the inescapable political power which the armed forces hold’. Although Inönü remained in office, his room to manoeuvre was expected to have been greatly reduced and, as an example of his concern for the military’s self-esteem, the report noted that Inönü ‘has gone out of his way to give credit to the loyalty and strength of armed forces’. He made ‘a conscious attempt to place full blame for the coup on Aydemir, with some passing references to irresponsible civilian politicians’. Finally, Inönü implied that those ‘few individuals who followed Aydemir were duped’. The report expected that his government would impose its political will more through compulsion than compromise. Regarding the attitude of the public, the same report stated that there had been great relief at seeing Aydemir’s revolt crushed so quickly,

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while at the same time fear persisted that ‘Turkey should again have had to face internal divisions and blood shed’.74 All this indicates that the public strongly disliked interventions by raw force in the style of the 27 May coup or Aydemir’s attempted putsches. Inönü’s second coalition never became popular with the population. Its lack of support was reflected in the November 1963 municipal elections, which demonstrated that the Justice Party was the most popular party in the country. The CHP’s partners now withdrew from the coalition, fearing that the voters would punish them for collaborating with Inönü. This, in turn, forced the prime minister to form a new cabinet, something that he succeeded in doing on 25 December the same year.75 During this crisis, the INR was confident that, unless it decides that ‘political turmoil has become hopeless’, the military leadership would not assume direct power; should Inönü fail to ride out the crisis, the military leaders would rather favour the formation of another civilian government, the bureau believed.76 This assessment is in line with previous ones made by the INR and the CIA, all emphasizing that the military leadership was fully aware that military rule had become unpopular with the Turks. It also indicates that with the radicals out of the picture, the senior military leadership felt so strong that it was now willing to accept yet another experiment in civilian government. The weakening of the radicals not only strengthened the power of the senior military leadership. It would also force any civilian government to accept that its room to manoeuvre was increasingly at the discretion of the military. The enhancement of the NSC, in particular, offered the senior military leadership an excellent platform from which to extend its influence over government policy; and, in the words of Zürcher, in the two decades that followed its establishment, the NSC became a powerful watchdog, sometimes replacing the cabinet as the centre of real power and decision-making.77 All this contributed to making the armed forces an autonomous institution. The senior military leadership became an integral part of the political and socio-political life of the country dedicated to the

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preservation of status quo while its overall position vis-à-vis the politicians had become so powerful that it no longer had to link its fortunes with those of any particular party.78 This also reduced the importance of Inönü, who now lost his position as the ‘swingman in reverse’.

The foreign policy factor and the end of the Inönü government The unilateral decision by the USA during the Cuban Missile Crisis to dismantle the Jupiter missiles stationed in Turkey dealt a hard blow to Turkey’s national prestige, in general, and to the honour of the armed forces in particular.79 This disappointment undoubtedly reflected negatively on the esteem in which the Inönü government was held among Turkish officers. A new blow was dealt by President Johnson’s letter to Inönü in 1964. The message was an ill-disguised warning that unless Turkey refrained from invading Cyprus, NATO could not assure Ankara that it would guarantee Turkey against a Soviet attack. This, in turn, made Inönü deviate somehow from Turkey’s traditional pro-American line: his decision to publish the letter added strongly to intensifying antiAmericanism among the Turkish population while the government made overtures to the Soviet Union, accepting economic and technical assistance from that country, among other things. According to the US Consulate General in Istanbul, American involvement in the Cyprus issue had increased the responsibility, and blame, which local Turks placed on the USA for the course of Cyprus affairs. Thus, on 29 August 1964, ten thousand Istanbul University students demonstrated against the USA’s Cyprus policy. According to Consul General John E. Merriam, the students had been prepared by a press campaign against the USA of ‘unprecedented proportions’ and anti-Americanism remained as an undertone in local political discussions. Left-wing intellectuals, in particular, were talking about a ‘new departure’ in foreign policy, i.e. away from the USA and towards the Soviet Union. All this had changed the traditional view in Istanbul of the USA as Turkey’s benefactor and protector, something that, according to the consul general, was particularly noticeable among

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the educated upper-middle class who were devoted to ‘the principles of Atatürk’ and who considered themselves the nation’s leaders. Furthermore, ‘overt anti-Americanism’ was also heard from ‘unusual quarters’. A former leader of Turkish-American women’s activities had privately confided that she would no longer participate in this work. The governor of Istanbul, who normally styled himself as a great friend of the USA, had taken the line that Americans are ‘nice people’ but that ‘it is too bad that American politics are dominated by Greeks’. Pro-American social leaders indicated uneasiness in appearing in public with Americans; the moderate newspaper Milliyet ran a series of editorials from 29 August to 13 September 1964 featuring writers who favoured a break with the USA. Cumhurriyet, once considered ‘the New York Times of Turkey’ depicted the US Food for Peace Program as a ‘secret weapon in the cold war’ and the USA’s Cyprus policy as ‘dominated by New York Greeks’, among other features. According to Merriam, one possible cause of the recent outburst of anti-Americanism might be that allegations that the USA supports enosis have touched a certain Turkish sensitivity: Istanbul Turks feel strikingly any implication of inferiority, in particular to Christians and more particularly to Greeks. However, the consul general also believed that many Turks had been unable to understand the changes in the USA in the preceding year, in particular the circumstances surrounding the death of President Kennedy and the increased attention gained by strong conservative elements in US politics. Thus, in the course of the Cyprus crisis there had been a feeling that the USA had changed; that it was no longer interested, and might let Turkey down. Feeding on these feelings, the Left had, in the words of Merriam, felt free to attack all US officials, to repeat ad nauseam the charge that Kennedy was murdered by wealthy arms manufacturers, and to charge that the USA’s political idealism has been pure hypocrisy, ‘purportedly as evidenced by US treatment of the negro’.80 The opposition claimed that the CHP – long adept at domestic propaganda – sought to use the anti-American demonstrations and propaganda as a means of avoiding responsibility for their government’s failure in the Cyprus crisis and as a method to ‘browbeating’ the

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USA into a pro-Turkish position. However, the entire onus could not, according to Merriam, be placed on the CHP: frustrations building up over the Cyprus crisis simply demanded an outlet which ‘extremist left-wing’ groups were bound to convert to their use. The real danger, again according to Merriam, did not lie in antiAmericanism but in its ‘complementary’ disposition to minimize the danger from the Soviet Union. Thus, it had become fashionable to review the history of the post-war world and to minimize the Soviet threat to the Bosporus and Kars. One group was actively searching for, in the words of the consul general, ‘documentary evidence’ of the Russian threat, confidently expecting to prove that the threat did not exist – proof in their minds that the first cause of the Turko-American Alliance was a hoax. He continued: Many Turks fear that the thaw in the Cold War has rendered dependence on the US anachronistic. This is expressed by the extreme left in the idea that Turkey should now play a neutral role and take aid from both the US and the Soviet Union. There have even been discussions of a link between Turkey and Communist China, putting Turkey in contact with the Communist world and providing the same time a buffer against the Soviet Union.81 US Peace Corps volunteers noted that there had emerged a ‘new Turkish mood’, questioning many aspects of the Turkish–American alliance. The US Embassy and consulates around the country supported these observations. Among the accusations was the following: ‘the Cyprus situation would have come out far differently if Kennedy were alive’. In fact, according to an unnamed source, a large portion of the Turkish people believed that President Johnson had a hand in Kennedy’s assassination. Many were also reported to have believed that Mrs Johnson was of Greek heritage.82 According to the CIA, the 1965 election campaign issues boded for the emergence of a left-right wing division of Turkish politics and, again according to the agency, it was the first time foreign policy issues had become controversial. This was due to the emergence of a vocal left represented by the Turkish Labour Party, and to some extent by the

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CHP. The Turkish Labour Party strongly denounced Turkey’s membership of NATO and CENTO as incompatible with national sovereignty. It lavishly employed, in the words of the CIA, the ‘American exploitation theme’. The CHP had become ‘stridently [...] ultra-nationalistic, with anti-US overtones’. Inönü spoke out in favour of improved relations with countries outside the Western alliance and took a ‘belligerent stand’ on the Cyprus issue. While the Turkish Labour Party proposed nationalization of the oil industry, banking and insurance and foreign trade, and called for planned economic development, Inönü announced his party’s position to be on the left of centre. According to the CIA, this caused the party to lose votes to both the Justice Party and the Turkish Labour Party. Those who feared it was going too far to the left went to the Justice Party while those who doubted its sincerity decided to vote for the Turkish Labour Party. The latter party drew its strength from intellectuals and white-collar workers, but not from industrial workers, because most trade unions regarded the Turkish Labour Party with considerable suspicion.83 This evaluation is line with what the overall trend of developments shows: the nature of politics in the 1960s contrasted sharply with that of the previous decade and saw for the first time, among other things, ideological politics. There emerged a left-wing presence, particularly at the universities, and students organized their own political associations, some affiliated with the workers’ party. Political literature, in particular translations, became readily available in cheap editions, the isolation of Turkey came to an end and the country became more aware of the world around it. At the same time, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the unilateral decision to dismantle the Jupiter missiles made many Turks believe that Turkey was little more than a pawn or a bargaining chip in the negotiations between the superpowers. The public became convinced that Turkey’s interest were negotiable and that she was no longer a strategic asset for Washington. This and the fact that Washington seemed to have sided with Greece in the conflict over Cyprus gave rise to virulent anti-Americanism. It polarized the country into two camps, the pro-American right and the anti-American left. The latter group included neo-Kemalist nationalists and leftists. The War of Independence was re-interpreted and

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presented as a struggle against imperialism with the Kemalists bent on establishing an independent, non-aligned state while their opponents were willing to accept foreign tutelage.84 Such changes in public opinion and among the parties also opened up new alliances between the civilian political leadership and the armed forces. Therefore, and because of the strengthening of senior military leadership at the expense of the radicals, the period from 1963 onwards also saw the emergence of a working relationship between the senior military leadership and the Justice Party. After all, as the heir to the Democratic Party, the Justice Party was expected to be the party with the best direct contacts to the Turkish voter.

Voters without a party and the emergence of the Justice Party The Democratic Party possessed an organization that, in the words of Weiker, had penetrated every corner of Turkey. In this way, the abolition of the DP left orphan an organization and a grass-roots movement that was superior to any counterpart in Turkey and one which, in large measure, had been responsible for DP victories during the 1950s.85 This also meant that a large number of voters were left without a party. In the competition for this prize among the DP’s potential successor parties, the Justice Party won out. The Justice Party was formed following the coup d’état on 27 May 1960 by a handful of ambitious men, many with limited experience. The goal was to capitalize on the large number of Democrats left without a party after the DP was banned. The Justice Party experienced fast success in the Western Provinces – the former home ground of Menderes – where it managed to pick up many DP organizations intact. In Central Anatolia, it was less successful, meeting competition for the ex-Democrat vote from the Republican Peasants Nation Party. In Eastern Anatolia where the New Turkey Party was first on the scene to capture the old DP organizations, it did poorly. In spite of this, it garnered some 35 per cent of the vote (compared to CHP’s 37 per cent) at the 1961 elections and became the biggest of the DP-successor parties. This trend continued in the municipal elections

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held in November 1963 when the Justice Party got 46 per cent of the vote (compared to the CHP’s 37 per cent), reducing its two competitors for the ex-DP vote accordingly. This trend was continued in the June 1964 senatorial elections. In this manner, the Justice Party was well on its way to becoming the ‘old DP’ at the provincial level and in the eyes of the voters. The election of Süleyman Demirel as president general at the Justice Party’s convention in December 1964 marked the re-emergence of the ‘old DP’ within the Justice Party leadership. Demirel had a history within the DP and enjoyed ‘old DP’ support including the approval of Bayar. As a token of this, the Justice Party decided to adopt the Iron Gray Horse as its symbol. This was chosen because it was claimed that in the early days of the DP, the peasantry – being unfamiliar with the word ‘democrat’ – preferred the expression Demir Kirat, which means ‘grey horse’. The legacy of Menderes was obviously considered a valuable weapon and his ‘martyrdom’ was believed to confirm in the minds of the peasantry that he had been brought down by their enemies, the traditional elite, because he had taken the side of the peasants. For that reason, in 1965, US observers were convinced that invocation of the memory of Menderes constituted a most potent weapon for Demirel. At the same time, they rejected the idea that the DP and the Justice Party were parties of ‘religious reaction’ or that their success with the voters was primarily a result of their ‘reckless and demagogic exploitation of the religious feelings of ignorant people’. This was something made up by CHP partisans in order to rationalize their own party’s lack of success. According to the same observers, such accusations not only obscured the fact that the leadership of both the DP and the Justice Party was of a secular nature, but also that the DP and the Justice Party had been successful in exploiting ‘the materialistic appeal of bread and butter issues’.86 Although Islam could not be separated from the basic appeal of the DP and the Justice Party, the crucial fact, according to the embassy, was that they were popular parties whose success rested on responsiveness to the desires of the people, and in particular the peasantry. Both parties had responded to the ‘obvious desires of many Turks for a relaxation of the relentless anti-religious campaign carried out by the

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republican reformers’. In this way, rather than deliberately stimulating religious reaction, the DP and the Justice Party exploited opposition to the militant secularism of the CHP.87 According to Professor Sadun Aren, a prominent member of the Turkish Labour Party, the Justice Party was ‘Turkey’s only truly mass party’.88 Following the Justice Party’s landslide victory at the general elections held on 10 October 1965, the CIA commented: The political heirs of Menderes won a decisive victory in a free election in Turkey just five years after the overthrow of the Menderes government by a military coup and four years after his execution, winning about 54 per cent of the vote and some 240 out of 450 seats in the National Assembly. Many prophets were confounded. [...] [Al]though it was predicted that the Justice Party, successor to the banned Democratic Party of former Premier Adnan Menderes, would win a plurality over its chief rival, the Republican People’s Party (RPP), most public opinion anticipated another coalition government.89 Among the chief reasons for the Justice Party’s preponderant victory, the CIA held out ‘emotional loyalty’ to the ‘martyred’ Menderes. This was true, in particular, among the Turkish masses, not least among the peasants. Furthermore, the Justice Party had made use of an efficient ‘party machinery’ inherited from the old Democratic Party, while Demirel carried the grey horse symbol into the most remote villages, reminding everybody of the Justice Party’s special relationship with the DP and Menderes. As a final factor of importance, the CIA mentioned that an apparent accommodation had been established between the Justice Party and the military. The CIA believed the armed forces had gained confidence in the Justice Party and concluded that a single party government can be a good thing for Turkey ‘if it does not abuse its power’. At the same time, the armed forces were believed to ‘exert whatever pressure is needed to keep the new government in line’.90 An exponent of the Justice Party–military rapprochement was former CNU leader General Cemal Madanogˇlu. During a meeting

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with a representative from the US Embassy, he was ‘most insistent that the USA back the Justice Party candidate Suleyman Demirel in the forthcoming election with every resource at its disposal’. According to the General, the CHP was slipping from the control of Inönü and into the hands of ‘leftists, essentially anti-American elements’. Pointing to a Soviet parliamentary delegation’s recent visit to Turkey, the General warned that this had served further to split Turkey into two camps: there was now a division on the one subject regarding which there had always been consensus, namely NATO. While the Justice Party was backing the USA and the Western alliance, the CHP was adopting a more neutralist stance. For that reason Madanogˇlu, according to his own account, had expended considerable efforts during the past few months to quietly rally supporters to the cause of Demirel. He had done so, the General went on, in spite of his fear that certain Justice Party members would not refrain from trading on its past association with the Menderes regime. Nor had he been deterred by the fact that the Justice Party might put forward such candidates as Melahat Gedik. She was a deputy from Aydin who had been able to arouse considerable emotional response in her campaign by trading on her husband’s death. (As mentioned earlier, Namik Gedik had committed suicide after the 27 May 1960 coup by jumping from his hotel room in Ankara as he was about to be arrested by members of the CNU).91 In fact, the Justice Party’s election strategy was to play the antiLeftist theme for ‘all it is worth’, and secondarily to stress the CHP’s responsibility for the Cyprus failures. According to the US Consul General in Izmir, G. Lewis Schmidt, Justice Party strategists had decided that there was more ‘to be gained than lost by a militant anti-Left stance, even to the extent of tacitly accepting complicity in acts of anti-Leftist violence’. At the same time, the party had embarked on a concentrated campaign to woo Turkey’s military. According to Schmidt, the most valuable source to the Justice Party’s strategy was Izmir’s mayor, Osman Kibar. He had individual contacts with Demirel and had participated in the Justice Party leaders’ elections strategy sessions. Kibar himself confided to the American that the Justice Party was using front groups to push the campaign against the Left. He admitted the complicity of the Justice

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Party in the organized acts of physical opposition – violence, in other words – directed against the Labour Party [Turkish Labour Party] and against such events as the showing of Leftist or anti-American films. Furthermore, the Justice Party was assisting the Anti-Communist Association in planning its activities and was probably also giving it financial support. According to Schmidt, the Justice Party strategy board had ‘calculated coldly the relative dangers and advantages’ of being associated with a militantly anti-Left campaign, and had concluded that there was a net advantage. They had likewise ‘coldly judged’ that the hue and cry arising over the ‘disgraceful’ attacks of violence on Leftist causes was the product of a rather small minority which was noisy, but insufficient in numbers to be a major factor at the polls. They also calculated that the access of Leftists to the mass communication media was not going to sway more than relatively small numbers of intelligentsia and elite.92 Concomitantly, former highly divisive issues, such as the amnesty one, were losing strength. The fact that Demirel was expected to meet some of the demands of his supporters, including the demand for a limited amnesty in December 1965, made the commander of the land forces, General Tural, publish a letter to the defence minister deploring the idea of releasing the ex-DP members who were still in prison. However, Gürsel and three former members of the CNU decided that the army should not intervene further and left it to the parliament to make the decisions on that issue. On 20 July 1966, the Grand National Assembly passed an amnesty bill that pardoned more than 20,000 people. Although Bayar and his former colleagues were now free men, they were still deprived of their political right to run for public office.93 In spite of the fact that in April 1969 a group of junior and middle grade officers threatened to overthrow the government if it restored political rights to the former DP members,94 according to Hale, relations between Demirel and the armed forces were characterized by détente. They both wanted to preserve the status quo.95 It was a new status quo, however. Although Demirel made a very strong showing at the 1965 and 1969 elections (52.9 and 46.5 per

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cent respectively), held an absolute majority in the national assembly (240 and 256 seats respectively)96 and was supported by a majority that was equivalent to the DP’s backing in the previous decade, times had changed. Parliament had lost its power compared to that it had held in the 1950s, something that would clearly transpire in the following years, in particular in the 1970s after the 1971 coup. There was no longer any elected institution with a strength remotely comparable to the strength that the Turkish parliament had held in the 1950s. There was no one for whom the Turkish voter could cast his vote if he expected the parliament and the elected government to prevail vis-à-vis the state elite; there simply was no heir to Menderes. Nevertheless, the process of transition was completed. The armed forces finally felt sufficiently secure to let the most popular party form the cabinet. The crux of the matter was that the only force that had remained outside their control after the 27 May coup was made up of the partyless Menderes voters, and that the CHP had never managed win their support. After four fruitless years with the CHP in power, the armed forces decided on an experiment to let the Justice Party form the government. In this way, they established a modus vivendi with the only party of importance that was able to carry Menderes’ voters. This solution, however, was only possible because of the palpable shift in power relations that had taken place within the armed forces: by 1965, the most ardent enemies of Menderes and the dogmatically anti-Justice Party forces, the radical officers, were only a shadow of their old selves. Aydemir’s two abortive coups had drained their power and played into the hands of the senior military leadership. The increased power of NSC gave this group direct and continuous access to influence on the civilian government, something that must have left them with a feeling of being in firm control with little to fear from the political parties. It was this development, too, that spelled the end of CHP rule in 1965, causing Inönü’s resignation from the post as prime minister – a position he would never return to after he lost the post of CHP chairman to Ecevit in 1973.

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The Turkish experience of transition from military government to formal civilian rule was unique. The cooperation between the military regime and the political parties, in particular the degree to which the CHP practiced collaboration, ensured that the transition from undisguised military rule to formal civilian government could unfold as a controlled process. It allowed the armed forces to build institutions so that they could perpetuate their power in the new era. Thus, by 1963, the Turkish officer had become a less visible, but a no less powerful actor on the political scene. This was the result of the enhancement of the NSC, and the extirpation of the radicals. In was beginning at about the same time that the traditional cleavage of Republican Turkey and the late Ottoman Empire between ’society and statism’, in the words of Lucielle W. Pevsner, became transformed into a Right–Left battle between statists turned social reformers and free enterprise supporters who were opposed to socialism and complacent to the radical right.97 All this was a harbinger of what the turbulent 1970s would bring and signified the closure of the Menderes era.

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CHAPTER 13 THE MENDER ES ER A AND ITS DEMISE

To this day, the Menderes era remains the period in the history of Turkey during which the parliament and the elected government were most unconstrained from control by non-elected bodies. The foundations of these freedoms were established during the final years of the one-party period. At the same time, the main actors in the process that culminated in the armed forces’ toppling the Menderes government in 1960 were institutions and persons with stakes in the political and social arrangement of the one-party era. It was also they who were the protagonists in the attempts to legitimize the coup, dressing it up in the vocabulary of democracy and liberal institutions. It has been claimed that Menderes was on the verge of establishing his own personal dictatorship and that the 27 May coup was a counter-coup. It is true that Menderes’ methods of dealing with the opposition were getting increasingly heavy-handed, and that he was clearly infringing on some of the fundamental tenets of liberal society. However, it is equally true that, in terms of the degree of political freedom, the Menderes era stood head and shoulders above anything Turkey had experienced during the one-party era. Compared to the subsequent decades, the Menderes era stands out as the only period during which the parliament was truly sovereign. The 1961 constitution created a number of institutions that decisively curbed its independence and emasculated the power of elected

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governments vis-à-vis non-elected institutions. The only institution left to act from a position of strength without restraint from external control was the armed forces. As a consequence, the politicians were often blamed for incapacity and the armed forces lauded for their resolve, while in all fairness it should be remembered that it was the very same institution that was responsible for the emasculation of the civilian politicians. Regarding the relations between Menderes and the old elite, it is clear that Menderes and the DP managed to mobilize the periphery against the old elite and that his early success represented the revolt of periphery against the centre. The popularity of Menderes and the DP was enhanced because they could frame their politics in Islamic terms and because they were framed in images that draw from that source, becoming a strong symbol for several socio-religious movements as well as a whole segment of the population, in particular the peasants. However, while Menderes was not leading a party resembling any of the religious parties that later emerged, he made use of – and managed to ride on the crest of – an opinion that the freedom to exercise religious rites and other activities was a fundamental wish. In this way, Menderes’ popularity can also be seen as reflection of the political potential that this opinion possessed and as a harbinger of the coming of religious parties in Turkey. Although Menderes’ attempt to align himself with this current against Communism resembles the efforts in the 1980s to forge a Turkish–Islamic synthesis in order to ally Islam on the side of the state, such efforts were anathema to the Kemalists of the 1950s. The Kemalist opposition of this era initially fought Menderes and his supporters in the arena of public opinion. They relied on their dominant position in the press and on support from the intelligentsia. It was his permissiveness vis-à-vis the religious revival, in particular, that gave the Kemalists the opportunity to cast Menderes as a ‘reactionary’ who strived to undo the achievements of modern Turkey and to open the gates for the ‘dark forces’ of religious fanatics and Ottoman backwardness, and to denounce him as a spokesman for the long-gone Sultan-Caliph.

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The CHP and the Kemalist elite’s hostility towards the DP and fear of Menderes was also conditioned by the fact that the prime minister functioned as a symbol of hope in the eyes those who wanted Islam to play a greater role in the direction of national politics, and because the DP and Menderes gave the brotherhoods much more leeway than they had ever known since the early years of the Republic. Seen from the point of view of the Kemalists, the brotherhoods represented the very same forces in politics and society that Atatürk and the CHP had fought for decades. Although the Kemalists succeeded in increasing their appeal among the educated elite, the great majority of whom were city dwellers, they realized that it was much more difficult to reach the periphery where the majority remained in favour of Menderes. Last but not least, the old elite simply feared that it would never regain its former position of power, prestige and influence. Following the 1957 elections, the CHP began to take on the mantle of democracy, accusing Menderes of acting in a dictatorial way. It is a fact that Menderes was using more and more authoritarian methods in his manner of governing, and it is beyond doubt that he acted increasingly heavy-handedly against the CHP. While we should still keep in mind that Menderes was presiding over a regime change and that he was Prime Minister in a state whose institutions, including universities and most of the press, were manned with people who owed their careers to the one-party state and whose loyalty belonged to the CHP, it is equally clear that the legislation also provided the government with a selection of instruments that were used to suppress dissent and opposition in general. In 1959 and 1960, the CHP accused the DP of obstructing, Inönü, among others, from speaking to his constituencies, and of creating incidents that were threatening the life of the Pasha – such as the so-called Topkapi Incident. The government’s clampdown on student unrest in the spring of 1960 only added to polarization, as did the DP’s 18 April motion presented to the Grand National Assembly for the establishment of an investigation of ‘the illegal activities of the [CHP] and the press’. Such actions, in turn, contributed further to turn the sectors of modern opinion making – such as the press, academics and students – against

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Menderes, and to make them rally behind the CHP and ultimately the armed forces. In the case of the armed forces, Menderes’ priorities in favour of private business saw the officers’ social and economic status eroded compared to other groups. This, in turn, created dissatisfaction, something which only increased when, in 1953, Menderes appointed a person with no direct link to the armed forces as minister of defence. To make things even worse – from the point of view of the military – important defence matters, including the prestigious NATO affairs, were taken over by Minister of Foreign Affairs Zorlu. Finally, it also seems that many officers took offence that the Prime Minister attempted to put the blame on the armed forces for the September 1955 riots directed against the Greeks of Turkey. All this indicates that the armed forces were losing their traditional influence and prestige, meaning that they were facing a situation not unlike the one that members of the other elite groups were facing. Conspiracy started among junior officers. It was also this group which was the most radical on the issue of future governance. While the senior officers favoured a return to parliamentarian politics with the military holding a watching brief, it was among the junior officers that we find the strongest support of continued military rule. Because they feared a return of Menderes and feared that they would become subject to revenge, the junior officers were also the main pressure group within the military government that demanded the execution of Menderes and his closest colleagues. The junior officers continued to be sceptical about civilian rule after power had been transferred to Inönü it the wake of the 1961 elections. In the period between 1961 and 1963, there were constant expectations of another military take over, and twice Colonel Aydemir and his radical group attempted a coup d’état. It was only after the neutralization of this group and with the strengthening of the NSC that the senior officers got firm control of the army. This made possible a development which saw the army shifting their support for Inönü to the Justice Party and in 1965 Demirel became prime minister in the wake of a landslide victory in the elections. This must be explained by the fact that the Justice Party was the only party that was able to win the support of the party-less Menderes voters.

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The Turkish experience of transition from military government to formal civilian rule was unique. The cooperation between the military regime and the political parties, in particular the degree to which the CHP practiced collaboration, ensured that the transition from undisguised military rule to formal civilian government could unfold as a controlled process. It allowed the armed forces to build institutions so that they could perpetuate their power in the new era; in 1965, they felt secure to such a degree that they decided to allow the Justice Party to form a new civilian government and do the job of containing Menderes’ former party-less voters. The military’s dissatisfaction with Menderes also has to be explained by his foreign policy. The prime dynamics in the early development of Turkey’s foreign policy originated from a drive to find a place among the nations and from the imperative of establishing good relations with her neighbours, something Ankara succeed in achieving – including the signing of an agreement of friendship and cooperation with Moscow. In the post-war period, marked as it was by the emerging Cold War, Ankara, facing Soviet aggression, had to choose sides and opted for the West. Through the same process and because of the disrepute that befell the one-party regimes in Germany and Italy in the wake of their destruction one-party rule in Turkey came under mounting pressure, externally and not least internally, as a nascent DP began to link the United Nations’ call for observance of civil and the political rights of the individual with the internal situation in Turkey. Turkey’s relations to Greece were influenced, on the one hand, by the wish of both countries to have close relations with the West and, on the other, by the strong impact of nationalist sentiments in both places that were unleashed and created in relation to the uncertain future status of Cyprus, in particular from the 1950s onwards. Menderes actively contributed to framing the Greeks of Turkey as the internal enemy and to mobilizing the mobs against local Greeks in September 1955, and he was in personal contact with the Cyprus Is Turkish Society, which played a leading role in organizing and executing the violent campaign against the Greeks of Turkey. It was also his government that adopted a more activist policy vis-à-vis the Cyprus issue by demanding partition of that island, taksim, and creating the

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TMT, which was designed to give the armed forces an opportunity to play a leading in role in achieving a solution to the Cyprus issue that would equal Atatürk’s triumph in Hatay and to accommodate those who held pan-Turkish ambitions. However, before that could be achieved, Cold War tensions and Menderes’ desire to increase Turkey’s importance for the West shifted his priorities from Cyprus to the Middle East. In the Middle East, Menderes clearly wanted Turkey to play a more prominent role than it had done in the early post-war period. But that brought it into conflict with Arab nationalism. The pivotal point was relations with Syria. They were stimulated by an old and uneasy relationship, which also suggests that there were still some in Ankara who felt that Turkey should have a say in Syrian affairs. This, in turn, implies a certain measure of continuity. Menderes’ aggressive stance vis-à-vis Syria can be seen as a prolongation of Atatürk’s stance on the Alexandretta issue and can be seen to have followed some of the trends that appeared in Turkey’s approach to Syria during the Second World War. In the setting of the Cold War, Menderes attempted to combine such aspirations with his efforts to promote Western interests in the Middle East and with anti-Communism. In addition, we should probably also count a certain desire to consolidate Ankara’s newly won position in the Western camp. His ambitions to upgrade Turkey’s role in the Middle East, and his clear endeavours to promote the interests of the Western bloc in that area, unleashed a series of new regional dynamics. Initially, his ambitions clashed with those of Nasser, who, in turn, strived to secure Egypt a leading role in the Middle East as a promoter of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism. Ankara and Cairo collided because of the Baghdad Pact, and Syria was the battleground. However, Nasser’s arms deal with the Communist bloc and the political and moral defeat of Britain and France at Suez rendered Egypt’s young leader a figure of invincibility in the eye of the Arab public that de facto spelled an end to the Baghdad Pact. Turkey continued its belligerent policy towards Damascus. The arguments were now that Syria was on it way to become a Soviet satellite, something that Ankara and Washington both agreed on. It stands as fact that among the US plans for how to handle the ‘Syrian

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problem’, one envisioned a so-called local solution. This implied that one of the countries neighbouring Syria enforced a regime change in that country. It is also a fact that high-ranking military men in the Turkish Armed Forces declared that they were waiting for the order to cross the border and take Aleppo and that they said that these moves were coordinated with the Sixth American Fleet, while at the same time it is possible to detect strong currents of synergies between the Turkish and US lines of politics vis-à-vis Syria. This leaves a strong impression that there was a joint US–Turkish plan that Ankara should be the executor of a regime change in Syria. At the end of the day, this policy failed utterly because of fear of a general war. Within less than one year, a whole new situation originated in the Middle East that threatened Turkish security on her southern flank and forced Ankara to revise its stance on the Cyprus conflict. Menderes now gave up his demands on taksim and accepted the proclamation of an independent Cyprus in 1960. This unleashed signs of strong disappointment in the ranks of the armed forces and was seen as a disgraceful defeat by those who held irredentist ambitions, something that only added to the accumulating dissatisfaction with Menderes in the armed forces.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Cover, Robert. ‘The Supreme Court 1982 Term: Nomos and Narrative,’ Harvard Law Review, Vol. 97, No.4 (1983), p.68.

Chapter 1. The Democratic Party 1. Karpat, Kemal. Turkey’s Politics: the Transition to a Multi-Party System (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1959), pp.144–5. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. p.151. 4. Ibid. pp.146–8. 5. Harris, George. ‘Celal Bayar: Conspiratorial Democrat’, in Metin Heper and Sabri Sayari (eds) Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey (Oxford: Lexington Books 2002), pp.45–9. 6. Sayari, Sabri. ‘Adnan Menderes: Between Democratic and Authoritarian Populism’ in Metin Heper and Sabri Sayari (eds), pp.65–7. 7. Szyliowcz, Joseph S. ‘The Political Dynamics of Rural Turkey’, The Middle East Journal, Vol.16, No.4, Autumn (1962), p.431. 8. Hale, William. Turkish Politics and the Military (London: Routledge 1994), appendix 5. 9. Szyliowcz, p.431. 10. Lewis, Bernard. ‘Recent Development in Turkey’, International Affairs, Vol.27, No.3, July (1951), pp.324–5. 11. Ankara, 3 August 1965, Embassy to Department of State, Subject: Justice Party on the Eve of the Election campaign, Confidential, National

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16.

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Archives, Washington DC, hence NA, RG 59, Central FP, Files 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. See also Sherwood, W.B. ‘The Rise of the Justice Party in Turkey’, World Politics, Vol.20, No.1, October (1967), pp.56–8. Ibid. and Ankara 3 August 1965. Simpson, Dwight J. ‘Development as Process: the Menderes Phase in Turkey’, The Middle East Journal, Vol.19, No.2, Spring (1965), p.144. Rustow, Dankwart A. ‘Turkey’s Second Try at Democracy’, Yale Review, Vol. 52, No.4, Summer (1963), p.529; see also Simpson, p.144. Pevsner, Lucielle W. Turkey’s Political Crisis: Background, Perspectives, Prospects (New York: Praeger 1984), pp.27–8. See also Robinson, Richard D. ‘Agrarian Revolution and the Problem of Urbanization’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol.22, No.3, Special Issue on Attitude Research in Modernizing Areas, Autumn (1958), pp.397–405. Logoglu, O. Faruk. Ismet Inönü and the Making of Modern Turkey (Ankara: Inönü Vakfi 1997), p.160.

Chapter 2. The Kemalist revolution and the Ottoman past 1. The Turkish National Pact, 28 January 1920, Hurewitz J.C., (ed.). The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, Vol.2 British–French Supremacy, 1914–1945, 2nd edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1979), pp.210–1. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Sayyid, S. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, 2nd edition (London: Zed Books 2003), pp.52–8. 6. Ibid. 7. Karpat 1959, p.44. 8. Köker, Levent. ‘National Identity and State Legitimacy: Contradictions of Turkey’s Democratic Experience’, in Elisabeth Özdalga and Sune Persson (eds) Civil Society, Democracy and the Muslim World: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul Transactions, Vol.7 (Istanbul 1997), pp.69–70. 9. Reed, Howard A. ‘Revival of Islam in Secular Turkey’, The Middle East Journal, Vol.8, No.3, Summer (1954), pp.267–9. 10. Yavuz, Hakan. Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003), p.140.

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11. In 1930 and 1934 women were granted political rights, first in municipal, and later in national elections. However, as political life was controlled by the one-party system, it would still be too early to claim that these rights also implied democratic rights. It should be noted, too, that steps to emancipate the women had already been taken during the time of the Ottoman Empire: during the First World War, women took an increasingly active part in the war effort as nurses, teachers, clerks and factory workers. Furthermore in 1916 civil marriage was introduced while polygamy was severely restricted, Reed, pp.268–9. 12. Poulton, Hugh. Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press 1997), pp.101–14. 13. Ibid. 14. Reed, p.269. 15. Sayyid, p.59. 16. Deringil, Selim. The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I.B.Tauris 1999); Fortna, Benjamin C. Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002); Göcek, Fatma Müge. Rise of the Bourgoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996); Hanioglu, Sükrü. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008); Idem. Preparing for a Revolution: the Young Turks 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001); Idem. Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995); Karpat, Kemal. The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001); Mundy, Martha and Richard Saumarez Smith. Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I.B.Tauris 2007); Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000. 17. Karpat 2001, pp.90–1. 18. Hanioglu 2008, p.205. 19. Karpat 2001, pp.90–1. 20. Hanioglu 2008, p.205. 21. Karpat 2001, pp.90–1. 22. Yavuz 1997, pp.130–5. 23. Bulliet, Richard W. The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Colombia University Press 2004), p.75.

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24. Schultze, Rheinhard. Geschichte der Islamischen Welt im 20 Jahrhundert (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck 2002), pp.32ff. 25. Cf. e.g. Pelt, Mogens. ‘The Establishment and Development of the Metaxas Dictatorship in the Context of Fascism and Nazism, 1936–41’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol.2, No.3, Winter (2001), p.160. 26. Yavuz 1997, pp.130–5. 27. Karpat 2001, p.7. 28. Yavuz 1997, pp.130–1. 29. Vahide, Sükran. ‘Toward an Intellectual Biography of Said Nursi’, in Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (ed.). Islam at the Crossroad: On the Life and Thought of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany: State University of New York Press 2003), p.4. 30. ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (ed.). Islam at the Crossroad, xiii. 31. Yavuz 2003. 32. Karpat 2001, p. 93.

Chapter 3. Challenges to the one-party regime in a changing world 1. Brockett, Gavin D. ‘Collective Action and the Turkish Revolution: Towards a Framework for the Social History of the Atatürk Era, 1923–38’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.34, No.4, October (1998), Special Issue: Turkey Before and After Atatürk: Internal and External Affairs, pp.44–7. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Yavuz, Hakan. ‘The Matrix of Modern Turkish Islamic Movements: the Naqshbandi Sufi Order’, in Elisabeth Özdalga (ed.), Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia: Change and Continuity (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul 1997), pp.134–5. 5. Brockett, p.48. 6. Yavuz 1997, p.135. 7. Ibid. pp.135–6. 8. Brockett, p.48. 9. Karpat 1959, pp.140–1. 10. Ibid. 11. Lewis, pp.320–1. 12. Karpat 1959, pp.114–7.

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24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

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Ibid. pp.140–1. Ibid. pp.117–8. Ibid. pp.119–21. Ibid. pp.121–2. Lewis, p.321; p.326. Ibid. p.326. Ibid. p.322. Ibid. pp.322–3. Ibid. pp.323–4. Gürbey, Gülüzar. Die Türkei-Politik der Bundesrepublik unter Konrad Adenauer (1949–1963) (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus 1990), pp.175–6. Lüdke, Tilman. Jihad Made in Germany: Ottoman and German Propaganda and Intelligence Operations in the First World War (Münster: Lit Verlag 2005); see also Landau, Jacob M. Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (Indiana: Indiana University Press 1995); idem, The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990); Özdoğan, Günay Göksu. ‘Turan’dan ‘Bozkurt’a: tek Parti Döneminde Türkçülüc (1931–1946) (Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları 2001). On early Turkish–Soviet Relations see Gökay, Bülent. A Clash of Empires: Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism, 1918–1923 (London: I.B.Tauris 1997). Hale, William. Turkish Foreign Policy, 1774–2000 (London: Frank Cass 2000), pp.49–51. Hale 2000, p.51. Ibid. pp.51–8. Cf.e.g. Lüdke 2005; Landau 1995. Regarding Dış Türkler, see Poulton, pp.285–314. Hale 2000, pp.54–5. Ibid. p.61. Ibid. p.62. Tarbush, Mohammad A. The Role of Military in Politics: A Case Study of Iraq to 1941 (London: KPI Ltd. 1982), p.141. Atatürk’s speech is cited in ‘Self-Determination in the Sanjak of Alexandretta, 1936–39’, Istanbul, 28 May 1957, NA, RG 59, 782.00/5–2857. The 28 May 1957 report’s citation of the Atatürk’s speech obviously is based on contemporary reports in the possession of the Consulate General. Ibid. Ibid. Olmert, Y. ‘Britain, Turkey and the Levant Question during the Second World War’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.23, No.4, October (1987), p.437.

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38. Hale 2000, pp.68–9. 39. Pelt. Tobacco, Arms and Politics: Greece and Germany from World Crisis to World War, 1929–1941 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 1998), pp.199– 200; 204–8. 40. Olmert, pp.440–2. 41. Hale 2000, p.86. 42. Olmert, pp.442–6. 43. Ibid. pp.447–9. 44. Ibid. 45. Weber, Frank G. The Evasive Neutral: Germany, Britain and the Quest for a Turkish Alliance during the Second Word War (Colombia MO, and London: University of Missouri Press 1979), p.83; pp.89–90. 46. Ibid. pp.66–70. 47. Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik (ADAP) Serie D, Bd. XI, 2 BadenBaden u. Göttingen 1950ff, Dok.422, pp.619–21. 48. Weber, p.64. ADAP Serie D Bd. XII, 2 Dok.514, pp.676–81. 49. ADAP Serie D Bd. XII, 2 Dok.514, pp.676–81. 50. Weber, pp.113–6. 51. Ibid. 52. ADAP Serie D Bd. XIII, 2 Dok.361, pp.567–70. Se also, Özdoğan, pp.162–3. 53. Weber, p.125. 54. Ibid. p.140. 55. Zürcher, Erik J. Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B.Tauris 1993) p.369. 56. Weber, pp.81–2. 57. Athanassopoulou, Ekavi. Turkey: Anglo-American Security Interests 1945–1952: The First Enlargement of NATO (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass 1999), pp.35–8; Zürcher, p.213. 58. Hale 2000, pp.85–6. 59. Ibid. pp.111–3. 60. Cf. e.g. Pelt. Tying Greece to the West: US–West German–Greek Relations, 1949–74 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2006), pp.38–43. 61. Karpat 1959, pp.114–7. 62. Lewis, p.323. 63. Karpat 1959, pp.140–1. 64. Karpat 1959, pp.142–3. 65. Ibid. p.140 note 10. 66. Lewis, p.329.

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Chapter 4. Menderes and counter-Kemalist currents 1. Geyikdagi, Mehmet Yashar. Political Parties in Turkey: The Role of Islam (New York: Praeger 1984), p.78. 2. Weiker, Walter F. The Turkish Revolution 1960–1961: Aspects of Military Politics (Washington: The Brookings Institution 1963), p.9. 3. Geyikdagi, p.78. 4. 24 March 1947, Central Intelligence Group, Intelligence Report, Country: Turkey, Subject: Request of Turkish Deputies for Religious Instruction, CIA-RDP82–00457R000400420008–7. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Istanbul, 26 January 1959, American Consulate General, Istanbul, to the Department of State, Status of Islam in Turkey – end of 1958, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2659. 10. Ibid. 11. Cited in Istanbul, 18 March 1957, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Exploitation of Religious Sentiments for Political Ends, unclassified, NA, RG 59, 782.00/3–1857. 12. Zürcher, pp.244–5. 13. Ibid. 14. Geyikdagi, pp.78–9. 15. Logoglu, p.163. 16. Geyikdagi, p.79. 17. Ibid. 18. Cf. Abu-Rabi, Ibrahim M. and Graham E. Fuller. The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2004), pp.7–8. 19. Vahide. ‘Said Nursi’s Interpretation of Jihad’ in Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (ed.). Islam at the Crossroad, pp.107–8. 20. Vahide. Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany: State of New York University 2005), p.307. 21. Ibid. pp.306–7. 22. ‘A Chronology of Said Nursi’s Life’ in Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (ed.). Islam at the Crossroad, p.xxiii. 23. Ankara, 24 April 1959, Embassy, Counselor of Embassy, John Goodyear, to Department of State, Religion in Turkey – Spring 1959, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/4–2459. 24. Ibid.

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25. Istanbul, 26 January 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Status of Islam in Turkey – end of 1958, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2659. 26. Ibid. 27. Ankara, 24 April 1959, Embassy, Counselor of Embassy, John Goodyear, to Department of State, Religion in Turkey – Spring 1959, Confidential, NA The Turkish, RG 59, 782.00/4–2459. 28. Istanbul, 26 January 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Status of Islam in Turkey – end of 1958, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2659. 29. Enver Pasha used the term in a private letter reacting to the results of the warfare of the Balkan States during the Balkan Wars; see Hanioglu, Sükrü. Kendi Mektuplarında Enver Paşa (Istanbul 1989), p.15. 30. Istanbul, 26 January 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Status of Islam in Turkey – end of 1958, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2659. 31. Crampton, R.J. A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), p.174. 32. Istanbul, 26 January 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Status of Islam in Turkey – end of 1958, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2659. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ankara, 24 April 1959, Embassy, Counselor of Embassy, John Goodyear, to Department of State, Religion in Turkey – Spring 1959, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/4-2459. 36. Istanbul 19 March 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Recent Development in Turkish Islam: Menderes’ Return to Turkey; the Reappearance of Bügük Dogu, Official Use Only, NA, RG 59, 782.00/31959. 37. It was the first major mosque to be built in Istanbul and became something of a sacred place, containing a stone said to bear the footprint of the Prophet Muhammad. The Ottomans considered it the fourth most important Islam site after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. It was here that Eyüb Ensari, companion to the Prophet Muhammad, had been buried after he was martyred during the first siege of Constantinople in 674–8. It was also here that ascending Ottoman sultans girded their swords and assumed their offices in public ceremony. More mosques, prayer schools and fountains were built and, because many Ottoman officials wished to be buried at or near the site of Abu Ayyub’s resting place, the cemetery became one of Istanbul’s most desirable final resting places. 38. Istanbul, 19 March 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Recent Development in Turkish Islam: Menderes’ Return to Turkey; the reappearance of Bügük Dogu, Official Use Only, NA, RG 59, 782.00/3–1959.

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46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ankara, 24 April 1959, Embassy, Counselor of Embassy, John Goodyear, to Department of State, Religion in Turkey – Spring 1959, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/4–2459. Ibid. Zürcher, p.145. Ankara, 3 August 1965, Embassy to Department of State, Subject: Justice Party on the Eve of the Election campaign, confidential, NA, RG 59, Central FP, Files 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. Zürcher, pp.243–5 Yavuz 2003. Ankara, 3 August 1965, Embassy to Department of State, Subject: Justice Party on the Eve of the Election campaign, confidential, NA, RG 59, Central FP, Files 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. Aydemir, Şevket Süreyya. Menderes’in Drami? 1899–1960 (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi 1969). Geyikdagi, pp.81–3. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, p.7. Ankara, 3 August 1965, Embassy to Department of State, Subject: Justice Party on the Eve of the Election campaign, confidential, NA, RG 59, Central FP, Files 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. Sherwood, pp.54–65, p.55. Lewis, p.322. In her study of the mobilizing potential of Islam in Egypt, Wickham stresses that in authoritarian settings where opposition groups’ access to formal political institutions and elites is restricted, we must consider the space available to opposition actors in ostensibly ‘non-political’ arenas, like the periphery encompassing religious institutions, local community, youth centres, schools and even private households. In this way, nonpolitical groups and organizations often provide the setting for collective political action. Wickham contrasts this ‘dynamic periphery’ with what she presents as the ‘hollow centre’, i.e. a locus whose institutions like parliament and political parties are closed to access for ‘real’ opposition and dissent. Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky. Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism,

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60.

61. 62. 63.

261

and Political Change in Egypt (New York: Colombia University Press, 2002), pp.94–5; 205. Tapper, Richard. ‘Introduction’, in Richard Tapper (ed.). Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State (London: I.B.Tauris 1994), p.9. Wiktorowicz, Quintan. ‘Islamic Activism and Social Movement Theory’, in Wictorowicz (ed.). Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2004), p.25. Brockett, p.48. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, p.8. Sherwood, pp.54–65, p.55.

Chapter 5. The Kemalists hit back 1. Ankara, 3 August 1965, Embassy to Department of State, Subject: Justice Party on the Eve of the Election Campaign, Confidential, NA, RG 59, Central FP, Files 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. 2. Ankara, 9 July 1963, Memorandum of Conversation, Internal Politics: Inonu–Menderes–Bayar Relationship, Confidential, NA, RG 59, Office of NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs’ Desk, Box 5. 3. Undated, Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Director, Allan Dulles to the President, Subject: The Turkish Republican People’s Party, Secret, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Ann Whitmann File, International Series, Box 49. 4. 2 January 1958, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Subject: Comment of Periodical AKIS on Treatment of Religious Issues in Electoral Campaign, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–258. 5. Istanbul, 10 January 1956, American Consulate General to the Department of State, ‘Istanbul Reactions to the Prime Minister’s Remarks at Konya (January 7) Promising Religious Training in Secondary Schools’, NA, RG 59, 782.13/1–1056. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ankara, 24 April 1959, Embassy, Counselor of Embassy, John Goodyear, to Department of State, Religion in Turkey – Spring 1959, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/4–2459. 10. 2 January 1958, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Subject: Comment of Periodical AKIS on Treatment of Religious Issues in Electoral Campaign, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–258.

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262 MILITARY INTERVENTION & 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Istanbul, 12 April 1958, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Subject: Press Reports on Reactionary Activities, NA, RG 59, 782.00/4–1758. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Istanbul, 4 June 1958, American Consulate General, Istanbul, to the Department of State, Subject: Istanbul Press Comment on Recent Reactionary Incidents, NA, RG 59, 782.00/6–458. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Istanbul, 26 January 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Status of Islam in Turkey – end of 1958, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2659. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Istanbul, 19 March 1959, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Recent Development in Turkish Islam: Menderes’ Return to Turkey; The Reappearance of Bügük Dogu, Official Use Only, NA, RG 59, 782.00/3–1959. Ankara, 24 April 1959, Embassy, Counselor of Embassy, John Goodyear, to Department of State, Religion in Turkey – Spring 1959, Confidential, NA The Turkish, RG 59, 782.00/4–2459. Zürcher, p.245 Ibid. Lewis, p.324. Sherwood, pp.58–9. Zürcher, p.250.

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Chapter 6. The Cyprus issue 1. Cossaboom, Robert and Gary Leiser. ‘Adana Station 1943–45: Prelude to the Post-war American Military Presence in Turkey’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.34, No.1, January (1998), pp.78–86. 2. Sever, Aysegül. ‘The Compliant Ally? Turkey and the West in the Middle East, 1954–1958’, Middle East Studies, Vol.34, No.2, (1998), pp.73–90; pp.73–4. 3. Roubatis, Yiannis P. Tangled Webs: The US in Greece 1947–1967 (New York 1997), pp.91–3. For a detailed account and thorough analysis of the process of Turkey’s becoming a member of NATO, see Athanassopoulou pp. 85ff. 4. Roubatis, pp.94–5. 5. Hahn, Peter L. ‘Containment and Egyptian Nationalism: The Unsuccessful Effort to Establish the Middle East Command’, Diplomatic History, Vol.11, No.1, (1987), p.27. 6. Roubatis, pp.94–7. 7. Vander Lippe, John M. ‘Forgotten Brigade of the Forgotten War: Turkey’s Participation in the Korean War’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.36, No.1, January (2000), p.97. 8. Roubatis, pp.98–105. 9. Hahn, Peter L. United States, Great Britain and Egypt, 1945–56: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 1991), pp.105–113. 10. Ibid. See also Kuniholm, Bruce R. ‘US Policy in the Near East: The Triumphs and Tribulations of the Truman administration’ in Michael J. Lacey (ed.). The Truman Presidency (Cambridge 1989), pp.314–5. 11. Roubatis, pp.110–2. 12. Heuser, Beatrice. Western ‘Containment’ Policies in the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948–1953 (London 1989), pp.181–3; p.205. Bagci, Hüseyin. Die türkische Aussenpolitik während der Regierungszeit Menderes, von 1950 bis 1960 (Bonn 1988), pp.84–96. 13. For a recent and thorough discussion of nationalism in Greece and Turkey and the view of the ‘other’, see Özkirimli, Umut and Spyros A. Sofos. Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (London: Hurst and Company 2008). Regarding Venizelists and anti-Venizelists in the interwarperiod, see Mavrogordatos, Th. Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1983), pp. 25–10; passim. 14. Cf. e.g. Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

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15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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Division of Intercourse and Education, Publication No.4, Washington 1914, republished in 1993 in the midst of war in former Yugoslavia as Kennan, George. The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1993); Toynbee, Arnold. The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (London: Constable and Company Ltd. 1922). Güven, Dilek. Cumhuriyet Dönemi Azınlık Politikaları ve Stratejileri Bağlamında: 6–7 Eyül Olayları (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları 2005), p.204. Athanassopoulou, p.37. Cf. e.g. Stamatopoulos, Kostas M. I teleftea analambi: i konstantinoupolitiki Romiosini sta chronia 1948–1955 (Athens: Ekdoseis Domis 1996); see also, Alexis Alexandris. The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek–Turkish Relations 1918–1974 (Athens: Center for Asia Minor Studies 1983). Millas, Hercules. ‘Non-Muslim Minorities in the Historiography of Republican Turkey: the Greek Case’, in Fikret Adanir and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds), The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden, Boston, Köln: E.J. Brill 2002), p.121. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ersanli, Büsra. ‘The Ottoman Empire in the Historiography of the Kemalist Era: A Theory of Fatal Decline’ in Adanir and Faroqhi 2002. Clogg, Richard. A Short History of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), p.171. Bagci, pp.172–9. Ibid. Athanasiadis, Spiros A. Fakelos T.M.T. (The TMT File) (Nicosia 1998), p.18. Mazower, Mark. Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941–44 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1993), p.349. Bagci, pp.172–9. Ibid. pp.176–9. Athanasiadis, p.106 Ibid. p.18. Bagci, pp.182–3. Ibid. pp.184–5. Ankara, 1 December 1955, American Embassy to the Department of State, the Istanbul–Izmir Disturbances of September 6, 1955, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/12–155.

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43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

265

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See above. Güven, p.207. Ankara, 1 December 1955, American Embassy to the Department of State, the Istanbul–Izmir Disturbances of September 6, 1955, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/12–155. According to the chief of the Syrian Army Staff, the Communists were hard at work among the Kurds, offering, among other things, an independent Kurdistan. In addition, repressive Turkish measures made numbers of Kurdish Communists enter Syria during the 1950s. According to an estimate by the Operations Coordinating Board, the Syrian Communist Party had some 10,000 members, largely drawn from the Armenian and Kurdish minorities and from Orthodox Christian communities. Damascus 17 November 1955, the Ambassador to the Department of State, Subject: Transmittal of Memorandum of Conversation with Chief of Staff Shuqayr, Secret, NA, RG 59, 683.00/11– 1755. See also, 7 July 1955, Analysis of Internal Security Situation in Syria (Pursuant to NSC 1290-d) and Recommended Action, Top Secret, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers 1948–61, OCB, Central File Series, Box 55, DDEL. Ankara, 1 December 1955, American Embassy to the Department of State, the Istanbul–Izmir Disturbances of September 6, 1955, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/12–155. Ibid. Ibid. Akgönül, Samim. Le Patriarcat grec orthodoxe. De l’isolement à l´internationalisation de 1923 à nos jours (Paris: Mainsonneuve et Larose 2005), pp.86–7. Ibid. Ibid. p.88. Ibid. p.89. Ankara, 1 December 1955, American Embassy to the Department of State, the Istanbul–Izmir Disturbances of September 6, 1955, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/12–155. Akgönül, pp.86–7. Ibid. p.87, footnote 95.

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53. Ankara, 4 September 1956, Memorandum of Conversation, Subject: Turkey’s Foreign Policy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.00/9–556. 54. 30 August 1955, News from Turkey, Turkish Information Office, New York, Vol.8, No.19. 55. Ibid. 56. Ankara, 1 December 1955, American Embassy to the Department of State, the Istanbul–Izmir Disturbances of September 6, 1955, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/12–155. 57. Birand, Mehmet Ali. Shirts of Steel: An Anatomy of the Turkish Armed Forces (London: I.B.Tauris, 1991) (translated from the Turkish title Emret Komutanım, Istanbul 1986) p.57. 58. Ankara, 14 February 1961, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland an das AA, Betr.: Stand der Prozesse auf Yassiada, PAAA, Abt.2, Ref.206, Bd.95. 59. Istanbul, 20 February 1956, American Consul General to the Department of State, Indictment presented by Istanbul Martial Law Authorities Against Seventeen Accused of Instigating Disorders of September 6/7, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/2–2056. 60. Ibid. 61. Güven, pp.204–6. 62. Ibid. 63. Güven, pp.204–7. See also Vryonis, Speros Jr. The Mechanism of Catastrophe: the Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul (New York: Greekworks.com 2005); Septemvriana 1955: I ‘nichta ton kristallon tou Ellenismou tis Polis (Athens: Ekdoseis Tsoukatou 1998) 64. Ankara, 1 December 1955, American Embassy to the Department of State, the Istanbul–Izmir Disturbances of September 6, 1955, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/12–155. 65. Ibid. 66. Istanbul, 20 February 1956, American Consul General to the Department of State, Indictment presented by Istanbul Martial Law Authorities Against Seventeen Accused of Instigating Disorders of September 6/7, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/2–2056. 67. Ankara, 1 December 1955, American Embassy to the Department of State, the Istanbul–Izmir Disturbances of September 6, 1955, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/12–155. 68. Bagci, p.196. 69. 15 September 1955 News from Turkey. 70. Bagci, p.196. 71. 15 September 1955 News from Turkey.

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72. Istanbul 20 February 1956, American Consul General to the Department of State, Indictment presented by Istanbul Martial Law Authorities Against Seventeen Accused of Instigating Disorders of September 6/7, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/2–2056. 73. Ibid. 74. Keesing’s Contemporary Archives 1961, p.18375. 75. Ibid. 76. Bagci, 193. 77. Istanbul 28 May 1957, NA, RG 59, 782.00/5–2857. 78. Ortam 26 May 1997, cited in Athanasiadis, p.55. 79. Kıbrıs Mektubu July 1996 and Halkin Sesi August 1996, cited in Athanasiadis, pp.99–101. 80. Ibid. p.19. 81. Ibid., pp.18; 103; see also Alasor, Roni. Sifreli Mesaj: ‘Trene bindir!’ (Köln: Befin Verlag 1999). 82. Alasor. 83. Kıbrıs Mektubu July 1996 and Halkin Sesi August 1996, cited in Athanasiadis, 119–21.

Chapter 7. Turkey and the attempts to tie the Middle East to the West 1. Cf. e.g. Damascus, 3 February 1955, Embassy in Damascus to Department of State, subject: The Turkish Prime Minister’s Controversial Stop-Over in Damascus, Official Use Only, NA, RG 59, 682.83/2–355. 2. Hale 2002, p.62. 3. Nachmani, Amikan. Israel, Turkey and Greece: Uneasy Relations in the East Mediterranean (London: Frank Cass 1987), pp.7–8. 4. Nachmani, p.45. 5. Hahn 1991, pp.105–113. 6. Ibid. 7. Roubatis, p.106. 8. Ibid. p.109. 9. Hahn 1987, p.38. 10. Ibid. 11. Persson, Magnus. Great Britain, the United States, and the Security of the Middle East: the Formation of the Baghdad Pact (Lund: Lund University Press 1998), pp.117–9. 12. Hahn 1987, pp.38–9.

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13. Regarding Israel, cf. Nachmani, pp.3ff. 14. Saunders, Bonnie. The United States and Arab Nationalism: The Syrian Case, 1953–1960 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger 1996), pp.25–7. 15. Bagci, pp.112–3. 16. Barnett, Michael N. Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order (New York: Colombia University Press 1999), pp.110–1. 17. Oikarinen, Jarmo. The Middle East in the American Quest for World Order: Ideas of Power, Economics, and Social Development in the United States Foreign Policy, 1953–1961 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura 1999), p.113. 18. Bagci, pp.103–4. 19. Damascus 3 February 1955, Embassy in Damascus to Department of State, Subject: The Turkish Prime Minister’s Controversial Stop-Over in Damascus, Official Use Only, NA, RG 59, 682.83/2–355. 20. Bagci, pp.103–4. 21. Ibid. pp.107–8. 22. Barnett, p.113. 23. Saunders, p. 26. 24. Cf. Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003), pp.160–85 passim. 25. Ankara, 28 February 1955, Embassy in Ankara to Department of State, subject: Turkish Reply to Egyptian Charges of Syrian Border Tension, Official Use Only, NA, RG 59, 682.83/2–2855. 26. Barnett, p.115. See also Mufti, Malik. Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1996), p.72. 27. Barnett, p.115. 28. Ankara, 23 March 1955, Embassy in Ankara to the Department of State, Subject: Ankara Editorial Comment on Turkish–Syrian Relations, NA, RG 59, 682.83/3–2355. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Damascus, 26 March 1955, Embassy in Damascus to Secretary of State, telegram, secret, NA, RG 59, 682.83/3–2455. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Beirut, 24 March 1955, Embassy in Beirut to Secretary of State, telegram, NA, RG 59, 682.83/3.2455. 36. 26 March 1955, USARMA Ankara to USCINCEUR Paris France, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.83/3–2655.

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37. Paris, 28 March 1955, Achilles to Secretary of State, telegram, top secret, NA, RG 59, 682.83/3–2855. 38. Beirut, 29 March 1955, 7:55 a.m. Embassy to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.83/3–2855. 39. Ibid. 40. Amman, 5 April 1955, the American Embassy to Department of State, subject: Local Reactions to Turco–Syrian Tensions, confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.83/4–555. 41. Moscow, 31 March 1955, Bohlen to Secretary of State, NA, Rg 59, 683.00/3–3155. 42. Seale, Patrick. The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945– 1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965), pp.233–4. 43. Ibid. 44. Washington, 30 March 1955, Mr Hart NEA to Mr. Allen NEA, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.83./3–3055. 45. Baghdad, 28 March 1955, Embassy to Secretary of State, telegram, secret, NA, RG 59, 682.83–2855. 46. Ibid. 47. Rubinstein, Alvin Z. Red Star on the Nile: The Soviet–Egyptian Influence Relationship Since the June War (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1977), p.4. 48. Bagci, p.111, citing Keesing’s 11–18 June, 1955, p.14256. 49. Ankara, 27 April 1955, Embassy to Department of State, subject: Picture of Aslan Humbaraci in the Turkish news magazine, Akis, NA, RG 59, 682.83/4–2755. 50. 20 May 1955, Moscow to Secretary of State, official use, NA, RG 59, 782.5261/5–2055. 51. Ankara, 21 June 1955, Embassy to Department of State, subject: TurkishSyrian Relations, confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.83/6–2155. 52. Damascus, 18 June 1955, Embassy to Department of State, subject: Foreign Minister Azm’s Statement on Foreign Policy, confidential, NA, RG 59, 683.00./6–1855. 53. Rubinstein, p.4. 54. Seale, p.233. 55. Barnett, p.116. 56. Imam, Hamada. Al-amerikan wa al-ikhwan (Cairo 2001), p.40. 57. Jankowski, James. Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism and the United Arab Republic (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers 2002), p.77. 58. Podeh, Elie. The Quest of Hegemony in the Arab World: The Struggle over the Baghdad Pact (Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp.175–6, see note 20.

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59. Ibid. p.176. 60. Ibid. p.178. 61. Jerusalem, 22 November 1955, American Consul General to Department of State, subject: West Bank Reaction to Turkish President’s Visit, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.11/11–2255. 62. Ibid. 63. Barnett, pp.116–18. 64. This was said during a conversation with the Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Bagci, pp.122–3. 65. Vahide 2005, pp.306–7. 66. Idem. ‘Towards an Intellectual Biography of Said Nursi’ in Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (ed.). Islam at the Crossroad, 2003, p.24. 67. Idem, 2005, p.325. 68. Erogul, Cem. ‘The Establishment of Multiparty Rule, 1945–71’ in Irvin Cemil Schick and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak (eds.). Turkey in Transition, New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987), pp.114–4. 69. Ankara, 4 September 1956, Memorandum of Conversation, Subject: Turkey’s Foreign Policy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.00/9–556. 70. Akis, 9 February 1957, Vol.IX, No.144, NA, RG 59, 782.00./2–2057. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Pelt 2006, pp.152–7. 74. Akis, 9 February 1957

Chapter 8. A new cold war frontline: Turkey versus Syria 1. Washington, 27 June 1955, Operations Coordinating Board, Memorandum for the Operations Coordinating Board, Subject: Analysis of the Internal Security Situation in Syria and Recommended Action, Top Secret, White House Office, NSC Staff, Operations Coordinating Board, Central File Series, Box 55 Syria, DDEL. 2. The Operations Coordinating Board met regularly at the State Department, and was composed of the under-secretary of state for political affairs, deputy secretary of defence, the directors of the CIA, USIA and ICA, and the special assistants to the president for National Security Affairs and Security Operations Coordination. 3. Saunders, p.22. 4. Bonn, 4 May 1957, Memorandum of Conversation, Participants, United States: Secretary of State Dulles, Assistant Secretary Elbrick, Ambassador Bruce, David R. Thomson, Germany: Chancellor Adenauer, Foreign

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

271

Minister von Brentano, Defence Minister Strauss, State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Hallstein, Ambassador Krekeler, FRUS 1955–1957, Vol. 24, No.105. Saunders, pp.41–51. Damascus, 25 March 1955, Ambassador to the Secretary of State, telegram secret, NA, RG 59, 682.83/3–2555. Ibid. Saunders, pp.41–2. Ibid. pp.46–7. Ibid. Ibid. p.50. Damascus, 8 November 1955, Moose to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, NA, RG 59, 683.00/11–856. Damascus, 17 November 1955, the Ambassador to the Department of State, Subject: Transmittal of Memorandum of Conversation with Chief of Staff Shuqayr, Secret, NA, RG 59, 683.00/11–1755. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Istanbul, 30 November 1956, Miner to Secretary of State, telegram, unclassified, NA, RG 59, 683.00/11–2956. Damascus, 11 December 1956, Moose to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, NA, RG 59, 683.00/12–1156. Washington, 24 December 1956, Memorandum of Conversation with Sir Harold Caccia, British Ambassador at my Residence [Dulles’], Personal and Private, Secret, J. Dulles, General Correspondence, Box 1, John Foster Dulles Papers, Steely Mudd Library, Princeton University. Ibid. Ibid. Washington, 25 January 1957, R.V. Mrozinski, to Mr Elmer B. States, Subject: Accelerated Soviet Arms Shipments to Syria, Secret, White House Office, NSC Staff, Operations Coordinating Board, Central File Series, Box 55 Syria, DDEL. Washington, 27 January 1956, Operations Coordinating Board, Subject: Courses of Action Against Communism in Syria – OCB Working group on NSC 5428, Secret, White House Office, NSC Staff, Operations Coordinating Board, Central File Series, Box 55 Syria, DDEL. Washington, 26 January 1956, Operations Coordinating Board, Department of Defence Contribution, Subject: Preparation of Courses of Action against

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

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Communism in Syria, Top Secret, White House Office, NSC Staff, Operations Coordinating Board, Central File Series, Box 55 Syria, DDEL. Memorandum of Conversation, participants: Brig. General Cevdet Yamanoglu, Iskenderun Garrison Commander; John H. Morris, American Consul, Iskenderun; Lt. Colonel Fulton, TUSLOG, Iskenderun; subject: Movement of Turkish Troops, Secret, attached to Ankara 20 May, US Embassy to the Department of State, subject: Turkish Military Maneuvers on the Syrian Border, April–May 1957, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54/5–2057. Ankara, 20 May, US Embassy to the Department of State, subject: Turkish Military Maneuvers on the Syrian Border, April–May 1957, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54/5–2057. Memorandum of Conversation, participants: Brig. General Cevdet Yamanoglu, Iskenderun Garrison Commander; John H. Morris, American Consul, Iskenderun; Lt. Colonel Fulton, TUSLOG, Iskenderun; subject: Movement of Turkish Troops, Secret, attached to 20 May Ankara, US Embassy to the Department of State, subject: Turkish Military Maneuvers on the Syrian Border, April–May 1957, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54/5–2057. Ankara, 20 May, US Embassy to the Department of State, subject: Turkish Military Maneuvers on the Syrian Border, April–May 1957, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54/5–2057. Iskenderun, 13 August 1957, American Consulate, Iskenderun, Subject: Turkish Military Maneuvres on the Syrian Border, July–August 1957, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54/8–1357. Saunders, pp.55–75. Ibid. pp.70–5. Washington, 11 September 1957, Memorandum of Conversation, Subject: Syria, Personal and Private, Secret, J.Dulles, General Correspondence, Box 1, John Foster Dulles Papers, Steely Mudd Library, Princeton University. 16 September 1957, Norstad to Twining, Top Secret, Lauris Norstad Box 105, DDEL. Saunders, p.73. Lesch, David. Syria and the United States: Eisenhower’s Cold War in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview 1992), p.156. Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 2004), p.165.

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38. Washington, 17 September 6:17 PM, to Embassy Paris, Top Secret, Limit Distribution, NA, RG 59, 782.54./9–1757. 39. Paris, 19 September 12:08 PM to Secretary of State, Top Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54./9–1757. 40. Naples, 19 September 2:51 PM to Secretary of State, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54./9–1757. 41. Ibid. 42. Washington, 20 September 10:39 AM to Paris, Top Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.54./9–1657. 43. Washington, 1 October 1957, Memorandum of Conversation with the President, Personal and Private, Secret, J. Dulles/Eisenhower, White House Memos, Box 5, John Foster Dulles Papers, Steely Mudd Library, Princeton University. 44. Washington, 6 October 1957, Memorandum of Conversation, Personal and Private, Secret, J.Dulles, General Correspondence, Box 1, John Foster Dulles Papers, Steely Mudd Library, Princeton University. 45. Saunders, pp.70–75. 46. Gendier, Irene L. Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958 (New York 1997) pp.310–1. The plan was a by-product of the Eisenhower Doctrine. It was initially prepared for military action against Syria and later served as the basis for the ‘Unilateral US limited war plan for operations in Lebanon’ that is for the landing of US troops in Lebanon in July 1958, ibid. 47. Little, Douglas. ‘Gideon’s Band: America and the Middle East since 1945’, Diplomatic History, Vol.18, No.4, Fall (1994), pp.530–1. Petran Tabitha, Syria: A Modern History (London 1972), pp.112–23. 48. Saunders, p.73. 49. Ibid. 50. 23 October 1957, Warren to Secretary of State, telegram. secret, NA, RG 59, 682.83/10–2357. 51. 22 October 1957, Warren to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.83/10–2257. 52. Washington, 25 October 1957, Memorandum of Conversation at the White House, Top Secret, J.Dulles, General Correspondence, Box 1, John Foster Dulles Papers, Steely Mudd Library, Princeton University. 53. Washington, 28 October 1957, Memorandum of Conversation with General Lauris Norstad, Personal and Private, Top Secret, J. Dulles/Eisenhower, White House Memos, Box 5, John Foster Dulles Papers, Steely Mudd Library, Princeton University. 54. Saunders, p.72.

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55. Hatzivassiliou Evanthis. ‘Greece and the Arabs, 1956–1958’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 16 (1992), pp.69–71. 56. Saunders, pp.72–4. 57. Barnett, p.129–32. 58. On 13 May 1958, more than two months before the landing of US Marines in Lebanon, Dulles instructed the ambassador in Beirut to reply to Chamoun, who had obviously asked for some sort of military assistance from the United States in the following manner: ‘The United States considers that the introduction of Western forces into Lebanon is a grave step which could have the most serious and far reaching consequences and one which should not be lightly requested or other than under the most compelling necessity to meet a situation where the integrity of Lebanon is genuinely threatened and where its own forces do not suffice for protection. The US is prepared upon appropriate request from President and Rpt. [repeat] and GOL [the Government of Lebanon] to send certain combat forces to Lebanon which would have the dual mission of (a) protecting American life and property and (b) assisting the GOL in its military program for the preservation of the independence and integrity of Lebanon which is vital to the national interests of the United States and world peace.’ In his instruction to the ambassador, Dulles noted that the Eisenhower Doctrine did not authorize the president to send armed forces to fight for Lebanon’s independence since there had not occurred ‘armed aggression from any country controlled by International Communism.’ For that reason Chamoun should couch his request in the terms indicated above, as once the US troops were in Lebanon they would, in fact, serve to protect the independence of Lebanon: ‘If for example they were stationed in Beirut and Tripoli to protect American life and property, they would presumably release Lebanese forces, and if elements which were there to assist GOL in its military program became engaged in hostilities they would, acting in self-defence, counterattack.’ The ambassador was also informed that the United States was concerting the action with Britain. As for Chamoun, he should be told that steps were already being taken to put substantial combat forces into readiness to respond promptly, but the arrival could not be counted on before two or three days after Washington had received the request from the Lebanese government. Furthermore, Chamoun should also know that Dulles said that ‘at least concurrently with any public request to the U.S. the GOL would file a complaint with the United Nations Security Council, alleging the interference from without in its internal affairs and the consequent threat to its integrity and independence.’ Washington, 13 May 1958, Dulles to American Embassy

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59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

275

Beirut, Top Secret, JFD/Eisenhower, Chronological Series, Box 16, Seely G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. Ankara, 7 June 1960, Embassy to State Department, Turk–UAR–Iraq Relations – the Bases of Turkey’s Middle East Policy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.86B/6–760. Washington, 12 August, President Eisenhower to President Celal Bayar, DDEL, Papers as President of the US, 1952–1961, Ann Whitman File, International Series, Box 49. Gürbey, p.84; and Pelt 2006, pp.160–9. Nachmani, p.74. Ibid. pp.3–4. Ankara, 7 June 1960, Embassy to State Department, Turk–UAR–Iraq Relations – the Bases of Turkey’s Middle East Policy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 682.86B/6–760. Hatzivassiliou, p.76–7. Alasor. AF 1206416 No.29 FR SANA, Ankara, Turkey, NA, RG 59, 782.00 (W)/7–2558 CS/HHH. Ibid. Ankara, 25 July 1958, Warren to Secretary of State, telegram, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–2558. Ibid. Ankara, 28 July 1958, Warren to Secretary of State, telegram, unclassified, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–2858. Ibid. Ankara, 27 July 1958, Warren to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–2758. Ankara, 29 July 1958, Warren to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–2958. Ankara, 13 August 1958, Embassy to the Department of State, Further Comment on the Significance of the Iraqi Coup in Turkey, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.00/8–1358 HBS. Ibid. Simpson, p.147. Istanbul, 23 January 1959, American Consul General to the Department of State, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2359. Undated, Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Director, Allan Dulles to the President, Subject: The Turkish Republican People’s Party, Secret, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Ann Whitmann File, International Series, Box 49.

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Chapter 9. The road to the 27 May coup 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Weiker. The Turkish Revolution, pp.10–1. Ibid. Ibid. Logoglu, p.162. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, pp. 10–1. Ibid. Logoglu, p.170. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, pp. 10–1. Logoglu, p.161. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, pp. 10–1. Ibid. Ankara, 16 December 1959, NA, RG 59, NEA, GTI, Turkish Affairs’ Desk, Box 3. Ibid. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, pp. 14–5. Ankara, 8 July 1960, US Embassy to the Department of State, Subject: The End of Menderes Government, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–860 Hale 1994, p.106. Ankara, 8 July 1960, US Embassy to the Department of State, Subject: The End of Menderes Government, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–860. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ankara, 23 April 1960 9.05 a.m., Ambassador to Secretary of State, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/4–2360. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Washington, 1 May 1960, Department of State to American Consulate General, Istanbul, Secret, NA, RG 59, 782.00/5–160. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, pp.18–9. 23 May 1960, NSC Briefing, Turkish Internal Situation, Secret, CIARDP79R00890A001200050016–2. Erogul, p.118. Logoglu, p.162.

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32. Karpat, Kamal. ‘The Military and Politics in Turkey, 1960–64: A SocioCultural Analysis of a Revolution’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No.6, October (1970), pp.1672–3. 33. George S. Harris, ‘The Role of the Military in Turkish Politics’, The Middle East Journal, Vol.19, No.1, Winter (1965), p.170. 34. Ankara, 11 August 1960, Fletcher Warren to G. Lewis Jones Jr., Official, Informal, Confidential, Eisenhower Library, Ann Whitmann File, International Series, Box 49. 35. Ankara, 22 June 1960, Embassy to Department of State, Subject: Republican People’s Party; A First Reaction Following the Coup, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/6–2260. 36. Karpat 1970, pp.1672–3. 37. Ankara, 8 July 1960, US Embassy to the Department of State, Subject: The End of Menderes Government, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–860. 38. 31 May 1961, CIA, Office of National Estimates, Subject: Situation in Turkey, Memorandum for the Director, Secret, John F. Kennedy Library, hence JFKL, NSF, box 167, Turkey General 1/61–9/61. 39. Black Book on the Militarist ‘Democracy’ in Turkey (Info-Türk: 1986), p.81. 40. Karpat 1970, pp.1672–3. 41. Zürcher, p.252. 42. 9 November 1961, INR, Research Memorandum, Military Rule in Turkey, May 1960–November 1961, Confidential, NOFORN, JFKL, NSF, 444, R.W Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63,[2 of 2]. 43. Ibid.

Chapter 10. The military and Menderes 1. Harris 1965, pp.60–3. 2. Ibid. 3. Ankara, 21 July 1960, Memorandum of Conversation, An Aspect of Turkish Military Attitudes, NA, RG 59, Near Eastern and African Affairs (NEA), Records of the Turkish Desk, 1958–63, Box 3. 4. Karpat 1970, p.1661. Karpat relies on later accounts published after the 27 May 1960 coup d’état, in the newspaper Milliyet 27 May 1962 and in Abdi İpekçi, Ömer Sami Coşar, İhtilalin İçyüzü (Istanbul 1965). 5. Hale 1994, pp.92–3. 6. Harris 1965, p.169. 7. Hale 1994, pp.97–8.

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8. Karpat 1970, p.1662. 9. Ankara, 21 July 1960, Memorandum of Conversation, An Aspect of Turkish Military Attitudes, NA, RG 59, Near Eastern and African Affairs (NEA), Records of the Turkish Desk, 1958–63, Box 3. 10. Washington, NEA, 1 June 1960, Admiral Burke’s Conversation with Senior Turkish Army Officer, NA, RG 59, Near Eastern and African Affairs (NEA), Records of the Turkish Desk, 1958–63, Box 3. 11. Harris 1965, p.170. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Karpat 1970, p.1665. 15. Hale 1994, p.100. See also Karpat 1970, p.1665. 16. Hale 1994, p.101. 17. 14 April 1958, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Subject: Army Officers Accused of Conspiracy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.551/4–1458. 18. Istanbul, 27 November 1958, to Secretary of State, incoming telegram, NA, RG 59, 782.551/11–2658. 19. Istanbul, 23 January 1959, American Consul General to the Department of State, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/1–2359. 20. Hale 1994, p.103. 21. Washington, NEA, 1 June 1960, Admiral Burke’s Conversation with Senior Turkish Army Officer, NA, RG 59, Near Eastern and African Affairs (NEA), Records of the Turkish Desk, 1958–63, Box 3 22. Zürcher, p.356. 23. 3 May 1960, Letter from General Cemal Gürsel to Defence Minister Etem Menderes, NA, RG 59, 782.00/7–1360. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Yesilbursa, Behçet Kemal. ‘The “Revolution” of 27 May 1960 in Turkey: British Policy towards Turkey’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.41, No.1, 121–151, January (2005), p.126, and footnote 31.

Chapter 11. The 27 May coup d’état and military regime 1. Weiker. The Turkish Revolution, pp.20–1. 2. The Turkish Revolution of 27th May 1960 with its Economic and Judicial Aspects, Basin – Yayim ve Turzim Bakanligi Yayinlarindan (no year of publication), pp.20–1.

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3. Zürcher, p.253. 4. Ibid. 5. Ahmad, Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge 1993), p.127. 6. Zürcher, p.254. 7. The Turkish Revolution of 27th, p.21. 8. Ibid. 9. Zürcher, p.257; see also The Turkish Revolution of 27th, pp.21–3. 10. Ibid. p.21. 11. Ahmad, p.130. 12. Ankara, 22 June 1960, Embassy to Department of State, Subject: Republican People’s Party; a First Reaction Following the Coup, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/6–2260. 13. Ibid. 14. Birand, pp.53–4. While Kemalism was never a field of study at the military academies during the one-party era, all this changed after the end of the Menderes era. The number of lessons in Atatürkcülük, Atatürkism, increased from about five to nine a week during the 1960s, continued to rise during the 1970s and took the form of a fully-fledged ideology after the coup in 1980, when the Generals’ regime decided that no less than 20 per cent of the time at the military academies should be dedicated to the study of Kemal’s philosophy, ibid. 15. Ankara, 27 October 1961, Embassy to State Department, telegram, secret, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General 10/61–12/61. 16. 1 September 1960, Fletcher Warren to Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Official, Informal, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk 1958–63, box 3. 17. Ankara, 11 August 1960, Fletcher Warren to G. Lewis Jones Jr., Official, Informal, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk 1958–63, box 3. 18. 1 September 1960, Fletcher Warren to Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Official, Informal, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk 1958–63, box 3. 19. 31 May 1961, CIA, Office of National Estimates, Subject: Situation in Turkey, Memorandum for the Director, Secret, JFKL, NSF, box 167, Turkey General 1/61–9/61. 20. Zürcher, pp.255–6. 21. Ibid. 22. Hale 1994, p.139–41. 23. Ibid. 24. Zürcher, p.256.

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25. 31 May 1961, CIA, Office of National Estimates, Subject: Situation in Turkey, Memorandum for the Director, Secret, JFKL, NSF, box 167, Turkey General 1/61–9/61. 26. Ibid. 27. Istanbul, 23 November 1960, American Consulate General to the Department of State, Attitude of Ex DP Followers, Official Use Only, NA, RG 59, 782.00/11–2360. 28. Hale 1994, p.142. 29. 9 November 1962, INR, Military Rule in Turkey, May 1960-November 1961, Research Memorandum, Confidential, NOFORN, JFKL, NSF, 444, R.W Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63,[2 of 2]. 30. 31 May 1961, CIA, Office of National Estimates, Subject: Situation in Turkey, Memorandum for the Director, Secret, JFKL, NSF, box 167, Turkey General 1/61–9/61. 31. Hale 1994, p.143. 32. 10 October 1960, Bi-Weekly Propaganda Guidance, No.50, 295, Trials of Leaders of Ousted Turkish Regime Imminent, Secret, CIA-RDP78–03061 A000100020011–8. 33. 1 September 1960, Fletcher Warren to Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Official, Informal, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk 1958–63, box 3. 34. 29 June 1960, Memorandum of Conversation, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk 1958–63, box 3. 35. Ankara 11 August 1960, Fletcher Warren to G. Lewis Jones Jr., Official, Informal, Confidential, Eisenhower Library, Ann Whitmann File, International Series, Box 49. 36. Izmir, 21 June 1960, American Consul to Secretary of State, Prosecution of DP members, Confidential, NA, RG 59, 782.00/6–2160. 37. 22 June 1960, American Consulate General, Istanbul to Secretary of State, NA, RG 59, 782.00/6–2260. 38. Ankara, 11 August 1960, Fletcher Warren to G. Lewis Jones Jr., Official, Informal, Confidential, Eisenhower Library, Ann Whitmann File, International Series, Box 49. 39. 1 September 1960, Fletcher Warren to Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Official, Informal, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk 1958–63, box 3. 40. 10 October 1960, Bi-Weekly Propaganda Guidance, No.50, 295, Trials of Leaders of Ousted Turkish Regime Imminent, Secret, CIA-RDP78–03061 A000100020011–8.

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41. Izmir, 13 October 1960, American General Consulate to American Embassy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63. box 3. 42. Izmir, 21 October 1960, American General Consulate to American Embassy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63. box 3. 43. Izmir, 13 October 1960, American General Consulate to American Embassy, Confidential, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63. box 3. 44. November 1960, Parker T. Hart, NEA, to The Secretary, Subject: Proposal for Personal Letter from the President to Turkish Head of State Concerning Current Trials of Former Government Leaders, Secret, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63. box 3. 45. Washington, 8 November 1960, Memorandum for the President, Subject: Recommendation That You Not Now Send a Personal Letter to Turkish Head of State Concerning Trials of Former Leaders, Secret, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63. box 3. 46. 31 May 1961, CIA, Office of National Estimates, Subject: Situation in Turkey, Memorandum for the Director, Secret, JFKL, NSF, box 167, Turkey General 1/61–9/61. 47. Erogul, Cem. ‘The Establishment of Multiparty Rule, 1945–71’, in Irvin Cemil Schick and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak (eds). Turkey In Transition: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987), pp.121–8. 48. 31 May 1961, CIA, Office of National Estimates, Subject: Situation in Turkey, Memorandum for the Director, Secret, JFKL, NSF, box 167, Turkey General 1/61–9/61. 49. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, pp.26–43. 50. Ankara 11 October 1961, The Embassy to Auswärtiges Amt (AA), Urteile von Yassiada, Politisches Amt des Auswärtigen Amtes (PAAA), Abt.2, Pol.206, Innenpol. Angelegenheiten der Türkei, Band 95. 51. Ibid. 52. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, pp.43–4. 53. Bagci, pp.238–9. 54. Ankara, 13 September 1961, Hare to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, JFKL, NSF 167, Turkey General, 1/61–9/61. 55. Istanbul, 14 September 1961, Consulate General to Secretary of State, telegram, confidential, JFKL, NSF 167, Turkey General, 1/61–9/61. 56. Ibid. 57. Ankara, 20 September 1961, The Embassy to AA, Die Urteile von Yassiada in der Offentlichen Meinung und ihre Rückwirkungen auf die beforstehende

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58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

A

CRISIS

OF

DEMOCR ACY

Wahlen in der Türkei, PAAA, Abt.2, Pol.206, Innenpol. Angelegenheiten der Türkei, Band 95. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, p.28. Ankara, 20 September 1961, The Embassy to AA, Die Urteile von Yassiada in der Offentlichen Meinung und ihre Rückwirkungen auf die beforstehende Wahlen in der Türkei, PAAA, Abt.2, Pol.206, Innenpol. Angelegenheiten der Türkei, Band 95. Ankara, 9 November 1961, Embasssy to AA, Die Urteile von Yassiada – Rückblick und Auswirkungen, PAAA, Abt.2, Pol.206, Band 95. Ankara, 15 September 1961, 9:25 PM, Hare to Secretary of State, Secret, Presidential Handling, Eyes Only, JFKL, NSF 167, Turkey General, 1/61–9/61. Yesilbursa, p.141. Inönü’s memorandum dated 13 September was to Gürsel and was published five years later in the newspaper Ulus, Logolu, pp.181–2. Ankara, 15 September 1961, 9:25 PM, Hare to Secretary of State, Secret, Presidential Handling, Eyes Only, JFKL, NSF 167, Turkey General, 1/61–9/61. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, p.46. Ankara, 20 September 1961, The Embassy to AA, Die Urteile von Yassiada in der Offentlichen Meinung und ihre Rückwirkungen auf die beforstehende Wahlen in der Türkei, PAAA, Abt.2, Pol.206, Innenpol. Angelegenheiten der Türkei, Band 95. Ibid. Hale 1994, pp.144–5. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, p.45. Ankara, 9 November 1961, The Embassy to AA, Die Urteile von Yassiada, Rückblick und Auswirkungen, PAAA, Abt.2, Pol.206, Innenpol. Angelegenheiten der Türkei, Band 95. Ankara, 16 September 1961 11:00 a.m., Hare to Secretary of State, telegram, secret, eyes only, JFKL, NSF 167, Turkey General, 1/61–9/61. 21 September 1961, Ankara to Secretary of State, Secret, JFKL, NSF 167, Turkey General, 1/61–9/61. In fact the cabinet did submit a resignation, which Gürsel, in turn, refused to accept. Hare described the procedure as ‘oriental reasoning’ as he suspected that the resignation was submitted for the internal record only. Consequently the cabinet would also deny rumours that it had resigned. Ibid. Ankara, 20 September 1961, The Embassy to AA, Die Urteile von Yassiada in der Offentlichen Meinung und ihre Rückwirkungen auf die beforstehende

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Wahlen in der Türkei, PAAA, Abt.2, Pol.206, Innenpol. Angelegenheiten der Türkei, Band 95.

Chapter 12. Transition from military regime to civilian government 1. Hale 1994, p.153. 2. 31 May 1961, CIA, Office of National Estimates, Subject: Situation in Turkey, Memorandum for the Director, Secret, JFKL, NSF, box 167, Turkey General 1/61–9/61. 3. Erogul, p.123. 4. Ahmad, p.137. 5. 9 November 1962, INR, Research Memorandum, Military Rule in Turkey, May 1960–November 1961, telegram, confidential, NOFORN, JFKL, NSF, 444, R.W Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63, [2 of 2]. 6. Ankara, 27 October 1961, Embassy to State Department, telegram, secret, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General 10/61–12/61. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ankara, 9 November 1961, Embasssy to AA, Die Urteile von Yassiada – Rückblick und Auswirkungen, PAAA, Pol.206, Band 95. Regarding Gekik see also Istanbul 15 January 1965, American Consul General to Department of State, Subject: Support of the Justice Party and Suleyman Demirel by Cemal Madanoglu, former CNU leader, secret, NA, RG 59, Central File, 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. 11. Ankara, 27 October 1961, Embassy to State Department, telegram, secret, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General 10/61–12/61. 12. Erogul, p.123. 13. Hale 1994, p.153. 14. Ibid. 15. Erogul, p.126. 16. 9 November 1962, INR, Military Rule in Turkey, May 1960-November 1961, Research Memorandum, Confidential, NOFORN, JFKL, NSF, 444, R.W Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63,[2 of 2]. 17. Ibid. 18. Hale 1994, p.154. 19. Ankara, 28 March 1962, The Canadian Embassy to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Subject: The Government and the Army since the

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

A

CRISIS

OF

DEMOCR ACY

February Crisis, NA, RG 59, NEA, Records of the Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63, Box 5. Navy Department, 11 January 1962, CINCUSNAVEUR to AIG ONE EIGHT CNO, secret, special handling required, not releasable to foreign Nationals, NA, RG 59, NEA, Record of Turkish Affairs, 1958–63, box 5. Ibid. 19 January 1962, CIA, Turkish Internal Situation, telegram, secret, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General 1/62–6/62. Ibid. Ibid. Hale 1994, pp.155–6. Washington, Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 9 April 1962, INR – Roger Hilsman to Secretary of State, subject: The February Military Revolt in Turkey, secret, noforn, JFKL, NSF, 444 R.W. Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63, 2 of 2. Hale 1994, pp.155–6. Washington, Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 9 April 1962, INR – Roger Hilsman to Secretary of State, subject: The February Military Revolt in Turkey, secret, noforn, JFKL, NSF, 444 R.W. Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63, 2 of 2. Ankara, 28 March 1962, The Canadian Embassy to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, subject: The Government and the Army since the February Crisis, NA, RG 59, NEA, Records of the Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63, Box 5. Ibid. 12 April 1962, INR Morning Briefing, Turkey: Pardon for Military Officers, Confidential, noforn, NA, RG 59, NEA, Records of the Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63, box.5. Ibid. Ahmad, pp.129–30. Ankara, 28 March 1962, The Canadian Embassy to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, subject: The Government and the Army since the February Crisis, NA, RG 59, NEA, Records of the Turkish Affairs Desk, 1958–63, Box 5. Ibid. Ibid. 6 June 1962, CIA, Military Plotting to Take Over Government of Turkey Delayed by New Attempt by Ismet Inonu to Organize a Government, telegram, S-E-C-R-E-T/noforn/continued control, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 1/62–6/62.

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38. Hale 1994, pp.163–4. 39. 6 June 1962, CIA, Military Plotting to Take Over Government of Turkey Delayed by New Attempt by Ismet Inonu to Organize a Government, telegram, S-E-C-R-E-T/noforn/continued control, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 1/62–6/62. 40. Ibid. 41. The source in question was Celikel. According to the CIA, his role in the plotting was unclear, but he was known to be in frequent contact with some of the former Committee of National Unity members, such as Mucip Atakli, Emanullah Celebi and Haydar Tuncanat, and various field grade officers. 42. 6 June 1962, CIA, Military Plotting to Take Over Government of Turkey Delayed by New Attempt by Ismet Inonu to Organize a Government, telegram, S-E-C-R-E-T/noforn/continued control, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 1/62–6/62. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. The CIA mentions that one of its contacts, a CHP official, had asked the agency’s source to recommend individuals who could represent the press. 47. The armed forces were planned to fill the post of prime minister with second army commander Lieutenant General Refik Tulga, although CHP officials were also mentioned, namely deputies Fuat Sirmen and Nihat Ermim. 48. These were, among others, Atakli and Celebi. 49. 6 June 1962, CIA, Plans for Military Takeover of Government, telegram, confidential, noforn/continued control, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 1/62–6/62. 50. 24 June 1962, CIA, 1. Military Reaction to Current Political Developments 2. Anti-regime Activity in the Turkish Armed Forces, telegram, secret, noforn/continued control, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 1/62–6/62. 51. Ibid. 52. Hale 1994, p.164. 53. 20 September 1962, CIA, Possible Military Coup 2 October, telegram, confidential, no foreign dissem., JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 7/62–12/62. 54. Hale 1994, p.164. 55. 27 September 1962, CIA, Military Plans to Overthrow Turkish Government, telegram, secret, no foreign dissem., JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 7/62–12/62. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid.

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286 MILITARY INTERVENTION & 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

A

CRISIS

OF

DEMOCR ACY

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 28 September 1962, CIA, Plans for a Military Coup, telegram, secret, no foreign dissem./controlled dissem./ no dissem. abroad, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 7/62–12/62. 29 September 1962, Inevitability of a Military Coup, telegram, confidential, no foreign dissem., JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 7/62–12/62. 3 October 1962, CIA, Improbability of a Military Coup, telegram, confidential, no foreign dissem., JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 7/62–12/62. Ibid. 12 October 1962, CIA, Prime Minister Inonu’s Off the Record Statement of the Current Political Situation to Ankara Journalists, telegram, confidential, JFKL, NSF, 167, Turkey General, 7/62–12/62. Ankara, 26 October 1962, Embassy to AA, Innenpolitische Lage der Türkei nach der Verabschiedung des Amnestiegesetzes, PAAA, Abt.2, Ref.206, Bd.169. Hale 1994, p.166. Weiker, Walter F. ‘The Aydemir Case and Turkey’s Political Dilemma’, Middle Eastern Affairs, Vol.14, No.9, November (1963), pp.260–1. 29 May 1963, Current Foreign Relations, Issue No. 22, secret, JFKL, NSF, 444, R.W. Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63[1 of 2]. Hale 1994, pp.164–8. 29 May 1963, Current Foreign Relations, Issue No. 22, secret, JFKL, NSF, 444, R.W. Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63[1 of 2]. Ahmad, p.137. 27 November 1963, Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, Intelligence Note: Increasing Political Instability in Turkey: Inonu’s Coalition Government in Jeopardy, telegram, secret/ no foreign dissem. JFKL, NSF, 444, R.W, Komer, Turkey 1/61–11/63[1 of 2]. Zürcher, p.258. Ahmad, pp.130–2 . Cf. e.g Nur Bilge Criss. ‘Strategic Nuclear Missiles in Turkey: The Jupiter Affair, 1959–63’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol.20, No.3, September (1997), pp.97–122. Istanbul, 5 October 1964, American Consul General to Department of State, subject: Istanbul Attitudes: A New Look at America and the World,

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confidential, NA, RG 59, Central File, 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. 81. Ibid. 82. 6 February 1965, Memorandum for Mr. McGeorge Bundy, the White House, subject: Peace Corps Observations in Turkey, limited official use, NA, RG 59, Central File, 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. 83. No date no place, Democratic Action in Turkey: 1965 General Elections, secret, CIA-RDP78–03061A000300050006–9. 84. Ahmad, pp.140–1. 85. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, p.7. 86. Ankara, 3 August 1965, Embassy to Department of State, subject: Justice Party on the Eve of the Election Campaign, confidential, NA, RG 59, Central FP, Files 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. No date, no place, Democratic Action in Turkey: 1965 General Elections, secret, CIA-RDP78–03061A000300050006–9. 90. Ibid. 91. Istanbul, 15 January 1965, American Consul General to Department of State, subject: Support of the Justice Party and Suleyman Demirel by Cemal Madanoglu, former CNU leader, secret, NA, RG 59, Central File, 1964–66, Pol. 12–99. 92. Izmir, 4 August 1965, American Consul General to Department of State, subject: The Turkish Elections: Justice Party Tactics, Strategy, and Estimates of Success, confidential, NA. RG 59, Central File, 1964–66, Pol. 12–5 Tur-Pol 14, box 2755. 93. Hale 1994, pp.172–3. 94. Pevsner, p.35. 95. Hale 1994, pp.173–4. 96. Ibid. p.175 and appendix 5. 97. Pevsner, p.37.

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INDEX

Abdülhamid, Sultan, 25, 40, 60 Abdullah, King of Jordan, 128 Adahan, 42 Adana, 14, 58 DP prisoners at, 229 US base at, 89, 157 Adana Demokrat, 100 Afghanistan, 35, 113 King of, 203 Agriculture, 16 Akis, 67, 71–5, 125–6, 130 Aleppo, 37–8, 117, 121, 124, 142, 251 Alexandretta, 35–6, 117, 121, 126, 142–3, 145, 250 Allies Turkey’s entry on the side of, 31, 42–3 Amnesty for imprisoned DP politicians, 6, 212, 214–5, 218, 220, 225, 229, 240 Amr, Abd-al Hakim, 127 Ankara, 57–6, 77, 107, 108, 111, 142, 143, 145, 169, 172, 181, 185, 188, 193, 198, 204, 205, 218, 221, 225, 229–30, 239 Agreement, 34, 91–2 University, 48

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Anatolia, 14–5, 17–8, 33, 39, 95, 99, 166, 176, 236 Greece in, 54, 91, 103 Antalya, 33 Arab Collective Security Pact, 116, 137 Arab League, 116, 118 Arab Nationalism, 5, 113, 129–31, 133–4, 152, 155, 157, 250 Arab Revolt 1916, 113 Arab Union between Iraq and Jordan, 154 Armed Forces’ Union (AFU) Silahli Kuvvetler Birligi, 193–4, 202, 207–8, 211–2, 215, 219 Armenians, 18, 33, 54, 66, 92, 99, 105 Atakli, Muncip, 214 al-Atasi, Hashim, 214 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 1–3, 11–3, 27–9, 35–6, 40–1, 47–52, 57–8, 60, 63–5, 70, 72, 75–9, 83–5, 92, 103–4, 107, 110–12, 131–2, 158, 172–3, 175–6, 178, 180–1, 189, 191–2, 196, 199, 217, 233, 247, 250 Atay, Falih Rıfkı, 78–9, 223 Association for the Defence of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia, 18, 66

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Auswärtiges Amt, see also German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 7, 38, 281 Averoff, Evangelos, 156 Aydemir, Talat, 181–2, 193 attempted coups by, 215–20, 222–8, 230–1, 241, 248 Aydin, 12–3, 44, 57, 200, 239 al- Azm, Khaled, 120

80–6, 91, 99, 102, 107, 110, 112, 130, 134, 156–9, 161, 163–69, 171–78, 182, 184, 187–88, 190–1, 194, 196–8, 200, 207, 210–12, 221, 223–6, 231, 233–39, 241–2, 247–9 CIA, 7, 47, 66, 109, 159, 172, 174, 192, 194–7, 199–200, 202, 210, 215–6, 221–8, 231, 234–5, 238, plot to overthrow Syrian government, 136–41, 144 Cilicia, 33, 66 Cold War, 43, 112, 129, 135–59, 233–4, 249–50 Cole, William J., 127–8 Committee of National Unity (CNU), 188–9, 192–4, 197–8, 202, 204–8, 211–3, 215, 217, 223, 238–40 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 12, 17, 32, 125 Communism, 27, 43, 47–8, 50, 58, 63, 71, 85, 99, 108–9, 115, 117, 120–1, 125–6, 129, 133, 135–7, 140–1, 146–8, 234, 240, 246, 250 Constitution of 1961, 2, 188–9, 195–6, 211, 214, 219, 245 Constitutional court, 2, 189, 196 Counter-revolution 1909, 12, 26, 60 Coup d’état of 27 May 1960, 1–2, 4–5, 14, 109, 112, 172–74, 181, 184, 187–209, 216, 236, 248 Crusader, 55–56 Cuban Missile Crisis, 232, 235 Cumhurriyet, 36, 233 Cyprus, 5, 7, 39, 56, 86, 89–112, 114, 129, 133, 156, 182 232–5, 239, 249, 250 Cyprus Is Turkish Committee, 98–99 Çarşaf-wearing, 80–82 Çukurova, see Cilicia

Baghdad Pact, 116–9, 123–30, 132–4, 136–6, 139, 152, 157, 250 Balkan Entente, 34, 92 Balkan Pact, 91, 93, 115 Balkan Wars, 17, 94 Balkans, 41, 115 exodus of Muslims from, 24 reorganization of, 39 Bayar, Celal, 11–13, 16, 51, 90, 127–9, 138, 171, 179, 186, 197–200, 202–7, 229, 237, 240 Beduizzaman, see Said Nursi Bil, Hikmet, 99–100, 107, 109 Black Sea, 13–5, 18, 66, 74 Britain, 34–9, 41–3, 89–90, 95, 97, 114–8, 123, 126, 129, 140, 148–9, 165, 250 Bulgaria, 37, 39, 43, 54, 94, 155 Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), 7, 176, 196, 211, 213, 218, 231 Büyük Cihad, 50 Büyük Doğu, 50, 58–60, 62–3 Caccia, Harold, 140 Caliph, 18–9, 22, 28, 84, 246 Caliphate, 19, 22, 60, 67 abolition of, 1, 19, 41, 132 Celebi, Emanullah, 223 Central Powers, 91 Chamoun, Camille, 127, 138, 154 CHP, 1–3, 5, 11–6, 29, 31–2, 47–50, 52–5, 61, 66–7, 69–70, 74, 77,

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INDEX Demirel, Süleyman, 237–40, 248 Demonstrations in 1960 against DP government, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174, 185 Denktaş, Rauf, 111 Dış Türkler, 34, 36, 41, 97, 99 Dodecanese Islands, 93 Dulles, Allen, 66, 109 Dulles, John Foster, 115, 136–7, 140, 144, 148–52, 158 Dunya, 69–70, 78, 108, 157, 223 Ecevit, Bülent, 156–7, 197, 241 Edirne, 117, 110 Egypt, 19, 39, 114–6, 118–21, 123, 125–27, 129–30, 133–5, 137, 139–41, 144–5, 149, 155, 157, 250 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 90–1, 135–6, 144–5, 148–52, 201–2 Elections, Turkish municipal 1963, 231 national 1950, 1–3, 5, 13–14, 31–2, 66–7, 179 national 1954, 2, 13–14, 52, 66, 168, 172 national 1957, 2, 13–14, 51–2, 67, 71, 73–4, 79, 86, 159, 164, 167–8, 171, 176–7, 182, 247 national 1961, 209–11, 236, 248 national 1965, 228, 239–41 national 1965, 240–1 Emirdag, 82 Enosis, 95, 103–4, 108, 233 Entente, 17, 34, 54, 91–2 Enver Pasha, 17, 40, EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kipriakou Agonos) the Greek Cypriot nationalist paramilitary organization, 101, 110–2 Ergin, Semi, 182 Erkin, Feridun C., 90 Erzurum, 18, 55 Étatisme, 1, 14, 31 Ezan (call to prayer), 28, 49, 132

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Fatherland Front, 175, 177 Fertile Crescent Federation, 123 Fez, 20, 82 Finland, 139 France, 34, 36–7, 89, 126, 133, 135, 148–9, 250 Franklin-Bouillon Agreement, 33, 35 Free Republican Party, 13 Freedom Party, 53 Gallman, Waldemar J., 125, 137 Gatwick, air crash 1959, 56, 58–61, 83, 195, 208 Gaziantep, 142 Gedik, Namık, 106, 212, 239 Germany Nazi Germany, 37–41, 43–4, 249 West Germany, 6, 155 German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, see also Auswärtiges Amt, 40, Glubb, Pasha, 128 Great Idea, 92, 94–4 Greece, 5, 24, 34, 43, 48, 89–91, 93–5, 103, 108, 114–5, 140, 155–6, 249 Cyprus Issue, 95–8, 235 War with Turkey 1919–22, 18, 92, 103–4 Greek Minority in Turkey, Violence against, 101–110 Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, 95–96, 101, 105, 108 Grivas, George, 95 Gromyko, Andrey, 144, 146 Guatemala, US intervention in, 136, 140 Gumhuriyya, al, 119 Gunakan, Necati, 143, 153 Gürsel, Cemal, 183–8, 190, 192, 194, 201–2, 206, 208, 212, 214, 216–7, 226–7, 240 Güventürk, Faruk, 181–2, 193, 215 Halkin Sesi, 111 Hare, Raymond A., 206, 208–9, 211–2

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Hatay, 35–6, 58, 99, 110, 112–3, 117, 126, 250 Havadis, 57, 139 Herter, Christian A., 150, 153, 201–2 Hikmet, Nazim, 108 Hungary, 151 Hür Adam, 58 Hürriet, 97, 99

Izmir, 7, 12, 58, 77–78, 92, 104, 106–8, 145, 197–8, 200–1, 203, 220, 239

Imam Hatip Schools, 21, 69 India, 131 Inönü, Ismet, 2, 4, 12, 25, 29, 39–40, 58, 62, 67, 102, 105, 107, 130, 157–8, 164, 166–72, 174–5, 177–9, 182, 184, 190–1, 203, 206–7, 212–18, 220–32, 235, 239, 247–8 INR, see Bureau of Intelligence and Research Iran, 35, 40, 43, 89–90, 103, 113, 116–8, 131, 136, 201 Iraq, 34–36, 38–40, 113–4, 116–8, 120–1, 123–6, 128–9, 131, 133, 135–42, 145–6, 150, 152, 154–8 Iskenderun, see Alexandretta Islahiye, 143 Islam, 1, 3–5, 19–25, 28, 34, 45–55, 58–9, 61–2, 64–5, 67–69, 71–2, 76, 79–82, 84–5, 129–33, 176, 195, 237, 246–7 Isparta, 71, 73–4 Israel, 114, 116–118, 126–8, 138–9, 141–2, 145–6, 149 Gaza attack 1955, 118–9 Peripheral Pact with Turkey, 155 Istanbul, 7, 12, 13, 15, 17–18, 32, 36, 54, 56–57, 60, 68, 71, 74–8, 80, 82, 93, 98, 101, 104, 106–9, 134, 145, 158, 166, 170–71, 181–3, 185, 193, 196, 198, 200, 203–5, 207, 214, 217–18, 220–1, 224, 230, 233 University, 21, 169, 188, 223, 232 Italy, 33, 35, 37, 41, 43, 89, 93, 249

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Jews, 18, 105 Johnson, Lyndon B., 234 Letter to Inönü, 232 Jordan, 116, 118, 126–9, 131, 133, 142, 143, 145–6, 150, 152, 154–7 Justice Party, 4, 6, 14, 210–2, 214–6, 218, 220, 222–3, 225, 228–9, 231, 235–41, 248–9 Karabelen, Daniş, 111–2 Kars, 42, 234 Kayseri, 212, 229 incident, 166, 174, 184, 203 Kemalism, 3–5, 22, 59, 62, 70, 73, 79, 81–2, 158, 189 Keskiner, Ali, 226 Kibar, Osman, 239 Kıbrıs Mektubu, 111 Kızıloğlu, Muharrem, 178–80 Konya, 13, 55, 58, 68–70, 74 Korea, South, 168, 170–2 Korean War, 16, 90, 129 Chinese intervention in, 90 Turkish combat troops in, 90 Koraltan, Refik, 11, 13, 30, 198, 205 Köprülü, Fuad, 11, 13, 95, 97, 107, 109, 129 Küçük, Fazil, 99–100, 111 Kurdas, Kemal, 205–6, 208–9 Kurtbek, Seyfi, 179–80 Kuscu, Samet, 182–3 Latakia, 141 Lausanne Agreement, 18, 34 League of Nations, 34 Lebanon, 99, 117–8, 122, 127, 129, 133, 146, 150, 152, 154–5, 157 Liberal Republican Party, see Free Republican Party

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INDEX Libya, 130–1 Lloyd, Selwyn, 151 London 1955 tripartite conference concerning Cyprus, 97, 100 London-Zürich Agreement, 156 Madanoğlu, Cemal, 238–9 MAH, Milli Amele Hizmet, Turkish National Security Police, 99 Mansfield, Michael, 144, 149 MacMillan, Harold, 151 Maraş, 74 Marshall Aid, 16 McGhee, George C., 89–90, 114 Megali Idea, see Great Idea Mehmet the Conqueror, Sulan, 58 Menderes, Etem, 184, 186 Merriam, John E., 232–4 Mevlana celebration, 55, 68 Middle class, new, 1, 14, 23, 26, 30–1, 64, 181 Middle East Command, 114 Middle East Defence Organization (MEDO), 114–5 Millet-i rum, 93–94 Milliyet, 51, 70–1, 233 Miner, Robert G., 158–9 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 42 Montreux Convention 1936, 34, 42 Moose, James S., 121, 137, 139–40 Morris, John H., 142–3 Mosul, 34–5 Muslim, refugees, 54 Nalbantoğlu, Burhan, 111 Naqshbandi Sufi Brotherhood, 20, 23–6, 28, 77, 85 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 116–20, 124–31, 133–4, 154–5, 157, 250 Nasserism, 131, 133, 155 National Declaration 1961, 196 National Security Council (NSC), Turkish, Milli Güvenlik Kurulu, 2, 189, 219

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299

National Security Council (NSC), US, 7, 137, 172, NATO, 89–91, 93, 115, 122, 144–7, 151–2, 155, 158, 170–1, 180, 184, 201, 220, 232, 235–6, 239, 248 Navy Intelligence, US, 214 New Turkish Party, 210, 214, 236 Nicosia, 100 Norstad, Lauris, 144–5, 151–2, 201 Northern Tier, 115–6 Nurcu movement, 25, 50, 55, 58, 62, 74–5, 77, 79, 85 Nuri Pasha, 40 Operations Coordinating Board, 135, 140–2 Ortam, 111 Osman, Sultan, 19, 57 Ottoman Empire, 20–21, 23–6, 32, 57, 60, 66, 69, 91, 93–4, 113, 242 legacy, 19, 22 tradition, 3, 19, 22 ÖHD (Özel Harb Dairesi), Special Warfare Department, 111 Önal, Kemal, 99–100, 104, 106 Pakistan, 115–8, 131, 206 Palestine, 39, 113 Pan-Islam, 25, 34 Pan-Turk, 34–5, 38, 40, 42, 99, 107, 112, 117, 250 Papagos, Alexandros, 95 Pappen, Franz von, 38–40 Patriarchate, Greek Orthodox, 93–5, 101–2 Peasants, 1, 11, 14–6, 30–1, 62–3, 77, 159, 194, 196, 204, 208, 236–8, 246 Peker, Recep, 4–8 Pentagon talks 1947, 89 People’s Republican Party, see CHP Prayer call, controversy regarding, see Ezan

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300 MILITARY INTERVENTION &

A

Pravda, 123–4, 139 Press, laws to contain, 29, 163–4, 174, 185

139, 140, 143–4, 146, 150–2, 154–5, 232, 234 Agreement of Friendship 1921, 33 Agreement of Friendship and Cooperation 1925, 1935, 33, 42 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 145–7 Spain, 48, 133 Stalin, Joseph, 42–3 State Department, US, 7, 89, 107, 122, 136, 138, 146–7, 155, 171, 195, 101 Suez Crisis, 129–30, 133, 148–9, 153, 250 Sufi Brotherhoods, 1, 20, 29, 45–6, 48–50, 85 Sultanate, 28, 40, 50, 60, 70, 84, 183, 199, 246 Abolition of, 19 Sunay, Cevdet, 215–7, 220, 224–7 Syria, 5, 12, 35–40, 99, 113–4, 117–28, 131, 134, 135–54, 157, 250–1

al-Quwwatly, Shukri, 138 Rahmi Bey, 12 Reaction (irtica), 4–5, 60, 69, 74–6, 79–80, 85, 197 Reform Atatürk’s, 1, 3, 16, 22, 25, 27–9, 52, 78–9, 191 Land law, 30–31 Religion, exploiting for political purposes, 1, 5, 20, 45, 49, 50, 52–5, 63, 77, 83–4, 176, 185, 191 Republicans Peoples Party, see CHP Rhee, Sygman, 169, 172 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 38 Risale-i Nur, 25, 52 Romania, 34, 94 Rusk, Dean, 206 Russia, 17, 44, Saadabad Pact 1937, 35, 113 Said Nursi, 25, 50–52, 55, 62, 71–5, 79, 82, 129–30 Salem, Salah, 125 Saudi Arabia, 119, 127, 131, 135, 141, 150 Schmidt, G. Lewis, 239–40 Secularism, 1, 14, 16, 49–50, 58, 61–2, 68, 74, 76, 83, 189, 238 Senate, 2, 188–9, 227 Sèvres, Treaty of 1920, 54, 92, 183 Seyhan, Dündar, 181–2, 193 al-Shahbandar, Moussa, 137 Sivas, 13, 18 Sixth American Fleet, 143, 149, 153, 251 Smyrna, see Izmir Solh, Sami, 122–3 Soviet Union, 32, 35–7, 40–3, 108, 116, 118, 120–1, 123–6, 130, 134–7,

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CRISIS

OF

DEMOCR ACY

Taksim, 110, 112, 156, 249 Talat Pasha, 12, 17 Tan, 12 Tanrısevdi, Mustapha Kemal, 111, 156 Tansel, Irfan, 217–8, 221, 226 Tansu, Ismail, 96, 111–2 Tanzimat, 24 Thrace, 18, 39, 53–4, 95, 104 Ticani brotherhood, 49, 58, 62, 75, 77 smashing busts of Atatürk, 49 TMT (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilati) armed branch of the Turkish Cypriot movement, 97, 110–2, 156, 250 Toker, Metim, 67, 102, 130–3, 164, 176, 190 Topkapi incident, 164, 174, 203, 247 Trabzon, 13 Truman, Harry, 43, 90–1, Doctrine, 43, 89, 140 Tunaboylu, İsmail Hakkı, 144–5, 153 Tural, Cemal, 217, 240

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INDEX Turanism, 40–1 Turkish Labour Party, 234–5, 238, 240 Türkeş, Alparslan, 42, 182, 187, 192–3 Twining, Nathan Farragut, 144 Ulus, 156–7, 164 United Arab Republic, 154, 156 United Nations, 44, 98, 113, 133, 141, 150–2, 156 United States of America, 6, 42, 44, 89–91, 114, 117–8, 128, 134, 136–7, 140–1, 144–50, 153, 165, 232–4, 239 Ürgüplü, Suat Hayri, 227 Varlik Vergisi, 29, 93 Vatan, 12–24, 29, 57–8, 77, 101 Veil, 20, 78 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 34, 103 Village Institutes, 20, 80, 168

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301

War of Independence, Turkish, 13, 18, 25–26, 28, 33, 57, 91–2, 101, 103, 111, 166, 183, 235 War of Liberation, Turkish, see War of Independence Warren, Fletcher, 150, 158, 165–6, 169–70, 173, 191–2, 197, 199 Woermann, Ernst, 40 Yamanoğlu, Cevdet, 142–3, 153 Yassiada tribunal, 103, 109, 196, 198, 200–1, 203–5, 207–8, 211, 220, 229 Yeni Sabah, 70, 101 Young Turks, 12, 25, 60, 183 Yugoslavia, 34, 90–1, 93, 115 Zafer, 96, 119–20, Zaim, Husni, 136 Zorlu, Fatin Rüştü, 96–7, 109–12, 127, 150, 155–6, 180, 198–9, 205–8, 248

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9781848857780_18_ind.indd 302

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