TURKISH EDITOR MURDERED.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1179, 14 July 1911, Page 5

TURKISH EDITOR MURDERED.

$ '— ONE WAY OF DEALING WITH CRITICS.

Bj Tclcrrarh-l'ress Assoeiatton-CoDyrlehl Constantinople, July 12. Two assassins murdered Zekki Rev, editor of the newspaper "Shcra." Tl'is is Iho thud murder of journalists opposing the Committee of Union and Progress. Two arrests have been made. THE HIDDEN POWER IN TURKEY, HOW THE COMMITTEE RULES. If von come to Constantinople and set yourself to try to understand the political organisation of modern Turkey, you can go a certain distance, but (writes a "Dailv Mail" correspondent) knowledge of that 'inmost circle of the country s government is hidden from you by a secrecy that is like the walls of a maze. I/very lino of inquiry is suddenly brought up short by it. You come across somo curious trend of policy; some purposeful tendency obviously at work; perhaps even some mysterious act of violence. ' I hat, say the people to whom you turn for guidance, "is the Committee"; but what ■the Committee really is.beyond a name and an outfit of conventional phrases of benevolent political aspiration you simply cannot find out. You feel and know that beyond the veil of secrecy, on the outside of which you stand, is the secret last centre" which.has its hand upon the country's destinies, but you can find no way through to closer knowledge of it. There is a secret central influence at work; its hand is to be socn everywhere; but what its real aims are, who even are the men who control it—these are things that people who have spent their lives in Turkey do not know, and confess that they do not know. Everywhere in Turkish politics you see the work of this unknown controlling hand. What is tho power that governs the exerciso of the court-martial whose existence has just been prolonged for another term? Martial law was proclaimed after the revolution to be a check on reaction. That need is ..past, but the court-martial remains. Its real function is to arm the hand of the secret clique which is running Turkey. Nor do the actual incidents of day to day in Turkey fit in any better with the Englishman's idea of the condition of Turkish politics as a free, enlightened constitutionalism. There is nono of tho immunity of opposition that we kuow in England. Lutfi I'ikri Bey, a prominent Opposition member just now, is not only constantly abused by the well-organised censure ot local committees throughout the country. Ho also receives from time to timo anonymous promises of assassination, like the more active instruments of the old regime used to when the Committee* was struggling for life. There i>ro reports from the provinces, too, of mysterious disappearances of former Bulgarian revolutionary leaders who would Iμ natural rallyingpoints in the events of future outbursts of Bulgarian national sentiment in Macedonia. _________