Evening Post. TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1926. THE TRUTH IN TURKEY

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 81, 6 April 1926, Page 8

Evening Post. TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1926. THE TRUTH IN TURKEY

The ofEence for which Mr. Macartney, "The Times" correspondent at Constantinople, has "been expelled at two hours' notice is that of "sending false news calculated to arouse suspicion regarding the tranquillity of the country." The gravity of the offence is indicated both by the shortness of the notice and by the statement of the Commissar of National Defence that "drastic action" will be taken against any foreign correspondent hereafter in the like case offending. Turning a man out of his job at two hours' notice and leaving his newspaper unrepresented is apparently not to be regarded as "drastic action." It is but a mild forewarning of the wrath that is to fall upon future offenders. "Something with boiling oil in it" may be their portion if they are not very careful. Turkey is a country in which the rulers have never been accustomed to stand

any nonsense. It was so when • the ruler whom an ignorant world knew as Abdul tho Damned was still to his subjects "Sultan of Sultans, King of Kings, Brother of tho Sun, and Shadow of God upon Earth.". It is so to-day when under a so-called Eepublic which apes the fashions of Europe liberty is as remote and life as cheap as ever. One of the latest testimonies which it has supplied to its complete permeation by Western ideals is the decree which abolished the fez and declared that the hat should take its place. That the Government, if not the people, had fully assimilated the spirit of European Liberalism was conclusively proved just before Christmas when 8 Turks were

condemned to death and 43 to life imprisonment for continuing to wear the fez. As telling the truth about Turkey seems to be just as revolting a crime as refusing to wear a hat, Mr. Macartney may think himself lucky in not having been added either to the 8 or the 48. But this may yet be the lot of some of his colleagues at Constantinople if they do not heed .the Commissar's warning. . .

The message which Mr. Macartney has cabled from Mitylcne showß that it was not in Constantinople, where Nationalism has been relatively mild, but Angora that worked his expulsion, and explains tho nature of his offence. The Angora authorities werj, he says, indignant at his dispatches regarding the closing of the English High School. The anti-foreign crusade which contrasts so oddly with the campaign for the enforcement of foreign, fashions has not even spared the schools from which their foreign conductors gain nothing. American missions have suffered in this way along with the rest, and it is ludicrous for the Turkish Government at this time of day to seek to conceal the facts. But it i» evident

that, though his report on this matter helped to fill, up the cup of his offence, the gravamen of it was the publicity which, he gave to another incident of apparently much less intrinsic importance. The Government's espionage service, says Mr* Macartney, suppressed a telegram to "The Times" on 29th March, describing the death of a young officer in a collision with the police. The Governmental newspaper, the "Milliett," acting on official instructions, reportod the death as suicided The victims' comrades after the funeral raided the "Milliett" office, smashing windows.

■ In. reporting the facts about the closing of the English High School the correspondent of '' The Times'' was merely informing the outside world of something with which tho Turks were already familiar and' of which they were presumably proud. But' thic fatal scuffle between a young officer and the

police, though, apparently of a kind which might occur in any European capital without exciting comment, had for some reason or other l)een suppressed. Eejed Pasha may be right in objecting to a foreign correspondent's "making a fuss about such an incident"'and thereby creating a suspicion of Turkey's tranquillity. But it is> quite clear that the mere report of the incident could not under ordinary conditions create such a suspicion. It might do so in Italy, for .instance, where conditions are abnormal, but in Constantinople the abnormality is not of a kind to have invested the incident with special significance without the comment which the Government itself has supplied. Why was the officer's death reported under the Government's

instructions as suicide if there were not some ugly facts at the back of it which the Government was anxious to suppress? "If the incident is trifling," says Mr. Macartney, "it is strange that it was hushed up.'^ And if it was really suicide it ig also 1 strange that after the funeral the victim's comrades should have given vent- to their grief in an attack on the office of the newspaper which had merely told what all knew to be the truth. To what extent Mr. Macartney had commented on the incident in his original report does not appear from either of the messages which his expulsion

has produced, but no comment can pos- | sibly have hit the Turkish Government harder than the bare statement of its attitude in the matter. Its censorship apparently succeeded in suppressing the whole of this report, but its still more foolish and arbitrary action has now brought out the whole truth, and given it an advertisement and a significance which would otherwise j have been completely lacking. Who a week ago would have paid more than a passing heed to the bare report of the death of a young Turkish officer in a collision with the police? Who, in view of the official or semi-official representation of that death as suicide and of the expulsion of the correspondent who told the truth, cannot see that the incident was really, in Carlyle's phrase, "significant of much," and that it lends colour to the correspondent's assertion that "there is an immense inarticulate discontent smouldering under tho military dictatorship"? A year or more ago that dictatorship, by means of a "Special Tribunal of Independence," commonly known as the "Angora Choka," was busy in harrying the Turkish Press by summoning the editors of various independent papers before it. The stinging editorials in the "Tanin" and "Ikdam," saj.d the Constantinople correspondent of the "Christian Science Monitor," caused the Cabinet to run amuck. ... It will be interesting to watch the next move of the small circle of army men who are now dominating the new Bepublican Government of Turkey, which is neither new nor Kepublican. The latest move of the dictatorship is this attack on a great foreign paper, but it is beyond the "Cheka's" jurisdiction.