Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1937. A WARNING.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 154, 1 June 1937, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1937. A WARNING.

It is an apt saying that “coming events cast Lien- shadows before/ 5 and it is, no doubt, for this reason and none other that the man who has regenerated Turkey, Kamal Ataturk, has issued a warning to the Rowers to keep their hands off the Balkan Pact States. The cable referring to this particular item of news was published on Friday and it may have escaped the notice of many readers, but its significance is not to be ignored. The States in the Balkan Pact comprise Rumania, Jugoslavia, (ireece, and Turkey, and it may be assumed from ixamai’s statement that the Powers to whom he was specifically referring were Italy and Germany, whose intrigues the Pact will not countenance so far as their frontiers are concerned. “These boundaries, 55 the President oi Turkey says, “form a single frontier, and those having aims on it will expose themselves to the burning sun. 55 To gain a clearer insight into the position of these Balkan States it is necessary to retrace events from the closing stages of the Great War. Bulgaria, like Hungary, came out on the wrong side of the struggle, and had her territory mercilessly lopped in consequence. Rumania was awarded the Dobrudja, Turkey got Thrace, Greece part of Thrace and part of Macedonia, and Jugoslavia the rest of Macedonia. Bulgaria being a “revisionist 55 Power believeu its future lay in closer association with Italy and Germany, and a counter-move was made by the countries surrounding Bulgaria in 1934, hence the establishment of the Ealkan Pact, and the diplomat mostly responsible for the success of the negotiations was the Rumanian Foreign Minister, Titulescu. Just as Hungary is encircled by the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Jugoslavia), formed to prevent Hungarian aims to win back lost territory, Bulgaria is encircled by the Balkan Entente to prevent Bulgarian intriguing with Germany and Italy. In.his book, “luside Europe, 55 John Gunther writes in a most instructive manner regarding Kamal Ataturk, who spoke last week on behalf of the Balkan States. Describing him as the “Turkish Colossus,” a “blonde, blue-eyed combination of patriot and psychopath,” Gunther sketches his career interestingly, from the big part he played in the Dardanelles campaign to the time he rose to be President of the Turkish Republic, and it would probably be no exaggeration to say that he was the fittest and strongest representative of the States to issue the warning to which he has just given utterance. Kamal is not a pure Turk.

His father was of Albanian origin; the mother was the daughter of a Turkish peasant whose wife was a Macedonian. It is further suggested by another authority that there was Jewish blood in the family. From “Inside Europe” we learn that Kama! has changed his name seven times. After the Dardanelles campaign he became Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Pasha is a military title equivalent to general), and after he crushed the Greeks in 1921 he assumed the name Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha, “ghazi” meaning “destroyer of infidels,” an odd sobriquet for Kemal, inasmuch as he was the greatest infidel in Turkish history. Ten years later he became Ghazi Mustafa Kemal when he abolished military titles. In 1934 he ordered every Turk to assume a patronymic in the western fashion and chose for himself “Ataturk,” which means “Father of Turks.” So he was simply Kemal Ataturk finally modifying this to the Turkish form of the Arabic to become Kamal Ataturk. Kamal is described as a somewhat Bacchi character and in personality and accomplishments is said to resemble no one so much as Peter the Great, who also westernised his country at frightful cost. Gunther 1 calls him “the roughneck of dictators.” Beside him “Hitler is a milksop, Mussolini a perfumed dandy, and Goemboes (the Hungarian dictator statesman) a creature of the drawing-room.”- We are told that Kamal Ataturk 5 s career is without parallel in modern times. In three years ‘ ‘lie took a nation that was centuries deep in rot, pulled it to its feet, wiped its face, reclothed it, transformed it, made it work.” In 1919 Turkey was so crushed and broken that it would have welcomed renunciation of sovereignty and a British mandate. In Turkey was the one enemy State so strong that it practically dictated its own peace terms. In those three years Kamal (1) drove out the Sultan, (2) abolished the Caliphate, (3) fought and won the war against the Greeks and drove them into the sea, (4) bluffed Great Britain at Chanak, (5) negotiated through Ismet Pasha the Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the regime of capitulations (foreign judicial rights) in Turkey and established the new frontiers on a basis that the wildest Turkish nationalist could not have dreamed possible, (6) wrote a republican constitution and created a parliament in his new impregnable capital, Ankara (7) became Turkey’s first—and only —President. His reforms have been so drastic and so comprehensive that in cultural and social fields at least there is very little left to do. He has abolished the fez, turned the mosques into granaries, Latinised the language, ended polygamy, installed new legal codes, compulsorily disinfected all the buildings ju Istanbul, adopted the Gregorian calendar and metric system and took the first census in Turkish history. He cut political holidays down to three, demanded physical examination of those about to marry, and, as already mentioned, built a new capital, Ankara, in the Anatolian highlands, replacing proud Constantinople. He limited most business activity to Turkish nationals and Turkish firms, abolished books of magic, gave every Turk a new last name, emancipated the women (more or less), and last, but not least, superintended the writing of a new history of the world in order to prove that Turkey is the source of all civilisation.