TURKEY: Costly Joke

A customer stopped at a Turkish newsstand and asked for a copy of a newspaper called Freedom. “We have no Freedom” said the news vendor. “Then,” said the customer, “I’ll take a copy of LIFE.” “We have no LIFE either.” “Ah, well,” sighed the customer, “I might have known, for where there’s no freedom, there can be no life.”

This small story, appearing last week in Bursa’s satirical weekly Chivi, was one Turkish magazine’s arch way of replying to Premier Adnan Menderes’ recent clampdown on freedom of the press in Turkey (TIME, June 11). But though Chivi was only fooling, it soon found that Menderes was not. The ink was scarcely dry, when Chivi’s editor was haled into court, fined 10,000 lire ($3,600) and sentenced to a year in jail for “writing with malicious and tendentious intent.”

Turkish newspapers made no mention of the trial. They valued life, even without freedom.