TURKEY: The Phony Incident

One night five years ago, in the Greek city of Salonica, a bomb exploded outside the house where Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, was born. The Turkish state radio boomed the news that Greeks had done it. Turkish tempers, already exacerbated by the long quarrel with Greece over Cyprus, flared into a night of shameful violence against the 100,000 Greeks living in Istanbul. Within hours a mob armed with pickaxes and crowbars marched down Istanbul’s Independence Avenue yelling “Cyprus is Turkish, not Greek!” A Greek Orthodox priest was scalped and another burned alive, 78 Greek churches were set afire and 4,000 Greek stores looted, before Turkish troops and police finally decided to quell the rioters. The Greek government protested that the Turkish police were suspiciously ineffectual in trying to control the mob, and the ensuing bitterness prolonged the long agony of Cyprus.

Last week Turkey’s new revolutionary rulers acknowledged that Greek suspicions had been right all along—the whole thing had been planned. The tip-off came with the arrest of Turkey’s former Vice Premier and Foreign Minister, Mehmet Fuat Koprulu, 69, a respected professor and one of the founding members of the Democratic Party. Koprulu’s part had been apparently minor. The chief culprits, said the Turkish government, were already in custody—President Celal Bayar, Premier Adnan Menderes, and ex-Foreign Minister Fatin Zorlu. This is the story as told by a : spokesman for Turkey’s new military junta :

Zorlu returned from a London conference on the Cyprus issue convinced that the Turkish case required strengthening, told Premier Menderes and President Bayar that what was needed was some incident to spark a display of Turkish patriotic fervor. The plot to set off the Salonica bomb was then hatched.

The day of the bombing, President Bayar and Premier Menderes were in Istanbul; at 6 p.m. they calmly boarded the express for Ankara, figuring that the mob would only smash a few Greek windows and break a few Greek heads. But the mob got out of hand, beating Greeks and sacking stores with abandon. The Istanbul governor panicked, tried frantically to reach Bayar and Menderes, finally managed to get a telephone message to a stationmaster, who stopped the train. In the middle of the night, Bayar and Menderes raced back to Istanbul by car, where they declared martial law and finally ended the carnage.

In subsequent weeks the Menderes regime continued to blame the Greeks for the bomb in Salonica, the Communists for the riots in Istanbul. Koprulu’s only part in the affair was to defend the government’s action during debates in the National Assembly, though privately he had been critical.

When police came to arrest him last week, unruffled Professor Koprulu said: “I have absolute faith in the justice of the supreme revolutionary court and am confident the guilt of the real culprits will be established.” Then he joined the other 537 political prisoners in the island jail of Yassiada.

Their trials are expected to commence this week. A spokesman of the National Unity Committee chillily announced that “sentences will be carried out immediately, defendants will not have right of appeal, curfews will be imposed on execution nights.”