Two-Edged Dagger

Turkey's Foreign Minister Hasan Saka, homeward-bound from San Francisco, dropped off in London for a call on Britain's Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. High diplomatic secrecy muffled the 45-minute talk between the statesmen. But it could not muffle its importance.

Presumably Minister Saka told Secretary Eden what the Russians last month had demanded of the Turks as a prerequisite for a new friendship treaty (TIME, July 9). Besides the right to privileged use of the Straits and the right to police them, the Kremlin was reported to want:

P:Rectification of Turkey's Balkan frontier. Apparently this meant the cession to Bulgaria of the Turkish Aegean port of Alexandroupolis (Dedeagach).

P: Rectification of Turkey's Asia Minor frontier. This meant the cession of the Kars region (with the town of Ardahan) to Russia. The Kars area (see map), was wrested from Turkey by the Tsars in the 19th Century, given back by the Bolsheviks in 1921, when Allied forces were in control of Kars.

Athwart the Oil Arteries. Russia's demand for Kars had far-reaching implications. Physically the region is a remote forested plateau, once part of Armenia, now predominantly populated by Kurdish shepherds and bandits. It has fairly valuable salt mines, and rigorous winters. But strategically, Kars is a bastion commanding the entrance from Turkey into Russia and from Russia into Turkey.

The Russians say that "Kars is a British dagger pointed at Russia's heart--Baku." Kars dominates the valleys leading to Batum, Russia's rail and pipeline terminal on the Black Sea, and the Transcaucasian roads to Russia's biggest oilfields. But Kars can also be a Russian dagger pointed through Turkey at the British Empire's oil arteries. It flanks the Iranian province of Azerbaijan about which Russia is much concerned.

For Turkey, Kars is the military key to its eastern defenses. If Kars passed into the Soviet Union, the rest of Turkey might soon follow into the Russian orbit.

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