A Scalp for the Taking

In all Turkey there is probably no man whom Premier Adnan Menderes would rather see behind bars than stocky Kasim Gulek, 51-year-old leader of the opposition Republican People's Party. As Gulek tells it, Menderes once promised that on the day Gulek finally went to jail the prison barber who cut off his thick black locks would be rewarded with a gold-plated watch. "That Menderes," says the opposition leader in his fluent American English,* "is a full-blooded Iroquois. He wants to scalp me."

Last week shrewd Kasim Gulek deliberately offered Menderes an opportunity for scalp-lifting. Premier Menderes, faced with rising criticism of his ruinously inflationary economic policies, has grown increasingly thin-skinned. Six weeks ago Menderes pushed through Parliament a repressive law which forbids political meetings or demonstrations except in the 45 days immediately preceding elections. (Turkey's next general elections will be held in 1958.) To test the new law, Opposition Leader Gulek decided to make a political tour of Turkey's isolated Black Sea ports.

"Kindly Desist." Setting out from Istanbul by ship, accompanied by newsmen, Gulek ran into government obstructionism right from the start. At his first big port of call, the tobacco town of Samsun, the local governor not only refused Gulek permission to hold a public meeting, but also decreed that he could not even hold a closed meeting with local Republican People's Party committeemen. Coolly, Gulek answered: "We have a perfect right to hold a meeting in our own party home." To the 300 people who braved police surveillance to crowd into Samsun's small, stifling party headquarters he announced his determination to fight for the repeal of Menderes' new law, and added: "The graveyards of Europe are filled with fallen dictators."

At every stop after Samsun, police interference steadily increased. At Giresun, where a detachment of soldiers with fixed bayonets surrounded him the moment he stepped ashore, Gulek tried waving to onlookers, only to be warned by the police chief: "You are creating a political demonstration by waving. Kindly desist." At fabled Trebizond, where Xenophon's weary Ten Thousand finally reached the sea, the police tried to whisk Gulek from the dock to party headquarters in a car. When he insisted on making the trip by foot, they used clubs and jeeps to scatter the crowds that gathered to catch sight of him. At a later stop, a provincial subgovernor ruled that it would constitute a political meeting if a cafe proprietor pushed a few tables together for Gulek's party. Still another ruling: anything Gulek said while standing up must be considered a political address.

Pears & Hazelnuts. For a while Gulek tried to counter the police with Gandhian tactics--simple handshaking tours. For the last 100 miles of his trip he abandoned ship and moved by car along the lush southeastern shore of the Black Sea, where the corn grows eight feet tall and string beans climb way up over a man's head. In this country, where peasants came out to the road to present him with such local delicacies as pears and, hazelnuts, the handshaking tactics worked well enough. But in towns, where clouds of policemen sealed him off from the populace, Gulek soon found that the only hands he got to shake were those ..of Republican People's Party committeemen. Accordingly, in Rize, where terraced tea plantations run up into cloud-capped mountains, Gulek decided on a new gambit--shopping. Casually, he strolled into the Rize bazaar to look at the local textiles. He got through three shops, shaking hands with the storekeepers and kissing customers' babies. Then a police officer stepped up and said: "Kasim Gulek, I arrest you on charges of fomenting a political demonstration."

After 13 hours' detention, Gulek was at last freed on bail and allowed to return to Istanbul. Gulek is already appealing an earlier sentence for "insulting the National Assembly," but some prison barber has yet to claim that gold-plated watch from Premier Menderes.

Besides Gulek's own display of personal courage, one sign that democracy is not yet dead in Turkey was the big black headlines in Istanbul's newspapers on Gulek's Black Sea trip. Despite the Menderes press-muzzling laws, the papers circumspectly managed to get the idea across.

*He was educated at Istanbul's American-run Robert College, and Columbia University.

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