Slow to Anger

The student explosion that blasted South Korea's Syngman Rhee out of his palace flashed across Asia, and ignited undergraduate riots in Turkey, another key outpost of the West.

As in Korea, the students were protesting against a man to whom his country owes much and against a regime which had once been democratic. Premier Adnan Menderes is a tremendously energetic figure, a builder, a driving initiator of economic expansion, an upholder of Turkey's NATO and CENTO alliances. But since his Democrats wrested office from President Ismet Inonu's Republicans in 1950, they have gagged newspapers, jailed more than 200 journalists, and cuffed the opposition about with barbarous disregard for civil rights. Unlike Rhee. Menderes knows what his followers are doing, and in fact dictates the laws that they enact.

Trigger for the students' revolt was Menderes' latest move: a bill granting almost dictatorial powers to a special commission (TIME, May 2) designed to investigate the "subversive, illegitimate" activities of the Republican opposition party. Gathering round a statue of the late great Ataturk at the university gate, 1.500 students at Istanbul University began shouting "Hurriyet!" ("Freedom"'), and singing Ataturk's famed song of victory:

The mountain peak is covered with

mist . . . Let us march, friends.

Police rushed in. One hulking cop tried to haul away a student. A dark-eyed coed felled him with a blow of her shoe's high heel. Truckloads of cops roared up and shooting started. Three students fell; University President Siddik Sami Onar arrived, told the police chief it was illegal for his forces to enter university grounds. He was knocked down, bloodied and carted off to a police station. "Give us our president!" roared the students, now 5,000 strong and boiling mad. By the time President Onar was brought back, they were past heeding his call to go home. They poured past sympathetic soldiers into Beyazit Square, where they sang and shouted slogans praising South Korean students. The cops threw tear-gas bombs; the students picked them up and threw them back. When mounted police charged, students jabbed lighted cigarettes under the horses, making them rear and throw their riders.

Cutting the Bridges. The cops began shooting in earnest, and some 20 students dropped. One student column surged toward Menderes' Istanbul headquarters. "Menderes must resign!" they shouted. "Death to all dictators!" Along the way they spotted and wrecked the lucklessly named "Menderes Drugstore." Tanks and troops headed them off. By opening drawbridges, the authorities stopped another column from crossing the Golden Horn into the heart of the city. The government proclaimed martial law. All Istanbul's cafes, bars and nightclubs were closed. The university was shut down. The military governor banned any mention of the events in the press, and denied that anybody had been killed. But hospitals reported five dead and many wounded. That night Istanbul was a ghost city. Not a pedestrian, not a car was seen in the streets.

Next day Ankara students took to the streets. Four thousand strong, they massed outside their university buildings, shouting "Freedom!" and "Down with all dictators!" At the law school, guns cracked, and eight ambulances screamed off with injured students. Students also rioted at Izmir. In Istanbul a crowd of about 15,000 collected in Beyazit Square, but the crowd seemed more interested in watching the students than in joining them in their protest. Troops were able to break up the demonstration by deliberately marching and countermarching until they had pushed everybody out of the square.

Crying Treason. At week's end, it appeared that with the army's disciplined support. Menderes had put down the challenge. But the outburst expressed rising resentment among Turkish students and intellectuals against his strongman rule.

In last week's debate, wrinkled old Ismet Inonu directly rapped Menderes: "Other regimes that have ruled illegally have justified their rule by arguments like yours. Syngman Rhee had an obedient police force, civil service and army in his hand, but you don't even command the loyalty of those forces." By giving a committee summary powers to investigate and punish police and army men, Inonu argued, the Democrats had "inevitably" proclaimed doubts of the officers' loyalties. "Those who seek to establish a coercive regime must believe that the Turkish nation is imbued with less self-respect than Korea," he cried.

No Turk could tolerate such a taunt. Deputies scrambled over benches to fight. One man stood in his tracks, weeping with rage. Police rushed in, and the session adjourned. Later the majority formally voted to expel Ismet Inonu, leader of the opposition, hero of two wars. President of Turkey from 1938 to 1950, for twelve sessions.

Adnan Menderes, the man who walked bloody but unbroken from a 1959 plane crash that killed fifteen, was not the man to moderate his ways in such an hour. Next day he went on the air to charge the Republicans with virtual treason. The students, he said, had become "tools of conspirators" and "fanatic party followers." He called their demonstrations "plots against the country's security." "They will soon learn," he said in his disarmingly soft voice, "what it means to stand against the state." In the morning, the Premier visited Ankara student dormitories--and got no back talk from the students.

Heading for Trouble. At week's end, as Istanbul bristled with tanks and guns, the U.S.'s Secretary of State Christian Herter and Britain's Selwyn Lloyd arrived in Istanbul for a meeting of the NATO foreign ministers. A few hours before, a thousand students had been shouting "Freedom!" outside the buildings where the ministers were to meet. Calling a 24-hour curfew, the military governor cleared the streets. Three thousand students were locked up in military compounds.

Freedom has no tradition in Turkey older than Ataturk, but a generation has grown up almost devout in its dedication to democracy. Menderes has small patience for such misty idealism. "What does it matter what the intellectuals of Istanbul think." Menderes once demanded scornfully, "so long as the peasantry is with us?" Ironically, the peasantry is still with Adnan Menderes. and he could probably still win an election without any of the repressive measures he has resorted to. But in trying to make doubly sure what can never be sure in a free democracy. Menderes was jeopardizing freedom itself in his young republic.

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