"We Say They Are Guilty"

"If things go right," said strapping General Cemal Gursel, soon after the Turkish army seized power fortnight ago, "we hope to finish all this in a month. If we run into difficulties it might take three months." Last week, like many a military man before him, General Gursel was learning that ruling a nation is never that simple.

Second Roundup. In the first hours after the almost bloodless overthrow of former Premier Adnan Menderes, the task of putting the Turkish Republic back on the democratic track seemed as straightforward as taking a hilltop. The army was solidly behind Gursel and his "National Union Committee" of generals, colonels and junior officers; the people had welcomed them with joy; their enemies were in their hands. Moderation was the order of the day. Leaders of Menderes' Democratic Party were released almost as fast as they were arrested; at the start of the week only 150 were in custody. General Gursel dismissed talk of punishment, said Menderes and a few others would be sent to some beach resort in temporary exile while the country ran off "free, just elections" and got back on an even keel.

This buoyant calm was shattered just two nights after the revolution when one of the new government's most hated prisoners, former Interior Minister Namik Gedik, suddenly leaped out of his bed on the top floor of Ankara's military academy. Shrieking "Ya Allah" (O God), he plunged through an unopened double glass window to his death. The hysterical suicide of the boss of Menderes' national police, the man held responsible for beatings and killings of anti-Menderes student demonstrators, shocked the new government and stirred the avenging wrath of the soldiers behind it. Abruptly abandoning his live-and-let-live attitude, Premier Gursel declared sternly: "Former ministers will have to account for their deeds." Once more jeeps rolled through Ankara making mass arrests. By midweek 403 out of 406 Democratic Deputies were in jail, most of them on Yassiada Island, eleven miles out to sea from Istanbul.

Second Reason. In their anger at the ministers who had tried to use the military as a tool to perpetuate tyranny, the officers blurted a new reason for vengeance. Speaking for the National Union Committee, Colonel Ertugrul Alatli announced that bodies of opponents of the Menderes regime had been found in circumstances that indicated they had been beaten to death in Menderes' jails and preserved for secret disposal later. Said a junta statement: "Some martyrs have been buried in unknown places, some thrown in wells, some kept in cold storage plants and even some cut up to be used as animal feed."

At week's end Alatli coolly reversed himself with the declaration: "We have nothing to substantiate reports that bodies have been found." Nonetheless, an investigation committee was named to prepare indictments of Menderes and other Democrats for these and other crimes. And the junta had already made up its mind as to the proper verdict. Said Colonel Alatli: "We say they are guilty. This is the feeling of our movement."

Second Room. By week's end, too, the army made it plain just who was calling the tunes in revolutionary Turkey. The Cabinet, Spokesman Alatli announced, would carry out the orders of the National Union Committee, which numbered not 21 officers as first announced but some 50. "Obviously," he said, "if the country has no National Assembly, some kind of assembly must take power and pass laws. This power is in the hands of the National Union Committee. The government is responsible to the committee."

As the Cabinet, almost entirely composed of able technicians, met nonstop in one room of Ankara's government building, the junta held round-the-clock sessions a few doors down the hall. Eating meals brought from a nearby restaurant and sleeping in his office ("I make the bed myself. That's why it looks so bad"), General Gursel hopped from one meeting to the other.

Second Thoughts. Already, the army, which had intervened for the stated purpose of restoring the liberties that Menderes had flouted, was getting entangled in tasks of civil punishment and constitutional reform from which it would be hard to extricate itself without impairing its own reputation for political neutrality. Democracy would not be established without a return to the two-party system--which was likely to prove difficult with almost the entire leadership of the Democratic Party in confinement.

Apparently unworried, ex-President Ismet Inonu, whose Republican Party as things now stand should prove an easy election winner over Menderes' smashed Democratic organization, last week pronounced the revolution "legitimate." But some other Republican Party leaders were not so optimistic. Said one: "It is easier to make a revolution than to end it. Those who have made the revolution are bound to be fearful about what would happen if the Democrats came back to power." At week's end Minister of State Sefik Inan said he doubted that new elections could be held before October at the earliest.

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