TURKEY: Blood on the Ararats

• Share

(See map)

Neither ark nor dove of peace landed on the Ararats (Big Mount Ararat & Little Mount Ararat) last week but bombs, thousands of them, raising thunder and mushroom clouds of dust. Round the Ararats' feet was the smoke of 200 burnt and blackened villages.

Month ago news reached Angora (Turkish capital) that the Kurds, a warlike backward race inhabiting a region which overlaps both Turkey and Persia, had risen in rebellion against the reforms of Turkish Dictator Mustapha Kemal Pasha. They had declared a Holy War. Dictator Kemal knew what to do. He ordered 15,000 regular troops, 15,000 reserves and Turkey's entire air force to the front, commanded them to exterminate without mercy every single Kurdish rebel.

Within three days the rebels were surrounded, had taken refuge on the Ararats. Squadron after squadron flew over them, first blew the Kurds out of their caves with bombs, then dove at the survivors with rattling machine guns. One airplane was shot down. Kurds tore it to shreds, fought over the privilege of gouging out the Turkish aviator's eyes. Turkish infantry systematically burned every Kurdish village in the vicinity, shot down every Kurdish man, woman, child.

More than anything else the Turkish forces seemed to resent Kurdish attempts to revive the fez, long ago abolished in Turkey by Dictator Kemal. The Kurds, in the first flush of their revolt, transformed the hats of captured Turkish villagers into "fezzes" by cutting off the brims.

For the sake of Progress, for the safety of his progressive régime Dictator Kemal was forced to put such arrant, desperate reactionaries to the sword. In one respect his own capital, progressive Angora, is retrograde. It no longer produces peerless Angora cats. But of all coats the Angora has still the longest, silkiest haired.