Turkey: After Seven Months

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Claques & Jeers. Menderes & Co. had clearly been incompetent, venal, corrupt and highhanded. Personally, Bayar has won reluctant respect by his stiff-necked dignity, apologizing for nothing, defiantly reminding his judges that he is an old man and indifferent to what they can do to him. Menderes has lost stature by his air of abject humility and his voluble eagerness to shift responsibility to anybody but himself. To many of his once fervent supporters, he no longer seems like the great man who ran Turkey so smoothly and so long.

But nothing in the evidence seemed to justify the death penalty that State Prosecutor Altay Egesel so frequently demanded for both Menderes and Bayar. (So far, death has been demanded for Bayar on four separate counts, for Menderes on seven, including the comparatively trivial Istanbul expropriations case.) In the eyes of many, the circus-like atmosphere of the trials demeaned such points as the prosecution was able to make. Sharp sallies against Menderes & Co. by Prosecutor Egesel and the presiding judge are applauded by a courtroom claque, responses by the defendants jeered.

Deep Worry. Impatient with a trial in which their former leaders have been continually harassed, humiliated, cajoled and insulted, ex-Democrats are showing mounting defiance. Statues and pictures of Kemal Ataturk, the professed idol of both Gursel and Inonu, are defaced and disfigured regularly in provincial Democratic strongholds. Anonymous hate letters trickle in to members of the junta. And although the junta ostensibly ignores these signs, indications are that privately it is deeply worried. Thousands of ex-Democrats have been clapped in jail on the strength of mere denunciations, and only last week 161 were rounded up in an alleged plot to overthrow the Gursel government.

Unvindicated morally, facing a growing though still underground challenge, the junta is in a quandary. Its members are committed by Cemal Gursel's word to hold free elections by October at the latest. But if they hang Menderes and Bayar, how will the predictably sharpened rancor among Democrats weigh in the election? Cynics suggest that the junta should have shot Menderes and Bayar as soon as they got their hands on them. Sighed an Istanbul businessman: "The greatest error was attempting to carry out the trials in a legal way."