TURKEY: Slow to Anger

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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 cafés, 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.