TURKEY: Surrounded by Dangers

In the bitterness of their third straight election defeat, Turkey’s Republicans erupted with cries of “Fraud.” Ex-President Ismet Inonu’s party had quintupled its strength, won in a third of Turkey’s provinces. But Premier Adnan Menderes’ Democrats still held a better-than-2-to-1 margin, with 424 seats to 178 for the Republicans. Angrily the Republicans accused Menderes of “stealing” the election by scratching opposition voters’ names from the rolls.

In Gaziantep, near the tense Turco-Syrian frontier, Republicans had missed victory in the province by only 200 votes. Two days after the election, assembling ostensibly to mark the 34th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, a crowd of Republicans burst into shouts of “Stolen votes!” mobbed Democratic Party headquarters, wrecked the city hall. In an exchange of stones and gunshots, a policeman and an eleven-year-old boy bystander were killed. At Mersin on the south coast, a Republican was shot and killed in a similar demonstration.

The government refused to release the popular vote totals, which, according to unofficial counts, gave the opposition 51.6% of the vote. “Serious illegalities in the elections have destroyed peace among our citizens,” cried the 73-year-old Inonu, who had inherited the mantle of power from the late Kemal Ataturk, only to lose to the Democrats’ Menderes in 1950. The Republicans ignored the fact that it was they who had set up the system by which a party with a minority of popular votes could win a sizable majority in the Assembly.

Premier Menderes dismissed the outcries of the opposition, insisted that the increased size of the opposition “won’t slow us down at all” in his hell-bent modernization of Turkey’s creaky economy. “Turkey cannot remain underdeveloped,” he declared. “She must have a strong national army, and we must be able to maintain it within our own resources. We Turks are surrounded by dangers. It means nothing less than our national existence.”