(See front cover)
Toothsome young lambs were slaughtered by the hundreds in Ankara last week and their fresh meat sizzled on a thousand skewers as banquet followed boisterous banquet. Champagne-loving Turkish Dictator Mustafa Kemal Pasha, high-strung and quick as a panther, was doing his best to honor the majestic Persian Dictator who styles himself the King of Kings and whose age of some 60 years is concealed by his upright military bearing, betrayed by a certain slowness of speech and gesture.
Once a Cossack trooper, His Majesty Riza Shah Pahlevi, King of Kings, showed in converse with the Turkish Dictator his customary habit of arriving swiftly at obstinate conclusions. Several times Dictator seemed vexed by Dictator, but only in political converse. When the talk shifted to soldiering both were in their element. With a strutting pageant of Turkish soldiery and Air Force maneuvers, Host Kemal so diverted Guest Pahlevi that the King of Kings prolonged his official visit.
When His Majesty relaxed in mellow mood, with Dictator Kemal half seas over, opportunities to negotiate were nimbly seized by the Talleyrand of Turkey, her perpetual Foreign Minister, Dr. Tewfik Rushdi Bey, who began his career as an obstetrician. Knowing that there is no Persian with whom one can effectively negotiate except the King of Kings, ingratiating Dr. Rushdi sounded His Majesty on the great project of a Middle Eastern Alliance, a bloc to be constructed in spite of Britain and France by Moslems of Turkey, Persia, Irak, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Transjordania and Egypt. Such at least is Dr. Rushdi's dream. And last week the King of Kings had left Persia for the first time since he seized the Peacock Throne in 1925 to discuss both Moslem dreams and realities with his Turkish neighbors.
That His Majesty should have been able to proceed in seemly state over the whole length of his snakelike route of 2,000 miles from Teheran to Ankara (see map) was itself a gigantic achievement of the two Dictators. Before they ousted the do-nothing hereditary royal dynasties of Turkey and Persia such a journey could only be made by meandering caravan and in utmost peril of attack by bandits. Most savage of all were the Kurdish cutthroats who for generations had defied both Persian and Turkish soldiers, raiding (first into one country, then into the other along their common frontier. Perhaps the wisest and most enlightened act of the King of Kings was to conclude two years ago with emissaries of Dictator Kemal a pact, by which Persia yielded to Turkey certain bits of her northwest frontier which made it possible for the two states so to deploy their border patrols that the Kurdish tribesmen could be nabbed at-their raiding and the scourge of banditry wiped out. Last week Turkish and Persian statesmen hailed this achievement in toast after brimming toast. They then talked behind their ever-itching palms about British oil, by all odds the juiciest thing in Persia.
Anglo-Persian. Spunky young Persians under their gruff and aging King of Kings have finally broken, denounced and torn up all important concessions previously held by the Great Powers except that of Anglo-Persian Oil Co. Ltd., of which concern the British Government is majority stockholder.