Oil for the machines of Turkey lay bottled in the bowels of tankers last June while representatives of four big oil companies served notice on the Turkish government: unless some $50 million in past oil bills was settled, the new shipments would not be unloaded. With only a week's oil in reserve, the government did some frantic juggling and scraped together a payment.
The U.S.'s strongest ally in the Middle East is so strapped that it can barely pay its day-to-day bills.
A newspaper editor reported one day last summer that while Premier Adnan Menderes was off on a trip, some political scalawagging was going on inside the ruling Democratic Party. "While the cat's away," wrote the editor, "the mice will play." The editor was arrested, and only by appeal to a higher court escaped a jail sentence of six months. His crime: imputing animal characteristics to the Premier.
"In Turkey," said a troubled Istanbul man, "it is still possible to be a free man, a free journalist, or a free judge—if you are willing to take the risk."
Only yesterday Turkey had seemed a solid rock in the free world's sea of uncertainties. Now it is a bothered bastion. Its economy is sick and its government is flirting with bankruptcy. Its brief but intense experience with democracy is afflicted with a return of the familiar weapons of autocracy.
What has gone wrong, and what can be done about it? These questions, raised for months past, concern more than tough, debonair Adnan Menderes, his government and his 23 million countrymen. All the other allies of NATO have cause to worry about the health of the member that anchors NATO's Eastern wing, provides the allies' largest single bloc of soldiers (the entire Turkish army of 500,000 men), and stands stoutly across the Black Sea from Russia. The U.S., in particular, has cause for concern. It cannot let Turkey sink, and Turkey insists that the U.S. owes it the means to stay afloat. The proposed means: a $300 million loan, no strings attached. The U.S. reply: no more loans until Turkey puts its economic house in order. The question: Who will back down first?
Scrap Iron & Will
The Turkish problem grows in great part out of a commendable urge, an almost feverish yearning, to become overnight a dynamic, industrial nation. For a nation forged only 32 years ago out of the scrap iron of the broken-down Ottoman Empire and the hot will of the late great Kemal Ataturk, for a people who for centuries left the complexities of commerce to their Greek and Armenian subjects, the Turks have made historic progress. In the five years since Premier Menderes left his Opposition bench in the Assembly to lead the Democrats to a stunning upset victory over the Republicans, he has gone all out to expand Turkey's productive capacity.
On the surface, the record has been amazing. Setting aside half its budget for defense. Turkey has put 22 divisions into NATO, doubled its output of steel, cement, textiles. It has built 7,000 miles of road and started a dozen multipurpose dam projects. Its most spectacular gain has been in agriculture, where, with the help of subsidies and 40,000 imported tractors, it has doubled the tilled land and turned the country into an exporter of wheat and cotton.