Steer clear of Turkey

International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2004 by Harry A. Franck

I very recently returned from a journey through Turkey.... I have planned to push on eastward and visit the eastern half of Turkey. But it simply isn't done. When I asked for permission to go to Erzerum, it was quickly and flatly refused. Having never before been proscribed in my goings and comings in any of the sixty or so countries I have visited, I asked for reasons. Foreigners were not allowed there, was all the explanation I was vouchsafed. The same short shrift was given my request to go to Kharpoot, Diyarbekir, Van, Kars. The eastern end of Anatolia, the Asiatic region that is almost all that is left to Turkey, was right closed against prying foreigners of whatever class or motive.

An anti-Kemalist and several Americans of long residence in the country at length confided the reason to me. In spite of a censorship unequaled in Western countries even in war times, the fact had leaked through that new massacres had been going on for some time in that part of the country. This time it was the Kurds who were in trouble. The Turks are natural bullies; they must have someone to pick on. The Greeks and Armenians and other Christians being virtually gone, they had fallen upon a racial minority of their own faith. Incredible as it may sound, the reason for the massacres this time was that some of the Kurds had refused to do away with the fez and adopt European headdress. Something in their own peculiar brand of religion makes this sacrilegious, and they were being hanged, deported, and their property confiscated--this last the main reason always for Turkish atrocities--on the charge of rebelling against the Kemal Government. We heard of the massacres of the Greeks and the Armenians; they had friends in the outside world and propaganda bureaus from which to make their wrongs heard. The Kurds, having none of these things, die silent martyrs.

Most of the American and other Christian missionaries have left Turkey. The few mission schools that remain must give only those subjects approved by the Kemal Government. The Government not merely specifies the curriculum, but names the holidays, requires the appointment of certain Turkish teachers, names the salary that must be paid them, and forbids absolutely anything even mildly suggestive of proselyting. To so much as show a Testament to a Turkish pupil is illegal. The superintendent of schools at Tarsus ordered the American boys' school there to hold classes on Sunday, to use the Koran instead of the Bible, and to conform to several other arbitrary religions rites. A few mission hospitals are still functioning, but the interference from the Turkish authorities is intense. Most of the few missionaries who remain are merely waiting and marking time in the largely vain hope that they will get permission again to work for the good of the masses.

There is an American missionary woman who has been all alone in the southeastern part of Anatolia for years. Her mission board has tried hard and long to get permission to send another worker to relieve her, or at least to bear her company, but without success. She might be allowed to leave, but only on condition of abandoning all the mission property and most of her own. She is allowed to write letters only in Turkish, and something like one in ten even in that language reach their destination. It is hardly necessary to add that she is within hearing distance of the Kurd massacres.

The Armenian hospital of Marsivan was closed by order of Mustapha Kemal because the American director said within hearing of some spy that, while no one objected to democracy in Turkey, it was impossible to establish a democracy by wholesale hangings and other dictatorial acts. Fifteen professors of an American mission school were hanged because the authorities found a photograph in the school showing a football team of boys in blue and white (the Greek colors) and sweaters with the Greek as well as the Turkish flag flying above them. It had been taken years before at the time of a match between students representing the two nationalities.

Like the missionaries, commercial men are leaving Turkey. They cannot compete with the new monopolies, abetted by the grafting and dilatory, unfair, unbusinesslike ways of the present Government. The Constantinople representative of one of our large tobacco companies has been months withdrawing his firm from the country, and the end has by no means arrived. Three times he had unpacked his office furniture, which he planned to move to Greece, for inspection, when last I saw him, and still had little hope of getting out when I left. An Englishman who held the lightering contracts with most foreign ships touching at Constantinople was forced more than a year ago to work exclusively for the harbor monopoly, and at last accounts had not received a piaster for his services.

In the old days the Sultans rewarded their favorites by farming out the taxes among them and permitting them to keep a large proportion of the collections. While taxes are far worse now than under the Sultans--being ubiquitous, arbitrary, yet bringing the people by no means benefits in proportion--the new stunt is the granting of monopolies. The present Government, disguised under the name of republic, is a closed corporation of a score or so of men close to Kemal. Most of them have done things which make it impossible safely to break with the dictator, however much they may wish to do so. These worthy Kemalists of high rank are given monopolies on many of the things of prime necessity. There are monopolies on almost everything--salt, sugar, tobacco, liquor, harbor rights, radio, even bathing; it is illegal to go swimming in Turkey except from an authorized bathhouse, after paying the corresponding fee to the monopolist. The poor hamals, or human pack-horses, that one still sees carrying atrocious loads in Constantinople and other parts of Turkey now toil for bare food, while the profits of their grueling labors go to the political favorite who holds the hamal monopoly. Under the Sultans many of them (Kurds to a large extent) laid aside what to them were fortunes and went home to spend the last years of their lives in ease.