Kemal Pasha—Founder of the New Turkey

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 246, 7 January 1928, Page 22

Kemal Pasha —Founder of the New Turkey

INS from Constantinople —as completely disappeared as the dinosaur —is the red fez. Along with the fez and the turban went the flowing

robes, the long male gowns, the cloth-and- rope headdress of the Turk-ruled Arab—not to mention the more or less simultaneous arrival of the knee-length skirt and flesh-coloured stockings on what is still the less represented sex in the street throngs of ancient Byzantium. There seems to have been no stern Kemalist command to do away with sack-like trousers and slapping red slippers; but the Turk of the masses evidently had enough sense of the incongruous to realise that Occidental hats and caps do not go well with such adornments.

To those of us who have known them familiarly since childhood it may be difficult to realise that ordinary hats and caps are not instantly adaptable or comfortable. That there is a natural fore and aft to them was not immediately recognisable to Turkish eyes. Even to-day, after nearly two years of practice, something like six Turks out of ten in the Asiatic and less sophisticated part of their contracted country will be found with the visor of a cap on the side of the head or protecting the nape of the neck. Not from ignorance entirely, of course; when a man has worn a fez for many generations, an awning over hitherto unprotected eyes may obviously be annoying. Like the denizen of Greenwich Village or of the erstwhile Latin Quarter, who expects originally in his chosen work to follow eccentricity in personal appearance, Kemal and his henchmen expect the abolition of the fez and its accompanying garments to bring about a complete Europeanisation of the ten or twelve million Turks subject to their stern rule. Modern psychology seems to have crept into “the Gazi’s” thinking. “Make my people outwardly indistinguishable from ‘other Europeans,’ ” one may easily read between the lines of some of his orders, “and they will unconsciously acquire all the qualities that have brought prosperity to the Western world —without, of course, adopting its vices or discarding the good old Koranic virtues.” And in his avowed purpose of makiug the Turk unrecognisable in exterior from the Christian peoples of the westward, Kemal has succeeded. Whole pages could be given to the new position of woman in the chastened post-war Turkey. In matters of greater import, the Swiss civil code and the Italian criminal code have displaced the old Koranic law. Incongruously enough, it is in Frenchruled Syria and British-mandated Palestine and the new crown colony of Cyprus, that the Ottoman code still lives. Only the over-optimistic will expect that laws thus adopted in mass from an alien people shall work at once as well as at home. After all, although the new Turkey ranks as a republic, it is such only in name, for the Government is as strictly personal, as arbitrarily Kemalist, as if the notion of giving the governed a voice in their governing were still far below the horizon ahead. But when the decision one way or another is of no personal interest to the chief who commands Turkey to-day, or to his little coterie, the court procedure from opening to judgment is completely European.

Surely one may list among items of westernisation the new Turkish way of taking care of poliitical favourites. In the old sultanic days it was by giving the right to collect taxes, with a more than goodly commission to the collector. The modern way is to hand deserving Kemalists a monopoly and let them make the most of it —within ultimate limits. It would require a prodigious memory to mention off-hand all the things that have become monopolies—that is, the virtually personal property of some member of the tight little clique surrounding Kemal. Perhaps it will suffice to mention that there is a bathing

monopoly. It is unlawful—and more or less dangerous to one’s liberty or financial standing-—to go swimming in the Bosphorus or the seas it connects without using an authorised bathing house and thereby contributing to the friend of “the Gazi” who holds the privilege. In his modernising of Turkey Kemal has cast aside the Koranic injunction against graven or sculptured images. The picturing of the human form (until recently considered sacrilegious) has broken out in all the furore of discarded prohibition. It will be remembered that there was not a public statue in the length and

breadth of the old Turkish Empire. To-day it is a backward and unresponsive Turkish city that has not erected at least one statue. The subject of one and all of them—without exception—is “the Gazi.” Down near the outdoor beer hall on Seraglio Point in old Stamboul stands a bronze Gazi in dinner dress (with cuffed trousers) who gazes away across the mouth of the Bosphorus to Anatolia (the Asiatic Turkey that is almost all that is left to him) in the attitude of a football coach admonishing a weakening team toward the end of a fourth quarter of a tied game.

Angora, the new capital, can well afford a few statues to the man who put it on the new real estate map. Land values in the great, fertile piain surrounding that age-blackened town huddled about a Roman-walled hilltop increased even more spectacularly than did those of Florida. An acre is easily sold for 400 times what it would have brought before the decision to remove the seat of Government further out of reach of European intrigue. For along with his eagerness to Europeanise his people, Kerual has a not unjustifiable suspicion of Europe. His motto is an ardent “Turkey for the Turks,” or at least for the Kemalists —outwardly at least, for the words are now synonymous. But the blue-eyed dictator of Turkey may be trusted not to swallow Western ways hook, line and sinker. He knows how to choose, and has the power to make his choice effective. And he is still Oriental enough to emasculate those Western institutions he does not care for. Few, perhaps, caught the unconscious humour in a late dispatch from the Bosphorus. “President Kemal,” it ran, using the Western form of the Turkish term, the Gazi, “gave a triumphal message of thanks to the nation, which has just elected to the Assembly the 316 deputies whom he himself picked. Only one dissenting vote was cast throughout the land.” To the recent traveller in Turkey the only surprising note in that message is that concerning the dissenting vote. Kemal and his associates, you may be sure, were little short of astonished at it; and it is easy to picture that lone dissenting vote taking to the tall timber with all the speed that modern garb makes possible. Only the foolhardly cast dissenting votes.