Silence, Please

Premier Adnan Menderes seems to believe that the simplest way to end domestic criticism of his government is to pass a law against it. After his re-election last fall, Menderes rammed through another in a series of restrictive laws making it a criminal offense for a newspaper to print anything said in Parliament that the Assembly president deems "defamatory to Parliament or its members." Opposition Deputies protested that the law could be used to prevent publication of legitimate criticism of the government. The Istanbul newspaper Cumhuriyet sent a copy of the statute to Professor Husein Kubali, a Sorbonne-trained expert on constitutional law at Istanbul University, asked for his opinion. On strictly legal grounds, Kubali held that the statute was unconstitutional because "it perverted the principle of freedom of expression" as denned by the Turkish constitution.

The government's response was immediate. First Education Minister Celal Yardimci demanded that Kubali be examined by a three-man board of his colleagues on the charge of "political activity." The board cleared him. But Education Minister Yardimci ignored their decision and last week suspended Kubali.

The university was in midterm recess, and the government had ordered the campus ringed by 300 police and cavalry as a "security measure." But some 600 students defiantly rallied to give departing Professor Kubali an ovation, carried him on their shoulders to his car despite his urging that they disperse. In Istanbul on a Ford Foundation project, Columbia University Law Professor Emeritus Elliott Cheatham urged the U.S. ambassador to intervene on Kubali's behalf because "I am sure Professor Kubali's attendance at the Conference on the Rule of Law at the University of Chicago last year strengthened his decision to speak forthrightly."

Cheatham and his friends canvassed U.S. and European schools to find a new job for Kubali. They may well be too late. At week's end the Turkish Parliament had before it a new law giving the government the right to prohibit Turkish professors from teaching in any foreign universities without the Education Minister's express permission.

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