After Seven Months

Seven months ago, when Turkey's Strongman General Cemal Gursel ordered the leaders of the deposed regime of Adnan Menderes to stand trial, expectation was that their cases would be wrapped up expeditiously, the junta's revolt against the Menderes government vindicated neatly, and Menderes & Co. put out of the way conveniently. But by last week, the i sth trial on Yassiada Island ended inconclusively, the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th trials were under way, the 1,000th witness took the stand to give testimony, and the Turks were frankly tired of the whole thing.

From the outset, the Yassiada trials went badly. Early prosecution charges that old ex-President Celal Bayar, 77,, sold a state-owned Afghan hound for personal gain did not stand up. An accusation that ex-Premier Menderes had arranged for the murder of his illegitimate child proved false; Menderes admitted readily that he had fathered the child in an illicit affair with an opera singer, but proved he had nothing to do with its death, which seemed to be of natural causes. Charges that Menderes threatened ex-President (and Republican Party leader) Ismet Inonu with assassination could not be substantiated.

What had the trials proved? Among other things, that:

P: Adnan Menderes misused $1,148,487 in secret state funds for private purposes --personal income tax. hotel bills, etc.

P: Democratic Party leaders actively fomented the disastrous 1955 anti-Greek riots in Istanbul, in which 4,000 Greek-owned stores were sacked and burned, three Greeks killed. But all that the prosecution could prove against Menderes personally was that he had ordered up a vigorous but nonviolent demonstration against the local Greeks as a protest against Greek demands in Cyprus. Against proud and unbending ex-President Bayar, nothing at all was proved.

P: Menderes and other top Democrats ordered harassment of opposition Republican Party politicians. Item: a crowd of Democratic Party followers was ordered by Menderes to demonstrate against Inonu in May 1959, overzealously pelted Inonu's car with stones and beat on it with sticks. Item: on Menderes' order, the army harassed Inonu on a political stumping tour in Anatolia, held up his train for three hours, turned him away from a village he was attempting to visit. Item: Democratic Party goons in the Anatolian towns of Canakkale and Geyikli bullied, attacked and injured Republican politicians, though not provably at Menderes' orders.

P: Top Democrats were responsible for the mob-wrecking of the anti-Menderes newspaper, Demokrat Izmir. (Menderes' direct complicity was not proved; yet the state prosecutor demanded the death penalty for him.)

P: Istanbul Democratic leaders were responsible for financial hanky-panky while expropriating choice Istanbul real estate under a Menderes scheme to modernize the ancient city. Faithful Democratic Party supporters were handsomely compensated for their expropriated properties, while Republicans were shortchanged. Still to be proved: that Menderes was personally culpable.

Claques & Jeers. Menderes & Co. had clearly been incompetent, venal, corrupt and highhanded. Personally, Bayar has won reluctant respect by his stiff-necked dignity, apologizing for nothing, defiantly reminding his judges that he is an old man and indifferent to what they can do to him. Menderes has lost stature by his air of abject humility and his voluble eagerness to shift responsibility to anybody but himself. To many of his once fervent supporters, he no longer seems like the great man who ran Turkey so smoothly and so long.

But nothing in the evidence seemed to justify the death penalty that State Prosecutor Altay Egesel so frequently demanded for both Menderes and Bayar. (So far, death has been demanded for Bayar on four separate counts, for Menderes on seven, including the comparatively trivial Istanbul expropriations case.) In the eyes of many, the circus-like atmosphere of the trials demeaned such points as the prosecution was able to make. Sharp sallies against Menderes & Co. by Prosecutor Egesel and the presiding judge are applauded by a courtroom claque, responses by the defendants jeered.

Deep Worry. Impatient with a trial in which their former leaders have been continually harassed, humiliated, cajoled and insulted, ex-Democrats are showing mounting defiance. Statues and pictures of Kemal Ataturk, the professed idol of both Gursel and Inonu, are defaced and disfigured regularly in provincial Democratic strongholds. Anonymous hate letters trickle in to members of the junta. And although the junta ostensibly ignores these signs, indications are that privately it is deeply worried. Thousands of ex-Democrats have been clapped in jail on the strength of mere denunciations, and only last week 161 were rounded up in an alleged plot to overthrow the Gursel government.

Unvindicated morally, facing a growing though still underground challenge, the junta is in a quandary. Its members are committed by Cemal Gursel's word to hold free elections by October at the latest. But if they hang Menderes and Bayar, how will the predictably sharpened rancor among Democrats weigh in the election? Cynics suggest that the junta should have shot Menderes and Bayar as soon as they got their hands on them. Sighed an Istanbul businessman: "The greatest error was attempting to carry out the trials in a legal way."

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