TURKEY - AS IT IS BY L. HADEN GUEST, M.P.
111110SE who go about the picturesque streets of Old Stambul, explore the Mosques and the Bazaar, admire the light, the coloured wall, the shadow, and the cypress, •breathe in the soft air and rejoice in= the blue sky,. may well leave the city carrying with' them chiefly memories of beauty. They will have' memories of sqUalor -also, vignettes of quarrels : with " harnals " fighting over baggage, of bandit boatmen, of dark square little boxes of shops in the bazaar where this or that rarity has been picked up, of the noise of• the streets of Pera and Galata, of the silence of Stambul, of the swarming crowd on the bridge across the Golden Horn. But in all the memories they will. find one at least lacking,: they will have _ very little memory of children. playing,.-children running, children calling they may remember miserably ragged children begging,' for Constantinople (Stambul, Pera and Galata are alike) is a city of grown-up people. Children are few and are becoming fewer.
During a recent visit (Easter, 1925) to the city I got into touch with the Turkish medical officer especially concerned with the care of child life and met a committee of Turkish doctors acting under his super- intendence to attempt to improve conditions. But their account of conditions in Constantinople was almost one of despair. And yet it is the simplest of all tragedies— the Turkish nation is dying out. In Constantinople eighty out of every hundred children born die in the first few years of life. In the villages of Anatolia a detailed enquiry was, I am informed, made recently in ten villages in the neighbourhood of the new capital, Angora, and revealed an infantile mortality of 75 per cent. among the children of the peasants. An optimistic Turkish doctor at Smyrna guessed the infant mortality rate in reply to my question at 50 per cent. But, whereas the rates given for Constantinople and for the Anatolian villages near Angora were arrived at after specific enquiry and calculation that of Smyrna was admittedly a guess and probably an underestimate.
To his aesthetic impressions of Constantinople the tourist must add another " motif," for he is in presence of a nation dying out of the beautiful shell which its life has made. The death-rate is greater than the birth-rate ; a nation is going the way to disappear.
There are no reliable statistics of any kind in Turkey, and therefore it is impossible to say :whether there are points of growth where life is still vigorous which will balance the loss in other parts of the country. But it is at least improbable that such points of growth exist. Exhausted- by a continued series of wars since 1912— Balkan War, Great War, Greek War and Kurdistan revolt (a big thing) of 1925—Turkey has received blows from which it is difficult to recover. The expulsion of the Greeks from Smyrna and Anatolia generally has been a loss to Turkey and a gain to Greece, as the booming prosperity of Athens attests. It is very evidently more blessed to lose wars than to gain them. And now in the interior of Anatolia great tracts of fertile land lie uncultivated. A population which is probably not more than ten millions, and may be less, lives in great poverty in a rich land which might support twenty millions with ease, and probably many more. Trade is lacking, transport is lacking, political leadership is lacking, and, more fatal, the all-vital initiative is lacking. Over everything is the shadow of—not resigna- tion--but of a fatal indifference which calls the nerveless hand " Kismet."
It would seem that the leaders of Turkey are alive to this. The revolt against the Sultanate, the divorce of Church and State brought about by the Kemal Government, the excellent programmes of railway. building, of instruc- tion in. agriculture, even of revival of• industry, or rather, creation of industry, make this evident. But can they do it ?- Can a nation be saved which cannot keep its children alive ? Can a nation become modernized." which revolts from the despotism of the Sultan- to grasp' at the despotism of the Kemal oligarchy ? Good observers agree that the men working in Government service at Angora_ are honest, industrious and. well-meaning. And then comes the incident of the arrest of.- Hussein_ Djahid Bey, editor of the suppressed TanIne, a leader of the party in opposition 'to Kern il (but even more " Western " in tendency), his trial by the " Tribunal of Independence " at Angora for an unim- portant and slightly disrespectful comment on the Constantinople police, and his sentence to. perpetual banishment to an Anatolian village lost in the wilds.
A government which childishly suppresses criticism in this manner, which risks driving critics to secret con- spiracy and armed revolt, and incidentally throws away the sympathy of the progressive forces in Europe, is clearly not in a strong position to begin the heroic tasks that lie before a real Turkish Government of recon- struction.
Are we in face of a nation from which the life-force is ebbing ? Syphilis has made terrible ravages in the near past.
Is the present high infant mortality partly due to that ?
Malaria—which has destroyed civilizations in the past— rages in Anatolia, and there are practically no doctors or means of medical help in the interior. And, worse than all diseases, poverty is present everywhere. Workers in Smyrna receive wages which, by calculating cost of food, amounts actually consumed and numbers of their family, would appear to be about 20 per cent. below the minimum level of subsistence. Those who live do so, therefore, by drawing big overdrafts on their life capital. Many workers in Constantinople and Smyrna have no homes, but sleep in coffee houses or in the streets. Many workers in the country districts have no proper places even to sleep, but share the byres of cattle in the winter and sleep on the fields they work at during other seasons of the year.
Not that anyone in Turkey gets paid on a scale corn- ' parable with Europe. Admink4-ration is defective indeed, largely because administrators are so inadequately paid that it must be practically impossible for them to live on their salaries. Thus, the Governor of Smyrna is said to be paid about £4 a week and the Chief Customs Officer of Smyrna about £8 a week.
Government despotic and fearful, ruling by the Tri bunal of Independence (a kind of Turkish Tcheka court) and suppression, Administration underpaid, frequently inefficient, people poor, wretched more truly, and with numbers decreasing, what remains ? There remain wide and fertile lands at present empty of men, there remain • beautiful forest-clad mountains, copious rivers, a delicious soft climate, historic traditions of great civilizations of the past and of the wealth and luxury built up out of lands now mean and poor. What wonder, then, that some Turks are saying now : " We cannot govern ourselves ; we must be conquered and ruled." What is to happen ?
Or is nothing to happen ? Are things just to drift until some new " revolt " like that in Kurdistan, or some in- surrection provoked by internal conflicts between political parties in Turkey gives the opportunity for a foreign • Power to intervene? England has no interest to intervene . in this matter. But what of other nations ?
But cannot the League of Nations help by offering at least medical and sanitary assistance to deal with the infant mortality question and the limitation of malaria and other infectious and contagious diseases ?
At the present time the condition of Turkey is a danger to herself, to Europe and to the Near East. Can we not make a change in European politics by offering assistance before the conditions have got to the stage of crisis ? A kind of intervention if you like, but a disinterested inter- - vention, aiming at the safety of a nation as well as at stability and security in the Near East.
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