Economics
The Ankara demonstrators were not workers proper—nor members of the union which or- ganised them. They were migratory workers— peasants who come into Ankara from a wide area around in the spring, when the building season opens, to get temporary employment. That is, it was really less a question of industrial unemployment than of agricultural underem- ployment. Turkey, unlike Greece, is pre- dominantly rural in its outlook. But an agri-
cultural country cannot be industrialised by any simple method. Even the Soviet Union, after endless suffering and the free use of the machine- gun as an economic weapon, still has an agri- cultural population about as large as its indus- trial one, and intolerably backward in produc- tion and, even more so, in consumption.
As with North Africa, to get Anatolia up to the productive capacity it knew under the Romans would be a splendid achievement. It is easy to say 'irrigation.' But re-afforestation is the real key, and the difficulties are plain in the fact that the Turkish Government's plan for this is a hundred-year one. They have also been discussing the truly revolutionary and beneficial measure of exterminating the goats, ruiners of so many millions of square miles of agricultural land all round the Mediterranean.
Intinu's major speeches as Prime Minister are concerned with the Five-Year Plan, upon which the parties are in essential agreement. It is a reasonable group of industrial and agricultural schemes, with about the maximum national in- vestment compatible with not causing further impoverishment on the way. He recently spoke sensibly about current projects, saying: We have set our rate of development at 7 per cent. and our object is to attain this. Some prominent foreign experts have told us during the talks with them that this goal of a 7 per cent. progress was extremely high. But we, faced with the need to increase our already in- sufficient national resources to the same extent as our population increases, have to be suc- cessful in this plan. . . . The biggest problem in agriculture today—because we have reached the limits of arable lands—is to ensure an increase in the production possibilities per acre by more work, better methods and larger dis- tribution of sowing grain. . . . Livestock rais- ing, which brings in 9,500 million liras per annum today, will be raised to 14,000 million. There are about 1,000 million acres of land in Turkey today under irrigation. This figure will be 6,000 million acres by the end of the five years.
After a reasonable skim through industry and education, he added:
If we accept the national income today to be 50,000 million liras it will mean that 18 per cent. of this money must be put into invest- ments. We can accept only 4 per cent. of this 18 per cent. to be foreign aid. This will mean that we must make economies in our daily life; we must shy away from unnecessary ex- penses and we must pay our taxes.
Sound and sensible maximum aims, anyhow, and the possible snags are clearly enough im- plied. If the poverty of the Turks were even kept in hand at something like its present level, that would be an achievement in a world faced by the population explosion. For, apart from certain special pockets which can certainly be improved, Turkish poverty does not go to the squalid extremes of that in the Arab countries. The lot of the comparatively scattered yeomanry in the Anatolian hill country is not so claustro- phobically unbearable as, for example, that of the fellaheen crammed in the Nile strip.
In the only considerable city, Istanbul, it is true that poverty and wealth face each other rather glaringly—and more literally so than in perhaps any other city in the world; as the higgledly- piggledly alleys of Galata look down over the steep slopes and magnificent waters directly at the coastal palaces of Beylerbey. But, even here, the extremes seem less arrogant than they do in, for example, Rome. And in the countryside the land still in the hands of the big Aghas is to be distributed, while already the free peasant predominates, assisted by the price-fixing and credit schemes and the co-operatives which were such a success in Bulgaria before the ruinous collectivisation. It is not certain that advance must be dependent on the political situation. Yet prudence implies that for the carrying out of these plans, as indeed for the general future of a stable Turkey, every week the coalition lasts is a gain.
Apart from their strategic role; the Turks have usually had a bad press in the West. The Otto- man Empire is thought of as a cultural nullity, destroying a Byzantium which, however deca- dent, was still its superior. When the Sultans reached their own decadence, their empire was a particularly nasty scene of national oppression and autocracy. The new Turkey is recognised not to have the faults of the old. Yet that leaves ,the Turks in most people's eyes as soldier-peasants, descendants of the sturdy and history-less hordes who came out of Central Asia a thousand years ago. Having admired their sturdiness and recog- nised their linguistic alienne,ss and lack of 'cul- tural' impact, we are rather at a loss with them. But the new Turkey—far more than the rather slapdash 'new' and 'experimental' countries like Ghana which attract so much attention—has been in Kemal's time, and is again, the seat of most responsible and significant political moves.
Of course, the present coalition may fail. Indnu, on whom too much depends, may die. And the government's break-up might lead not to a People's Republican minority government, nor to a new coalition between the People's Republicans and the two smaller opposition parties as is sometimes suggested, nor to a regime based on the Justice Party and tolerated by the army, but to the worst possibility— another and more extreme military coup. But enough reserves of political common sense are apparent to suggest that even then the anti- democratic cycle might fairly soon be damped down again and the country given another chance to reach stability. Meanwhile, in any case, Turkey will, of course, remain firmly in the Western Alliance. .
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