Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-10-05
Ho10 the Turk Manages 1t

y
| ~ EPEATEDLY comes the question. how
TN can the Turks, numbering not more
than eight or nine millions, and but
recently emerged from the World Wars
overwhelming defeat, now strike so auda-
cious posture? How can Mustapha
Renal and his Nationalist followers, who
| do not even include. as yet, the Turks In
| Constantinople and its adjacent regions, vir-
tually defy great European powers?
If those powers were united in assertion
Of the principles for which, as spokesman
of Western and of Christian civilization,
they are assumed to stand, there probably
would be no Turkish menace-or II there
were, it would be short-lived. But instead
of unity there is dissonance, not only among
the leading nations but also within them.
While England has frowned and France has
smiled upon the Kemalist advance, there are
in both countries and elsewhere a reaction
airy element that approves and forward
minded element that disapproves the idea OF
re-establishing the Turk in Europe. me
latter as Mr.. Henry Varian succinctly sums
up this aspect of the situation, would
eliminate the Turks as a ruling power ex-
cept in a small way in Asia Minor. and
even there would claim Entente-tribunal
Jurisdiction for Christian minorities;" while
the former would nurse a Turkish empire
with full control of the nine million people
of Asia Minor and civil control of Constan-
tinople as the capital, with possibly Adrian
ople and Thrace." Such an empire, they
argue, would prove, as in the past, buff
fer between the ambitions of Russia on the
one hand and the Greeks and Balkan
countries on the othT, so that at no time
would the Straits be liable to fall into the
hands of q power or powers which could
control or dispute control Of the Med1ter-
ranean and Far East trade"-precisely the
y, soIo fhn inIn IL IN h
sters have chung for hundred years, and
in consequence Of which the Turk has been
free to dupe them all and to massacre as
he would.
The reactionaries now propose to restore
the state of affairs to which the World
War; it was hoped, had put an everlasting
end. They are reinforced at this juncture
by widespread and perhaps not ungrounded
fears of a "holy'' war, which Turkey, or
the Sultan, as head of the Moslem faith,
might instigate. This is a possibility which
needs must be pondered by powers having
colonies in Mohammedan lands, notably in
Africa and West Asia, where Britain and
France both are concerned, and in India,
where the formers stake Is peculiarly haz-
ardous. It is chiefly this that gives the
Turk his present advantage and audacity
Yet he would now hold no such card to play
if the Allies had duly encouraged the
Arabs in the late war and afterwards had
vouchsafed their full rights. Arabian rather
than Turkish leadership of Islam might we'll
have been brought to pass-and with what
simplifying, what saving results for the age
old Near East problem!
But now the best reasonable hope Is that
English liberalism and it's concomitants
elsewhere in Europe may prevent the worst
developments of situation which adequate
forethought, with foreaction, would have
prevented and which world league of
justice rightly supported by America would
have made impossible.