Die Türkei 1960

This volume is an interesting period-piece. Karl Hartl was Austrian ambassador in Turkey at a tense time, around the military coup of 1960, and his despatches to Vienna are acute and readable. Until the coup, Turkey had had an excellent reputation in the West: progressive and reforming, democratic, reliable as regards NATO. She put in for association with the European Economic Community in 1959, but the vaguely religious pre-coup government also had solid relations with Pakistan, lining up in a British-inspired Baghdad Pact. But there were tensions all along, and they burst out when the military took over on 27 May 1960. In 1961 Turkey’s reputation took a considerable dip, when the former Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, was hanged, despite pleas for clemency from President Eisenhower, the Pope, and Queen Elizabeth II—who was particularly grateful to him for help in solving the Cyprus problem. For good measure the military hanged the foreign minister and even the finance minister—in this case as a substitute for the former President, who (at seventy-five) was judged too old for hanging, and was given a life sentence (he was released quite soon, and died at 103). One of the crimes for which these men were sentenced was that they had organised the famous pogrom of 1955 which drove the Greeks out of Istanbul. Strangely enough, the Greek Patriarch was a witness for the defence, though Hartl misses this

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