Shirts, Paper, Bottles

Keen, hard Premier General Ismet Pasha sped out from Istanbul to Bakirkoy last week with a slogan ringing in his ears: "Assure the independence of our shirts!" In a normal year Turks turn into shirts and shifts some 50,000,000 yards of cotton sheeting. This they have bought chiefly from Japan, but Dictator Mustafa Kemal is now driving ahead with a Five Year Plan to industrialize Turkey and make her self-sufficient. In this program the building of cotton mills was put first "so that the Turkish people shall no longer wear the imported cotton shirts of economic slavery to the Imperialist Powers." Last week in this defiant spirit General Ismet opened at Bakirkoy the first of several new State cotton mills, a magnificent plant of latest design with 9,000 spindles, 335 looms and a production of 9,500,000 yards of cotton cloth per year.

Machinery for the new plant was entirely supplied by Soviet Russia, Dictator Stalin sending it as a "loan without interest" to Dictator Kemal, to be paid back in Turkish goods in 20 years. In the Turkish Parliament the queer opposition groups, which Dictator Kemal fosters and maintains expressly to blow off steam against himself, have charged that the Five Year Plan is "pure Communism," but Premier Ismet declared last week that Turkey's tariffs have been upped so high that private capitalists, seemingly unafraid, are now building cotton mills behind the tariff walls at such a rate that within one year Turkey will be weaving all her own shirts.

Next day Premier Ismet drove to Izmid, seized a trowel, laid the cornerstone of a paper factory designed to produce 35 tons of newsprint per day, or almost one-half of Turkey's present consumption. "Most of the raw materials," cried General Ismet, "we shall obtain locally, such as wood pulp, kaolin, resin and alum."

Chatting economics excitedly with his gorgeously uniformed military staff, General Ismet then boarded a yacht loaned him by Dictator Kemal, sailed to two likely sites, one on the Bosporus, the other on the Black Sea, where he founded respectively a bottle factory and a semi-coke plant. The ceremonies over, he gave a champagne supper to foreign experts who are coaching Turkey's Plan.

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