Return of the Donkey

Inside the coffin was the body of Lutfi Kirdar, Minister of Health in Turkey's late, deposed regime. Sickly and burdened with 72 years of age, Kirdar had dropped dead fortnight ago while testifying before the court trying ex-Premier Adnan Menderes and other leaders of the regime that Kirdar had once served. Present at the obsequies in Istanbul's Sisli mosque was a menacingly large crowd of 1,500 mourners, many genuinely bereaved but many others expressly come to show defiance of General Cemal Gursel's ruling military junta. To do so, they chose to consider Kirdar a martyr.

Among the defiant was a group of bearded Moslem zealots, who loved Menderes for building 8,000 mosques and hated Gursel for his insistence on keeping religious affairs strictly separate from those of the state. As Kirdar's coffin emerged from the mosque, the zealots seized it. Chanting a dirgelike Moslem prayer, they carried the coffin through the streets toward the cemetery. When Istanbul's military governor appeared, his car was pelted with stones. "Take back the freedom you gave us," the bearded men shrieked. "We don't want it."

Before long, 22 of the coffin snatchers were securely locked up in Istanbul. The incident served as a reminder that Menderes, though currently on trial for his life, and his Democratic Party, though officially banned, still have a following. Gursel's junta, after nine months in power and nearly as many months of hesitation, recently gave all political parties except Communists and Menderes' Democrats the go-ahead to operate freely once again. Eleven new parties materialized, including one made up wholly of army officers forcibly retired by the junta. The scramble for the Democrats' onetime 4,500,000 votes is on.

Strongest of the new groups appears to be the New Turkey Party, led by pro-Western Ekrem Alican, 45. Trained at the London School of Economics, handsomely smooth Alican was a Democrat who broke with Menderes five years ago. He was the junta's Finance Minister until he quit two months back to gather together his New Turks. Alican made up for the lack of a party program by circumspect courting of ex-Democrats. ("Many honest people voted Democratic, and they will be welcomed by us.") But when the party's ten founders applied for permission to dub their new grouping either the New Democratic Party or the Free Democratic Party, they were turned down flatly by the alarmed junta.

With elections to take place no later than Oct. 29, and possibly as early as July, the likeliest prospect is a landslide for the Republicans of old (76) ex-President Ismet Inonu, heir of the late great Kemal Ataturk. In coffeehouses the Turks cheered the return to democracy, happily discussed the merits of the new and old parties over rose-scented glasses of raisin liquor. As Nasreddin Hodja, a popular medieval sage, once declared: "When God wishes to make a man happiest, he causes him to lose his donkey, then find it again."

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