Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/208

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

whose loyalty the Turks had sufficient confidence to enable them to entrust Armenian mail to him for censorship. The Armenian women were being taxed to the point of robbery, and so were their Turkish neighbors. Ghalib Pasha told me that he was treating Turks and Armenians on a basis of scrupulous equality, and I believe that he meant precisely what he said. If there were enough men like Ghalib Pasha in Turkey to fill all the provincial administrations, Turkey would be a model country. But men like Ghalib Pasha are not appointed chiefs of police in highly delicate places like Konia.

Damad Ferid Pasha did not cease his efforts to regain a foothold in Anatolia, after his brief counter-revolution in Konia. With the Greek advance in the spring and summer of 1921, his agents renewed their activities along the coasts. In Smyrna the Greeks welcomed them and in Mersina, the port of Cilicia, the French and Armenians welcomed them. Their work increased with the 1921 Greek offensive, until Nationalist agents boarded the British steamer Palatina at Adalia, discovered Topal Osman and four confederates hidden in a cargo hold, and shot them down. It was a wholly illegal proceeding but it put an end to Ferid's efforts to return to Anatolia. Incidentally, it so embarrassed the Italians who were occupying Adalia under the secret war-time agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, that they evacuated their zone. Technically, they had been hostile to the Turks but actually their hostility was directed to the Greeks in Smyrna. Their departure now afforded the Nationalists their first access to the Mediterranean, and their first representation in the West was soon at Rome.