How to Deal With the Turks

1920

The Allied military demonstrations in Constantinople will be watched with keen attention, says the St. Louis Star, as it is a test, under extreme circumstances, of the theory that the Turks can best be controlled by leaving their capital in Europe. If the influence of the Allies in Constantinople restrains Turkish outrages in Asia Minor, the principal argument for leaving the Turks in their present capital will be justified. This, however, does not cover the situation.

Renewed outrages against the Armenians, coupled with defiance of the Allied police forces in Asia Minor, call for drastic restriction of Turkish power. The Turks should have no army and no armament. The covenant of the League of Nations provides for supervision by the league of sales of arms and munitions in "countries in which the control of this traffic is necessary in the common interest." Surely, Turkey, judged by its long record of massacres and unjustified wars, is such a country.

The one thought of the Allied powers, in settling with Turkey, should be to put an end, once for all, to the terrible conditions which have prevailed in the Near East since the Ottoman Turks broke out of their own Turnanian home nearly a thousand years ago. The Turks must be made impotent to carry on their policy of slavery and slaughter. The United States, while this problem is being settled, cannot legitimately stand aside and treat it as an affair of Europe. It is a world problem, and our concern.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, March 20, 1920, p. 6.