A TURKISH TOWN EMBRACES MODERNIZATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300026-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: April 16, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

eSTAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300026-3
ARTICLE APPEARED 16 April 1986
ON PAGE
INTERNATIONAL
A Turkish Town Embraces Modernization
By PHILIP REVZIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
CANKIRI, Turkey - The green-domed
Tas Mescit, built by the invading Seljuk
Turks in 1235 A.D., was an early insane
asylum, where music therapy helped peo-
ple adapt to the societal upheaval caused
by assorted maurauding tribes.
Today Cankiri is engulfed in another
kind of upheaval, as Western culture in-
vades. But the Tas Mescit is in ruins.
Today's music therapy is piped through
Sony Wafkmans into the heads of Cankiri's
youth.
At the Beskant Kebab Salon, dinner
conversation stops for the 8 o'clock news
on the giant color television. There is film
of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev,
and scenes of Turkish Prime Minister Tur-
gut Ozal greeting Dutch and Japanese
VIPs in Ankara. "Dallas" and "Falcon
Crest" are hits. Commercials urge Turks
to buy Italian spaghetti and German dish-
washers. Shop signs in town read AEG,
Goodyear, Volvo, Renault.
Cankiri has learned to coexist. As a
black-robed peasant crawls on her knees
gathering -scraps of wood from the side-
walk in the middle of town, a bulldozer
clears a new park. As women in tradi-
tional, brightly colored cotton pants tend
hazelnut trees on a hillside, a crane lifts
the last huge boiler into the new salt refin-
ery.
Open-Door Policy
Like the rest of Turkey, Cankiri is open-
ing up to the outside world and building at
a dizzying pace. Mr. Ozal isn't waiting for
foreign investment levels to match the
praise heaped on him by Western govern-
ments for his free-market policies.
Constantly invoking the ghost of Mus-
tafa Kernel Ataturk, the founder of modern
Turkey whose statue graces the main
street of Cankiri and most other towns,
Mr. Ozal says he wants to complete the
Westernization of Turkey by taking it into
the Common Market. To get ready, he is
pouring billions of government dollars,
mostly borrowed from abroad, into new
sewers, new houses and new factories. By
the end of next year every village in Tur-
key will have electricity and automatic
telephone equipment, a development "un-
imaginable five years ago" boasts Adnan
Kahveci, an aide to Mr. Ozal.
It's a gamble similar to those unsuc-
cessfully tried by countries such as Brazil
and Mexico. But Mr. Ozal swears Turkey
will succeed, because he has opened up the
country to trade and investment, liberal-
ized foreign exchange and banking laws.
and is investing in power plants and other
structural necessities that will eventually
let Turkey make and export more goods.
Right now, the thundering development
all over Turkey is little more than the
brick and mortar manifestation of Tur-
key's $22 billion foreign debt. So far, Tur-
key is current on debt repayments, and
wins praise from the International Mone-
tary Fund and other groups, but each
month it must struggle to find cash. Tur-
kish exports have nearly tripled in five
years to $8 billion last year. but more are
needed to allow Turkey to pay its bills.
The West is pulling for Mr. Ozal. Tur-
key is strategically located, bordering
Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, Iran, Iraq and
Syria. It is a gateway to the Middle East. a
listening post for U.S. intelligence, and a
big recipient of U.S. military aid. The U.S.
wants Turkey economically healthy, politi-
cally stable in an unstable region, and a vi-
able model of how free-market policies can
work in the Third World.
Mr. Ozal wants multinationals to fi-
nance, build, and operate hydroelectric
and nuclear power plants, for example, in
return for a guaranteed market for the
power. This scheme, called the Build, Own
and Operate Model, or Boom, by the
Turks, is described as "a brilliant idea to
get plants built without incurring more
debt" by an American business adviser
here.
Westinghouse Electric Corp., BBC
Brown, Boveri & Co. of Switzerland, and
others are negotiating Boom projects, but
nothing has been signed.
Mr. Ozal is also prodding Turkish busi-
nessmen to invest more in new and bigger
factories, but they complain about the 60%
interest rates at Turkish banks. "Capital is
our biggest problem," says Asaf Guneri,
chairman of Zihni Group, an Istanbul-
based shipping company. "There isn't
any.". Mr. Kahveci, the Ozal aide, retorts
that businessmen should "sell their villas"
and invest more of their profits.
Tough Problems
Turkey's frenetic construction is. all the
more remarkable when compared to the
near-anarchy and 130% inflation of the late
1970s. Mr. Ozal still has problems, includ-
ing a 40% inflation rate, high joblessness,
annual per-capita national income of little
more than $1,000, and a vigorous political
opposition that is 12 percentage points
ahead of him in opinion polls. But even the
opposition supports Mr. Ozal's free-market
approach.
The first results of modernization can
be seen most clearly in places like Cankiri.
Its municipal budget, not untypically, has
increased sixfold in five years to the
equivalent of $4 million a year. Mayor
Mustafa Kale is getting the town ready to
support three times the present 50,000 pop-
ulation by the year 2010. He is building
1,500, houses this year. The post office-tele-
phone center has been refurbished. The
new town library, cultural center and mu-
seum are open. The woolen mill, the flour
mill and the railroad switch factory are ex-
panding.
The biggest thing here is the new rifle
and cannon factory, being built for the mil-
itary with advice from General Dynam-
ics Corp. It will cost $600,000, employ 1,000
workers, and hopes to export some of its
production.
'It's like living on a giant construction
site," says the mayor with satisfaction as
he lights up a Marlboro 100 cigarette.
Isn't it all coming a little too fast? "Not
too fast. Too slow," he says, stubbing out
his cigarette in a gold-trimmed onyx ash-
tray.
The mayor pauses to sign a few papers
bustled in by his secretary. He winces a lit-
tle as he mentions the 12,000 Cankiri resi-
dents who still work in West Germany and
France because there are no jobs for them
here. "We'd like them to be able to come
home."
About 2,000 of these exiles have invested
in the mayor's two pet projects, the salt re-
finery and the woolen mill, both of which
are majority-owned by the city. They are
Cankiri's best hopes for exports, and if the
plants succeed, the mayor will use them to
try to attract foreign investment.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300026-3