Turkey's Merchants

God bless Ahmet Cakmak. The florist from Ankara did what a lot of small businessmen around the world wish they had the guts to do. Thanks to Turkish government policies, Mr. Cakmak's cash register has yielded fewer and fewer Turkish lira to support his family. Mr. Cakmak did not, as some are wont to do, throw it on the ground and stamp upon it, as if it were the agent of his misery. No, he hurled it through the air at the person of Bulent Ecevit, Turkey's veteran prime minister. If you were on Mr. Cakmak's jury, could you find him guilty?

Most Turks seem to admire Cakmak's fighting spirit.

A few days after Cakmak staged his one-man protest, thousands of small shopkeepers and businessmen marched through the old imperial capital, Istanbul, and other cities to demand that Ecevit resign to allow someone else to rescue Turkey from corruption and the International Monetary Fund.

Here is Turkey's IMF package, in the words of historian Norman Stone, the Oxford historian who now teaches at Ankara's Bilkent University: "It involves privatization, a straitjacket on state deficits, perhaps a new tax here and there, all with a view to currency stabilization at last. This program has been tried elsewhere. Unquestionably, it profits some locals, but it can also do great damage?harming small farmers, small traders and the small service-sector people who are the seed-corn of an economy." Although I disagree with Professor Stone on other Turkish issues?his denial of the Turkish massacres of Armenians during World War I and of Kurds over the last 25 years?his analysis of Turkey's economic woes rings true. It will sound familiar to the many small traders and farmers whom the IMF has bankrupted in other countries to turn their businesses and land over, cheap, to the transnational corporations who have bought their politicians.

For Turkey, acceptance of the IMF's loan conditions has led to the usual rising prices, loss of salary value, increased unemployment, bankruptcy and denigration of services to the poor. Professor Stone noted that one of the more hopeful signs for the Turkish economy was the transformation of factories from making boots for soldiers into shoes for civilians. But, as the Washington Post's John Ward Anderson reports, "About 75 percent of the 300,000 workers in the shoe industry have lost their jobs, as have 140,000 textile workers." Add to this the fact that wholesale prices rose by 10 percent last month alone, while gasoline went up 21 percent.

Hardworking people in Turkey?like millions of other traders, workers and farmers have discovered in other colonies of the IMF empire?found themselves without customers or jobs. Good one Ahmet Cakmak! It was he, not the lawyers or bankers, who vented the rage of a nation. So it was that Bulent Ecevit walked out of his prime ministerial offices, no doubt contemplating his next maneuvers to prolong the life of his three-party coalition and to appease the gods of the IMF. Could he have been meditating for a moment that something must be done to stop state banks from granting loans to politicians who do not repay them, when, all of a sudden, he was confronted with that most unwelcome nemesis of politicians and corporate board directors everywhere: a real, and angry, human being?

The sight of Mr. Cakmak's cash register smashing onto the pavement at his feet may have added to his shock. There it was, the symbol of his and the IMF's package: an empty cash register.

The police put Mr. Cakmak in jail for the night, and a court fined him the equivalent of $37. Had Mr. Cakmak gone to prison, he would have joined many thousands of political prisoners protesting the government's treatment of them. Many are on hunger strike, as are some of their families on the outside. So far, and the number may rise before you read this, 19 people have died of self-imposed starvation to compel the government to stop torturing and otherwise mistreating prisoners. Ecevit's plan, which went into effect last December, to move prisoners from Turkey's crumbling penitentiaries, to modern "F-type" prisons has met prisoner resistance. Why? The old prisons had cells for as many as 80 men, while the new ones have private and double rooms on the American model. Something must be wrong for a prisoner not to want a room to himself. While they are together, the prisoners believe they have the protection that, if a guard beats one, there are 99 witnesses. Isolated, they are on their own. Mr. Cakmak may have had in mind the famous slogans with which Moustafa Kemal Ataturk recovered his country's pride: "Happy is the man who can call himself Turk." Happier still, if he can throw off the IMF, replace Ecevit, clean up the prisons and grant peace to his Kurdish fellow citizens.