Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/196

 Hamid Bey, one of the best men available in Angora, was dispatched to Samsun as mayor. Hamid Bey is a Rhodes Turk with up-standing hair, Kaiser-like moustaches, a mouth full of gold and a booming voice, a combination apt to give one meeting him for the first time a sense of having met some new species of wild man, but a further acquaintance with him reveals beneath his surface eccentricities a character of solid integrity and ripe judgment. He had been a governor of provinces and the fact that the post of mayor in Samsun was thought worthy of being filled by an ex-governor may be taken as an indication of Rafet Pasha's anxiety to discover some peaceful solution of the Pontus problem. Osman Agha's terrorism remained as much of a problem at Angora as the Greek terrorism which it sought to overcome, but a solution was finally discovered for it when Osman, having shot down 900 Greeks and Armenians in Marsovan in reprisal for the knifing of 200 Turks by Greek troops at Ismid, marched to Angora to offer himself and his Laz followers to the Army. He entered Angora as the hero of a goaded and angry population and Kemal, after permitting him to enjoy his ovation to the full, incorporated his followers in the Turkish shock troops with whom they were cut to pieces in the Battle of the Sakaria River. Thereafter there were no more Marsovans in the so-called Pontus, but the problem of its Greeks still remained.

There appears to be no doubt that the Pontus program had reached the status of a definite organization determined on independence, an organization which was peculiarly difficult to combat by