ABSTRACT
The revolution of the Turkish armed forces of May 27th is not like other revolutions in Middle Eastern countries. In those countries the object of the revolutions was to establish dictatorships. The revolution committee had no long-term plan when it over-threw Menderes’ government; it wanted, as Captain Numan Esin stated, ‘to put the government into clean hands’. The revolution of May 27th was not carried out by excited nationalists or anti-imperialist madmen, but by coolly calculating members of the general staff who wanted to remove all the abuses of the former régime and lead the country back to the road of Kemalism once and for all. A member of the Revolutionary Committee claimed that after the revolt the authorities recovered more than 300,000 fire-arms, among them machine-guns, that had been illegally distributed to the Democratic Party’s hatchet-men.
