Ottawa Citizen - Turkey looks out for Turkey

Op-ed by Desmond Morton, professor emeritus of history at McGill: Canadians have seldom spent much time thinking about Turkey. One of the big players in the Middle East, Turkey has been under-represented in our immigration totals.

What might have been a very close encounter, the Chanak Crisis of 1922, vanished when prime minister Mackenzie King rebuffed British pressure to get involved in a war with Kemal Pasha's Turkish independence movement. Instead, as Kemal Ataturk, he was free to establish modern Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.