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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–November 10, 1938), Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and anti-imperialist statesman, was the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey.

Early career

Atatürk was born in the city of Thessaloníki (Turkish: Selânik) in Northern Greece, where his birthplace is commemorated by a museum at the present day Turkish Consulate. In accordance with the then prevalent Turkish custom, he was given the single name Mustafa. His father, Ali Rıza (Efendi), was a customs officer who died when Mustafa was a child. His mother's name was Zübeyde (Hanım).

Mustafa studied at the military secondary school in Selânik, where the additional name Kamaal ("perfection") was bestowed on him by his mathematics teacher in recognition of his academic brilliance. As 'Mustafa Kamaal' he entered the military academy at Manastır (now Bitola) in 1895. He graduated as a lieutenant in 1905 and was posted to Damascus. He soon joined a secret society of reform-minded officers called Vatan (Fatherland), and became an active opponent of the Ottoman regime. In 1907 he was posted to Selânik and joined the Committee of Union and Progress commonly known as the Young Turks.

The Young Turks seized power from the Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908, and Mustafa Kamaal became a senior military figure. In 1911, he went to the province of Libya to take part in the defence against the Italian invasion. During the first part of the Balkan Wars Mustafa was stranded in Libya and unable to take part, but in July 1913 he returned to Istanbul and was appointed commander of the Ottoman defences of the Gallipoli area on the coast of Thrace. In 1914 he was appointed military attache in Sofia, partly to remove him from the capital and its political intrigues.

War commander

When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany, Mustafa Kamaal was posted to Rodosto (now Tekirdag) on the Sea of Marmara. He commanded a division in the Gallipoli area, and he played a critical role in the battle against the invading allied forces during the Gallipoli landings by British, French and ANZAC forces in April 1915. Here he made his name as a brilliant military commander by defending Chunuk Bair and the Anafarta hills, becoming a national hero and acquiring the title of pasha (he would later outlaw all titles of nobility).

During 1917 and 1918 Kamaal Pasha was sent to the Caucasus front fighting the Russian forces with some success, and then to the Hejaz, where the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule was in progress. He became increasingly critical of the incompetent conduct of the war by the Sultan's government, and also of increasing German domination of the Empire. He resigned his command, but eventually agreed to return to serve in the unsuccessful defense of Palestine.

In October 1918 the Ottomans capitulated to the Allies, and Kamaal Pasha became one of the leaders of the party which favoured a policy of defending the Turkish-speaking heartlands of the Empire, while agreeing to withdraw from all the non-Turkish territories. Turkish nationalist sentiment was aroused by the Greek occupation of Izmir (Smyrna) in May 1919, in accordance with the Treaty of Sèvres (this Treaty was signed by the Sultan under Allied duress but never ratified by the Ottoman parliament).

Political consolidation

The government sent Kemal Pasha to Samsun in North-Central Anatolia to take command of the nineteenth Army, a formation which, in accordance with the restrictions placed on the empire by the Allies in the Treaty of Sèvres, was supposed to be disbanded. This was meant to be an insult to Kemal, who, being a nationalist, was an enemy of Sultan Mehmed VI's capitulatory government. He then turned the tables and seized the opportunity to free Turkey from Allied occupation. In June 1919, on orders, he left the capital, Istanbul, and founded a Turkish nationalist movement in Samsun, but the movement would soon be based in Ankara. In April 1920, a provisional Parliament, the Grand National Assembly, was formed in Ankara, offering Kemal Pasha the title 'President of the National Assembly'. This body repudiated the Sultan's government in Istanbul and refused to recognize the Treaty of Sèvres.

The Greeks understood the threat posed to their position on the Aegean coast by the rapid consolidation of Kemal Pasha's forces in central Anatolia and advanced inland to meet them. Conflict between the two armies was inconclusive, but the nationalist cause was strengthened the next year with a series of brilliant victories. Twice (in January and again in April) Ismet Pasha defeated the Greek army at İnönü, blocking its advance into the interior of Anatolia. In July, in the face of a third offensive, the Turkish forces fell back in good order to the Sakarya river, eighty kilometers from Ankara, where Atatürk took personal command and decisively defeated the Greeks in a twenty day battle.

In the meanwhile, Kemal Pasha signed the Treaty of Kars (October 23, 1921) with the Soviet Union, a treaty of friendship in which Turkey ceded the city of Batumi to Lenin's Bolsheviks in return for sovereignty over the cities of Kars and Ardahan.

Kemal Pasha's victory in the War of Independence retrieved Turkey's sovereignty. The Treaty of Lausanne superseded the Treaty of Sèvres and Turkey recovered all of Anatolia and eastern Thrace from the Greeks.

Kemal Pasha spent the next several years consolidating his control over Turkey and instituting a variety of wide-ranging political, economic and social reforms. Although he claimed to be fostering a democracy, many of those who opposed his policies were exiled or dismissed from their posts. He also ensured that the Turkish political process remained firmly under his personal control, with little or no dissent from his own goals and policies.

In March of 1925, Mustafa Kemal pushed through the Maintenance of Order Law, which allowed the government to shut down organizations which it deemed to be subversive. This law was immediately applied to the Progressive Republican Party, the main political party opposing Kemal's reforms. Unsurprisingly, he won the next election.

Cultural reform

Mustafa Kemal regarded the fez (which Sultan Mahmud II had originally introduced to the Ottoman Empires dress code in 1826) as a symbol of feudalism and banned it, encouraging Turkish men to wear European attire. The hijab (veil) for women, while never formally banned, was strongly discouraged; and women were encouraged to wear western apparel and enter the country's workforce. From 1926, the Islamic calendar was replaced with the Gregorian calendar. In 1928 the government decreed that the Arabic script be replaced by a modified Latin alphabet, and citizens between the ages of six and forty were required to attend school and learn the new alphabet. The conservative clergy fiercely opposed these reforms, trying in vain to maintain its traditionally strong influence. As a result of the reforms literacy increased dramatically. The reforms also included extensive removal of Arabic and Persian words from the Turkish language.

Mustafa Kemal opened new schools, where, as part of the curriculum, fine arts were taught to boys as well as girls. Girls had been traditionally excluded entirely from education, but now a universal system of education was introduced for children of both sexes. He also lifted the Islamic ban on alcoholic beverages: Mustafa Kemal had an appreciation for the national liquor, rakı, and consumed vast quantities of it. In 1934 he promulgated a law requiring all Turks to adopt surnames. The Grand National Assembly gave him the deferential name Atatürk, meaning "father of Turks," and assumption of that name by other men is still forbidden by law.

Seeking to limit the influence of Islam on Turkish political and cultural institutions, which he regarded as one of the principal causes impeding Turkish development, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the 1300-year-old Islamic caliphate on 3 March 1924 and established a western-style separation of church and state ("mosque" and state) in Turkey. While promoting a secular Turkish state, Atatürk maintained the traditional Ottoman tolerance of religious diversity and freedoms, but viewed these freedoms in the western Enlightenment sense of freedom of conscience. For himself, Atatürk rejected religion and prized science and rationalism as the basis of morality and philosophy.

He was briefly married to Latife Uşaklıgil between 1923 and 1925.

Legacy

Atatürk died in 1938 of cirrhosis, a probable consequence of his strenuous lifestyle and heavy drinking for many years.

His successor, İsmet İnönü, fostered a posthumous Atatürk personality cult which has survived to this day, even after Atatürk's own Republican People's Party lost power following democratic elections in 1946. Atatürk's face and name are seen and heard everywhere in Turkey: his portrait can be seen in all public buildings, on all Turkish banknotes, and even in the homes of many Turkish families. Giant Atatürk statues loom over Istanbul and other Turkish cities. He is commemorated by many memorials all over Turkey, like the Atatürk International Airport in Istanbul and the Atatürk Bridge over the Golden Horn.

Few countries have been as genuinely and permanently changed by a single ruler as Turkey was by Atatürk. His reforms proved more lasting than the revolutionary changes of many other regimes. Tentative reforms had been undertaken in the 19th century, principally through the Tanzimat and Mesrutiyet, and they were expanded and finalised by him. He was farsighted enough to create a political system which could adapt to the introduction of pluralistic democracy fairly easily. His secularist and modernising reforms proved permanent to this day, and gave Turkey domestic and international peace and a measure of prosperity even in his lifetime. But Kemalism has also left Turkey with a divided identity — Europeanised but not quite European, alienated from the Islamic world but still a Muslim country.

Atatürk's legacy also survives in the Turkish military, which sees itself as the guardian of Turkish independence, nationalism and secularism.

Women's Right

With abiding faith in the vital importance of women in society, Atatürk launched many reforms to give Turkish women equal rights and opportunities. The new Civil Code, adopted in 1926, abolished polygamy and recognized the equal rights of women in divorce, custody, and inheritance. The entire educational system from the grade school to the university became coeducational. Atatürk greatly admired the support that the national liberation struggle received from women and praised their many contributions: " In Turkish society, women have not lagged behind men in science, scholarship, and culture. Perhaps they have even gone further ahead." He gave women the same opportunities as men, including full political rights. In the mid-1930s, 18 women, among them a villager, were elected to the national parliament. Later, Turkey had the world's first women supreme court justice.

National Liberator

Mustafa Kamaal Pasha emerged as the national liberator of the Turks when the Ottoman Empire, carved up by the Western Powers, was in its death throes. Already a legendary hero of the Dardanelles and other fronts, he became in 1919 the leader of the Turkish emancipation. With a small and ill-equipped army, he repelled the invading enemy forces on the East, on the South, and on the West. He even had to contend with the Sultan's troops and local bands of rebels before he could gain complete control of the Turkish homeland. By September 1922, he had received one of history's most difficult triumphs against internal opposition and powerful external enemies.

The liberator ranks among the world's greatest strategists and holds the rare distinction of having maintained a perfect military record consisting of only victories and no defeats.

As the national struggle ended, the heroic leader proclaimed:" Following the military triumph we accomplished by bayonets, weapons and blood, we shall strive to win victories in such fields as culture, scholarship, science, and economics," adding that " the enduring benefits of victories depend only on the existence of an army of education." It is for his military victories and his cultural and socio-political reforms, which gave Turkey its new life, that the Turkish nation holds Atatürk in gratitude and reverence.

Culture and the Arts

Among the prominent statesmen of the 20th Century few articulated the supreme importance of culture as did Atatürk who stated: " Culture is the foundation of the Turkish Republic." His view of culture encompassed the nation's creative legacy as well as the best values of world civilization. It stressed personal and universal humanism. " Culture," he said, " is a basic element in being a person worthy of humanity," and described Turkey's ideological thrust as " a creation of patriotism blended with a lofty humanist ideal."

To create the best synthesis, Atatürk underlined the need for the utilization of all the viable elements in the national heritage, including the ancient indigenous cultures, and the arts and techniques of the entire world civilization, past and present. He gave impetus to the study of the earlier civilizations of Anatolia - including Hittite, Phrygian, Lydian, and others. Pre-Islamic culture of the Turks became the subject of extensive research which proved that, long before their Seljuk and Ottoman Empires, the Turks had already created a civilization of their own. Atatürk also stressed the folk arts of the countryside as the wellspring of Turkish creativity.

The visual and plastic arts (whose development had been arrested by some bigoted Ottoman officials who claimed that the depiction of the human form was idolatry) flourished during Atatürk's Presidency. Many museums were opened. Architecture gained new vigor. Classical Western music, opera and ballet as well as the theater took impressive strides. Several hundred "People's Houses" and the " People's Rooms" all over Turkey gave local people and youngsters a wide variety of artistic activities, sports, and other cultural affairs. Book and magazine publication enjoyed a boom. Film industry started to grow. In all walks of cultural life, Atatürk's inspiration created an upsurge.

Atatürk's Turkey is living proof of this ideal - a country rich in its own national culture, open to the heritage of world civilization, and at home in the endowments of the modern technological age.

Criticism

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Despite his successes, Atatürk remains a controversial figure, and is generally disliked by devout Muslims and Kurds. Many Muslims feel his reforms were motivated more by a hatred for Islam than a desire to modernize Turkey. Some of his reforms that sought to limit the role of Islam in Turkish society were criticized as attempts to suppress religious freedom and interfere with religious institutions rather than secularize Turkish society. He outlawed the wearing of "religious attire" in public and, as head of the army, forbade military officers from praying. His decree commanding mosques to air the Muslim call to prayer and recite the Quran in Turkish only rather than the traditional Arabic were fiercely opposed by Islamic leaders, to the extent that they simply could not be implemented. Laws prohibiting Muslim women from wearing headscraves in government buildings (including schools) have been widely protested by women in Turkey and drawn the ire of human rights groups and civil liberties organizations.

Many Kurds accuse Atatürk of seeking to destroy their identity by forcing Turkish nationalism upon them. Atatürk initially enlisted the help of the Kurds during the War of Independence through vague promises of self-determination, but reasserted control over Anatolia's Kurdish areas after the republic's founding. He sent Turkish administrators to govern the region and banned Kurdish language media and education. Kurdish towns were renamed, and Kurds were prevented from reciting traditional Kurdish songs or poetry. Subsequent uprisings were crushed; Kurdish uprising leaders were arrested and/or executed. Since then, Turkey has kept an iron grip over its Kurdish areas, resulting in an often tense relationship between Ankara and its Kurdish subjects. Kurdish language education and media in the largely Kurdish southeast have only recently been allowed after having been banned for nearly 80 years. The government has encouraged Kurdish migration to western Turkey, a policy many claim is motivated by a desire to dilute and disperse the Kurdish population.

See also

• Atatürk's reforms

External links

• Ataturk.net, a website dedicated to Atatürk
• His biography and reforms
• Quotes of and quotes on Atatürk
• Atatürk Gallery by the Ministry of Culture, Republic of Turkey
• Biography, the Revolutions and a speech excerpt from the Ministry of Culture, Republic of Turkey
• Atatürk: The Biography of the founder of Modern Turkey, by Andrew Mango ISBN 158567334X

• 1881 births
• 1938 deaths
• World War I people
• Pashas
• Presidents of Turkey
• Turkish military people
• Field Marshals
• Prime ministers of Turkey