Ataturk: The Man Who Made Modern Turkey

by Read Listen Learn

Every year on 10th November at five past nine in the morning, people in Turkey stop what they are doing and stand still for a minute or two to honour the founder of the Republic Of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

He died more than seventy-five years ago, but his name and his thoughts still have great importance there. Every school and government office has his picture in it; every banknote shows his face; and what he would think of new political developments (if he were still alive) is part and parcel of modern discussion. It is illegal to speak badly of him or to draw a moustache or glasses on his picture. Every city – every village, in fact – has a street or a school named after him. So, why does this man’s memory live on every day so many years after his death?

To answer this question, we need to understand what Turkey was like before he founded the Republic in 1923. In the first place, it was the centre of the Ottoman Empire, which had been “the sick man of Europe” for a century and had been getting smaller and less powerful for nearly three hundred years. But when Mustafa Kemal was in the Army, it was on the point of death. There had been a revolution in 1908 when the Young Turks, a group of reformers, tried to change the system from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one.

Mustafa Kemal, at that time based in Damascus, Syria, was for a short time part of this group. In 1910, he was in Albania, where Isa Boletini was fighting for independence from the Ottomans. In 1911, he was in Libya, where, with 20,000 men, he was trying – at times, very successfully – to defend this Ottoman colony from 150,000 invading Italian troops. But he had to retreat, as he was needed in the Balkans to take back Edirne – still part of modern Turkey – which a foreign army had attacked and occupied.

The Ottoman Empire was in these difficulties because it refused to modernise and many of its sultans had been poor governors. Turkey’s decision to join the First World War in 1914 on the side of Germany and Austro-Hungary was the last straw. Mustafa Kemal’s defence of Gallipoli (Gelibolu in Turkish) was one of the few victories the Ottomans had, although he also beat the Russians and took the towns Bitlis and Mus back from them.

Mustafa Kemal’s army killed tens of thousands of New Zealanders and Australians as they were trying to invade, but it was characteristic of him that he sent a message to the mothers of these foreign dead to say that when their sons had died and been buried next to Turkish boys, they had become part of the Turkish family and would be well - looked after in death.

Anyway, by 1918, the Ottoman Empire was dead too and the winning side was going to divide Turkey between them. Mustafa Kemal, who had a fine reputation as a successful soldier, refused to accept this. He fought the War of Independence to keep all the land where people naturally spoke Turkish as one country under a Turkish government.

This was an extraordinary thing to do: the Turks had fought for four years and lost. Everybody wanted to get on with their lives, return to their homes and farm their land again. Instead, Mustafa Kemal fought the Greeks in the west and the Armenians and Kurds, assisted by British and French money, in the east, until he could make a whole Turkish Republic.

Even then, while he was fighting, there were signs of the leader he would become as President. When the Greeks left Izmir on the west coast burning, they walked over the Turkish flag on their way out. The Turks tried to get Mustafa Kemal to do the same with the Greek flag as he entered the city victorious, but he refused.

The last sultan escaped Istanbul on a British ship when he heard that Mustafa Kemal had won the War of Independence. The path was clear for him to make a new society, a new Turkey. In 1923, he announced the Republic of Turkey and became its first President for life.

In the fifteen years before he died of cirrhosis of the liver, he completely transformed the country. His vision was to create a modern country where religion and government were separate, women had the same rights as men, everyone could get an education and which was at peace at home and abroad.

It is often said that Mustafa Kemal simply copied the West, for instance, by making everyone take a surname. (He chose Atatürk (or Father of the Turks) for himself.) He also encouraged men to wear western clothes and hats and believed that women would stop covering their faces if they had the chance to. (In fact, he made it impossible for women to go inside any government building if they covered their heads.) He introduced western classical music and dancing to Turkey too.

However, although these were extreme changes because they affected people every day of their lives and must have seemed very strange to them, we must not forget that Atatürk lived in nationalist times and that he too was a proud Turk.

It is true that he changed the Turkish alphabet from an Arabic - Persian to a Roman one, but he had very good reasons for this. In 1928, when he made every Turk between the ages of four and forty learn the new letters, there were only 10% of men who could read and fewer women. Two years later, that number had jumped to 70%. As Atatürk argued, the Roman alphabet was not just more suitable to the sounds of Turkish words, it was easier to learn. And we must not forget that if he encouraged some western music and fashion, he also opened many institutes for studying Turkic languages and history. And, of course, he had the Quran translated into Turkish!

Atatürk introduced electricity all over Turkey, reduced the taxes on the poor and for the first time made primary education free and compulsory for all children, but his most surprising success was making women equal citizens to men.

It was clear from the beginning of his Presidency that he wanted women to go out to work and to be more independent of men. For instance, when he abolished the Islamic courts of law and introduced new ones modelled on the Swiss and Italian legal systems, he made it possible for women to divorce men. In 1934, before many European countries, he gave women full political rights and the vote and, the following year, there were eighteen women Members of Parliament – more than in many countries even today!

Atatürk never managed to introduce democracy to Turkey. He attempted it in 1930 but there was fighting in the streets and the opposition party was forced to close. He also executed the heads of the Turkish Communist Party and made an army so strong that it has held three coups d’états (military takeovers), since he died, in the name of secular government.

However, he pulled Turkey from a backward society to the twentieth century in only fifteen years. Atatürk’s was a truly magnificent victory.