Political Biography: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

(b. Salonica, 12 Mar. 1880; d. 10 Nov. 1938) Turkish; President 1923 – 38 The son of a minor Ottoman official, Atatürk attended the War College at Instanbul, from which he graduated in 1905. He helped to found the Fatherland and Freedom Society in 1906 which merged with the Committee of Union and Progress in the following year and spawned the Young Turks Revolution of 1908. Mustafa Kemal gradually became disenchanted with their policies. He conducted a brilliant defence of Gallipoli during the Great War and fought the Allies on various other fronts.Allied intentions to dismember the Ottoman Empire and divide up its Turkish core, formalized in the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, had been opposed from 1919 onwards by Mustafa Kemal and his Turkish nationalist associates in Anatolia. At Erzurum and Sivas the basic Kemalist programme as formulated and issued from Ankara as the National Pact. The pact renounced the empire, but demanded complete independence for all Turkish-speaking territories. It was endorsed by the legal Ottoman parliament and then by the new National Assembly meeting at Ankara, in 1920. The Assembly also deposed the Sultan, promulgated a republican constitution, and proclaimed Mustafa Kemal President. These objectives were secured by the Turkish war of independence against Greece, France, Italy, and Soviet Russia, 1920 – 22.Atatürk ("Father Turk" — the name he adopted in 1935) now embarked on an ambitious and radical programme to turn Turkey from a Muslim polity into a modern state. The Republic was proclaimed in 1923, with Ankara as its capital, Kemal as executive President, and a single political party. An elected Parliament was added by the 1924 constitution. The dominance of Islam in public life was ended when the Caliphate was abolished in 1924; religious orders were disbanded; religious property was seized; religious instruction was curtailed and a secular educational system established; the Islamic legal system was replaced by a European one; and, in 1928, Islam itself was disestablished. The fez and the veil were forbidden, the Latin alphabet was substituted for the Arabic, and, in 1934, women were enfranchised. Ataturk revitalized the economy, created mixed state-private banks, protected domestic industry and, on étatiste Kemalist principles, responsibility for investment and preventing foreign capital entering Turkey was assumed by the state. Atatürk's reforms provoked Kurdish revolts which were ruthlessly suppressed. The Kurdish language was proscribed and Kurdish ethnic identity denied; in the new dispensation, Kurds became "mountain Turks".