******'s Political Life

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I have been reading Andrew Mango’s biography of Kemal ****** – which has broadened my knowledge of the life of the man who is seen as the father of modern Turkey.

He was born into a lower-middle-class family in Salonica, which is in Greece now but was part of the Ottoman Empire then. Late 19th century Salonica was an ethnically mixed city, with sizeable Jewish, Muslim and Christian populations. Many of the Muslims in that part of the Ottoman Empire were descended from Slav and Albanian converts. Some say this was the case with ******’s family although, as they spoke Turkish at home, they considered themselves to be Turks.

******’s father died young and he entered a military academy where he rose through the ranks. He was associated with the Young Turks (the Committee for Union and Progress) who launched a coup in 1908 which got the Sultan to re-introduce a constitution and hold limited elections to a Parliament. However, the modernising ideas of the Young Turks were strongly resisted and, by the start of the First Balkan War in 1912, they had generally fallen from power and conservatives were back in charge. The loss of the First Balkan War ended the Ottoman Empire’s role as a European power. Kosovo was lost and became part of Serbia. Bosnia formally fell under Austro-Hungarian jurisdiction and Albania became independent. Salonica itself along with the rest of what is now the Greek province of Macedonia became part of the Greek Kingdom.

Some of the Committee for Union and Progress came back to power following the loss of the Balkan War. However, the mistake was then made to join Germany in war with Britain, France and Russia in 1914 when World War One broke out. This war showed the weakness of the Turkish army but they did score one notable victory – at Gallipoli. However, the Turks lost a number of battles with the Russians and also faced tribal revolts in their Arab provinces (many of which had been quite loosely governed anyway and felt semi-detached from the central government in Istanbul).

The war also saw the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from the Armenian minority in the Ottoman Empire. This genocide continues to cause controversy today – with the Turkish state denying it took place.

The war formerly ended in 1918 with the Ottoman Empire a broken force. Allied forces occupied Istanbul and the Sultan was virtually a prisoner of them. Additionally, the Empire’s Arab possessions became League of Nations mandates. Iraq, Jordan and Palestine went to Britain; Syria and Lebanon went to France. Egypt was already nominally independent but a protectorate of Britain. The same could be said of the emirates of the Arabian peninsula. The Saud dynasty – allies of the Allied Powers who had participated in the 1916 Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule – took power in Saudi Arabia.

The Treaty of Sevres, the treaty that the Allied Powers put to the Ottoman Empire after its defeat, would have left a rump Turkey. It was agreed to by the weakened government of the Sultan but, by that stage, a nationalist revolt was brewing. ****** was able to become head of this movement. It started from ‘Societies for the Defence of National Rights’ who had sprung up among Muslim Turks to stop Greek or Armenian occupation of areas of Turkey which had had mixed populations.

In the end, the rebels were able to defeat forces loyal to the Sultan and were able to force recognition of the Ankara government by the old regime. This marked the beginning of the end for the centuries-old Ottoman dynasty.

The Treaty of Lausanne ended the ‘capitulations’ and ‘unequal treaties’ that the Ottoman Empire had formerly entered into with European powers. It also returned some territory to Turkey that had been given away by the Treaty of Sevres.

The reasons why the Allies who had been able to defeat Turkey in 1914-18 were willing to agree to a reversal of some of their gains is a matter of debate. I suspect that the French and British governments were somewhat war-weary and had no intention of fighting Turkey to help Greece hold on to areas of western Turkey with Christian minorities. Additionally, ****** was able to make a separate deal with communist Russia. This avoided having to fight the full range of former Allies. It also enabled the defeat of the Armenian nationalists – as both the Bolsheviks and the Turkish nationalist forces were able to attack and invade territory claimed by the short-lived independent Armenian state.

The Western Allies were keen to have peace and were keen not to antagonise both Turkey and Russia simultaneously. This was one reason for the deal. While intervening in the Russian Civil War, the West did not also want to be fighting Turkish nationalists.

Interestingly, ****** had a two-faced attitude to communists. He repressed Turkish communists but was normally on generally good terms with the USSR.

The period after the end of World War One saw the end of the multi-ethnic nature of much of the Near East. Greek minorities were expelled from Turkey and Turkish minorities were expelled from Greece. ******’s own birth place of Salonica lost its Muslim minority – which was around 30% of the city’s population in 1893. The Jewish community in Salonica – which had been more populous than the Greek community in the city itself in the late 19th century – continued to live in the city after WW1 but were destroyed by the Holocaust.

****** shared the ideas of the Young Turks (the Committee for Union and Progress) and had been a (fairly junior) figure in their hierarchy. After he came to power, he formed a People’s Party (later known as the Republican People’s Party) that – at the beginning – was just one party among several in the Grand National Assembly. But, it soon became a single-party state. A brief attempt to create a ‘loyal Opposition’ in the 1930s faultered when ****** felt that too many religious reactionaries were joining the Opposition party (eventhough it was as secular as the Republican People’s Party and led by one of his friends).

Interestingly, much of the CUP’s nationalism in the pre-WW1 period had consisted of trying to maintain the Ottoman Empire. It was Ottoman nationalism rather than Turkish nationalism that was in the minds of many prior to 1914. However, with the Arab Revolt of 1916-8 as well as with the loss of the European parts of the Empire, the nationalism became more ‘Turkish’ and less ‘Ottoman’. The loss of the Arab possessions of the Empire had been accepted, though, as irreversible by Attaturk after the end of WW1. He did, however, want to keep hold of the Kurdish parts of the Empire. In the 1918-20 period, while he was struggling for power against the old government and against the Allied occupying armies (there was not much fighting with the British, French or Italians – the only significant battles were against the Greeks and Armenians), he was aiming at a new state inhabited by all the non-Arab Muslims of the Ottoman Empire.

To mobilise a population that was still largely religious, the idea of a state for the non-Arab Muslims of the Ottoman Empire (i.e. Turks, Kurds and Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Caucuses) was the doctrine that the Ankara government was putting about while it was challenging the old government in Istanbul. They wanted, for example, if possible, to keep hold of Mosul Province (which is now the Kurdish region of northern Iraq) rather than it going to the British Mandate of Iraq.

At this stage, Kurdish nationalism was not a strong force, since national consciousness had yet to develop among many Kurds. As such, there was no notable movement for a united Kurdistan consisting of northern Iraq and south-east Turkey at this point in time. The Kurdish-majority areas thus remained divided between Iraq and Turkey after the Treaty of Lausanne.

It is only after the end of the ‘War of Independence’ in 1922 that the state became ‘Turkish’. It is the measures of the government after 1922 and especially from the 1930s onwards that attempted to assimilate the Kurdish population into a state that was presented as the nation-state of the Turks.

With regard to secularism, Mango maintains that ****** had always been secular-minded. However, realising the religious beliefs of the people, the process of secularising Turkey did not begin until his government had complete power from 1923 onwards and when there was no longer a separate Sultan’s government for opposition to rally around. He recognised that difficulties that previous reformers had had in the 19th century and that the Young Turks had had from 1908-11 (and during WW1). As such, he took a ‘softly softly’ approach initially.

He abolished the post of the Sultan first – and became the first President of the Republic. The spiritual role of the Sultan – as the Caliph – was only abolished later. It was once the RPP had become the ruling party in a single-party state that he started with further secularising policies – since he feared that otherwise religious opponents would flock to an opposition party.

A secular code of personal and family law was brought in – to complement earlier, secularising, criminal codes. He also cracked down on religious foundations and on the wearing of religious dress outside of places of worship.

Over the whole course of his rule (until his death in 1938) he carried out a number of measures that reformers of an earlier era could only have dreamed of. But he did so in a dictatorial manner. He abolished the wearing of the fez and the hijab by civil servants. He changed the alphabet to Roman script from Arabic script. He changed the calendar to the Gregorian one. He mandated that all people have surnames. Such measures shaped modern Turkish society and form the framework of its politics to this day.

The question might be asked – why was there not more opposition to his measures? I am not sure of the answer. Mango mentions that there were revolts. But these revolts lacked leadership. Many also took place in the remote Kurdish areas of the country and so were unable to spread. Also, ****** had enormous credibility for being the ‘winner’ of the War of Independence and having safeguarded as much of Turkey as possible from the Allies. Additionally, to some degree the old regime could be blamed for the loss of WW1, as such the association of the conservative old ways with defeat and humiliation enabled conservative resistance to be pushed away more easily than had been the case before WW1.

****** strikes me as – in many ways – someone who followed policies that were modernising and who aimed for enlightenment. He was, in a sense, a Turkish equivalent of the French Revolutionaries who aimed to sweep away superstitions and old habits from society. He wanted Turkey to enter the modern scientific and industrial age on a par with the powerful nations of the West. As such, there is much to admire about him. But it can not be denied that he did so in a dictatorial fashion. His own lack of respect for democracy and for opposition parties has carried over into the modern Turkish army. Post-1950, when the RPP first lost power in a free election, the army has intervened in politics a number of times. Additionally, the ‘Turkification’ policies that he followed have alienated the Kurdish minority. As someone who fought hard for Turkish sovereignty and Turkish national rights – ****** seemed to have a blind spot as far as Kurdish national rights were concerned. This was perhaps not seen as a major issue in the 1920s, but it has become one since.[

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