‘Gentlemen, tomorrow we will declare an independent republic!’, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk announced at a dinner with a group of legislators on October 29, 1923, and after voting the next day, the Turkish parliament adopted the new form of government. And Atatürk was elected as the first president of Turkey.
Long live the Republic! Long live Mustafa Kamal Pasha!’, the legislators shouted these slogans.
However, according to experts, 100 years after the historic announcement that changed the Middle East, Ataturk’s legacy is now in jeopardy.
Atatürk is considered the ‘founder of modern Turkey’ while many also remember him as one of the worst abusers of minorities in the Ottoman Empire. However, despite the conflicting opinions, there is a consensus that Atatürk was one of the most important political figures of the 20th century.
He managed to preside over Turkey for 15 years at a high level of popularity and was trying to determine what would be the country’s new identity after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which was divided by the First World War. I started in the year 1918.
Born in Thessaloniki in 1881, when the Greek city was part of the former Ottoman Empire, Atatürk belonged to a generation of soldiers who were concerned about empire.
The territory of one of Europe’s largest states was shrinking rapidly, while ethnic nationalism and tensions between different religious groups were increasing.
Yucel Yanakdag is a professor of history at the University of Richmond in the United States and an expert on Turkey. “Some soldiers believed that one way to stop or reverse the decline of the Ottoman Empire was to westernize and modernize it,” he told the BBC.
That is, this group of fighters also supported secularism. “It’s not that they didn’t like religion or Islam, but they thought it was somehow slowing down social progress,” he says.
So Atatürk began to modernize his country with a series of reforms that changed Turkey forever.
The first changes allowed Turks to exercise popular sovereignty through democracy. Thanks to the republican revolution, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey announced the establishment of the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923.
Perfection and its six arrows
The main features of the new country were based on the six arrows of perfectionism. The ideology implemented by Atatürk is also called ‘Ataturkism’, which is a symbol of republicanism, populism, nationalism, secularism, statism and reformism.
One of his most important legacies for most historians was the secularization of the country in particular.
Yankdag says that “in the Ottoman Empire, the roots on the basis of ‘race and religion’ were very strong in the empire and they knew that this was one of the reasons for its disintegration.”
Atatürk’s idea was to convince these different ethnic and religious groups to remain part of the Republic of Turkey.
Turkey adopted the Gregorian calendar, a 1926 constitutional amendment decreed the end of the Ottoman Caliphate, and a modified version of the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic alphabet.
Likewise, the ‘founder of modern Turkey’ enacted a new civil code in 1926 that proclaimed gender equality in the country. Then women got the right to vote in 1934, before other countries like Argentina, Colombia, Mexico or Venezuela.
Respectable in Turkey
Atatürk also made Ankara, then a small city of a few thousand inhabitants, a center. It was the new capital of the country, replacing Istanbul in order to place the capital in a more central geographical location.
Kemal Atatürk is seen as a revered figure in the country for several reasons.
“I remember when I was in primary school, I started writing poems in praise of Atatürk,” Turkish writer Neydim Gursel tells English Publisher Mundo.
There is undoubtedly still a large group of people in Turkey influenced by his personality. The legacy of perfectionism is very important not only for Turkey, but for the entire Muslim world, but I think we should also criticize it today.
To transform Turkey, Atatürk and his colleagues thought that dictatorship was the best way to implement all these reforms.
Ali Yasi Oglu, a historian, explains that ‘within a short period of time he became an authoritarian leader and basically eliminated all vestiges of democracy.
“There were some attempts to introduce a democratic semblance in 1932, but overall he was an authoritarian leader.”
Dissemination role
Outside Turkey’s borders, opinion is somewhat more divided about the man who transformed the Eurasian nations.
Atatürk commanded the Turkish army during the Greco-Turkish War from 1919 to 1922, which he won despite being weakened after World War I.
During the so-called Asia Minor War, atrocities were committed on both sides and millions were forced into exile.
Atatürk expelled the Greek army from Anatolia (now Turkey) and also expelled large numbers of ethnic Greeks, in what was later called the ‘population exchange between Greece and Turkey’.
Through this population exchange stipulated in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, approximately 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians, many of whom had never lived outside of Turkey, were expelled from the country.
Opinion about Mustafa Kemal is also divided in Armenia, which was not an independent country until 1922.
The Armenian people claimed that some of their territories were occupied by Turkey and some by the Soviet Union.
Stanford University historian Yasioglu told English Publisher Mundo: “I don’t think Armenians blame Atatürk entirely, but the state he created was seen as a country that ended World War I. I perpetuated the atrocities committed during the Armenian Genocide.’
This is because some people believe that (the Turks) benefited from the fact that millions of people were killed and certainly more than a million were deported. These were the people who participated in the genocide and fought against the Armenians after the war.
The Kurdish question
In Turkey itself, there is an ethnic group that is a follower of Kemalist ideology and feels oppressed in this regard.
After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the government changed the situation of the Kurdish population in Turkey.
The new Kemalist ideology of creating a secular nation under one language, one race, and one culture resulted in oppression of other nations that had a place in the old empire.
Yucel Yankdag of the University of Richmond points out that Kurdish identity was denied because Kemalism required that everyone living in Turkey accept that they were now Turks.
Between 1936 and 1939, the Kurdish population of the southeastern region of Durzum – now known as Tunsili – resisted the Turkish Republic and as a result more than 13,000 Kurds were killed by the Turkish army.
This incident laid the foundation for the Kurdish insurgency that still continues against the Turkish state.
It is a critical event for the country’s nationalists, as the venerable Atatürk was still president of Turkey at the time and his own adopted daughter Sabiha Gökçen – the country’s first female pilot – took part in the attacks.
“Secularization was a relief for some, but for others it meant denying the identity of Kurds and Armenians, Greeks, Chechens, Arabs, etc.,” says Yankdag.
Legacy at risk
According to some experts, part of Atatürk’s legacy and what was built after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, especially the secularization of the country, may be at risk.
In July 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the conversion of Aya Sofia, one of Istanbul’s most famous landmarks, into a mosque.
The Hagia Sophia was originally a basilica and was later converted into a temple in 1453 by order of Sultan Mehmed II, but it was Atatürk who allowed it to be used over the decades.
In 1935, the founder of modern Turkey ordered whether Hagia Sophia should be turned into a museum and forbade the complex to be used as a place of worship of the Christian or Muslim faith.
So the current Turkish president’s decision to allow Muslims to pray in Aya Sofia for the first time in decades is cause for concern.
Historian Ali Yasi Oglu says that ‘Erdoğan has always been careful not to attack Atatürk directly, but at the same time, for some years now, he has tried to undermine the policies and legacy he (Atatürk) left behind. .’
According to him, the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque was a ‘symbolic and very clear step’ in this direction.
A number of churches that had been converted into mosques during the early years of the Ottoman era were converted into museums. In addition to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the same was done with the Church of St. Saviour, in the same city, and in Trabzon.
“Over the past 10 years, Erdogan’s government has slowly started converting all these places into mosques,” says Yasioglu.
“These are actions that point to a general move to reintroduce Islam into public and political life, which has certainly damaged the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.”
Yasıoğlu, like many other experts, believes that Erdogan’s approach is part of a broader policy that includes a certain nostalgia for the Ottoman past and an attempt to restore a miniature version of the empire that Islamism has replaced. have a big role and it is against what Atatürk wanted for the future of his country.