Andrew Mango - Ataturk: The Biography of the founder of Modern Turkey

ANDREW MANGO

www.johnmurray.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by John Murray (Publishers)
An Hachette UK Company

Andrew Mango 1999

The right of Andrew Mango to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978-1-84854-618-9
Book ISBN 978-0-7195-6592-2

John Murray (Publishers)
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

www.johnmurray.co.uk

To Mary

Daphne and Benedict

with love

M USTAFA KEMAL ATATRK is one of the most important statesmen of the twentieth century. He established and shaped the Turkish republic, today the strongest state between the Adriatic and China in the broad Eurasian land belt south of Russia and north of the Indian subcontinent. He influenced the history of his countrys neighbours. For peoples ruled by foreigners, he showed a way to national independence in amity with the rest of the world.

Atatrk is usually known today as a radical modernizer and westernizer. The description is true, but not sufficient. He imported Western practices in order to bring his country into parity with the richest countries of the world, most of which were to be found in the West. But his aim was not imitation but participation in a universal civilization, which, like the thinkers of the European Enlightenment, he saw as the onward march of humanity, regardless of religion and the divisions it caused. He believed that the struggle for genuine independence should be waged by each nation for itself in the name of an overarching secular ideal of progress common to all, and therefore leaving no room for antagonism towards the most advanced nations. He was an anti-imperialist only in the sense that his ideal was a universal commonwealth of civilized people. Above all, he was a builder, the greatest nation-builder of modern times.

Atatrks vision was optimistic and humanist. His practice often fell short of it. Moreover, particularly towards the end of his life, his thought was contaminated by doctrines of ethnic and racial superiority current in the contemporary West. Atatrk had, and still has, many opponents in Turkey. Traditional Muslims saw in his ideal of secular progress an idolatrous juggernaut, and believed him to be an imitator of the infidels. For others he was simply an unprincipled dictator. Nationalists in neighbouring countries have other bones to pick with Atatrk. He defeated the Greeks; his generals beat the Armenians; he wrote off the Arabs, while adding to his country a district which Syrian Arabs claim for their own. Kurdish nationalists hold him responsible for the policy of assimilating Kurds within the Turkish nation. All these anti-Turkish nationalists are to be found among Atatrks detractors. Turkish and non-Turkish Marxists had their own critical reservations; but they no longer figure.

The controversy which surrounds Atatrk works to the advantage of the biographer and historian, as it throws up not only new arguments but also new sources of information. In Turkey, where the debate is particularly lively, new books on Atatrk proliferate. The first volume of Atatrks collected writings and a new edition of his private letters appeared just as the manuscript of this book was nearing completion. So did a comprehensive refutation of criticism levelled at Atatrk by Islamist opponents. However, even before these latest works, enough fresh material had accumulated to justify a new biography. This material is almost entirely in Turkish. It consists of memoirs and diaries of Atatrks contemporaries, extracts from his own notebooks and archive, histories of the republic, accounts of specific events, etc. The information these books contain is in the public domain, although many publications are out of print and others are hard to trace. This new biography is based largely on published Turkish sources, which until now have never been adequately checked, compared and collated.

I apologize to non-Turkish readers for the paucity of books in English and other European languages in my bibliography. The fact is that Mustafa Kemal was largely unknown in the West until 1919 when he assumed the leadership of the Turkish nationalist movement. Later, foreigners met him for official purposes, but none had privileged access to him. Western scholars who have written about him have relied, as I have done, on published Turkish sources: these I have usually cited direct.

My reliance on Turkish material, and the fact that Atatrk is a figure of Turkish history first and of world history second, have led me to adopt the modern Turkish phonetic spelling for proper nouns. One exception is Istanbul, where it would have been pedantic to dot the capital I, as Turkish spelling requires; nonetheless I have retained it for all other place names, such as zmir (Smyrna), zmit (Nicomedia), znik (Nicaea), etc. Total consistency is impossible, first because modern Turkish spelling has not yet achieved it, and second because some of the Turks mentioned in this book spelled their names according to different conventions. On occasion I have modernized their spelling, changing, for example, Khalide Edib to Halide Edip. For some places which were once under Ottoman rule I give the modern Turkish spelling, followed in brackets by their current name, e.g. Yanya (Ioannina, later Yanina in Greek Epirus). For others, I use the traditional English spelling: Salonica, Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, etc. Surnames were introduced by law in Turkey in 1934. For the earlier period I give the forenames of Turks mentioned in the narrative and then in brackets the surname which they later adopted, e.g. Ali Fuat (Cebesoy), Falih Rfk (Atay), etc. With regard to Atatrk himself, I am not entirely consistent. In general, I call him Mustafa and then Mustafa Kemal before 1934, but occasionally the surname Atatrk slips in before he adopted it officially in 1934.

I have written this biography in London, drawing mainly on books diligently assembled for me by Ahmet Yksel of Sanat Kitabevi, the prince of antiquarian booksellers in Ankara. I could not have done it without his help. As my work progressed, I discussed it with many friends on my frequent visits to Turkey. I am grateful to them all, particularly to Professor Sina Akin, Dr ahin Alpay (who alerted me to some interesting material in the American press), akir Eczacba (who sent me a photocopy of an article in the US magazine The Caucasus ), Professor Selim lkin (who has kept me supplied with Turkish press cuttings and other material on Atatrk), Altemur Kl (whose father was one of Atatrks closest friends), Professor Emre Kongar (who gave me the photograph albums published by the Turkish Ministry of Culture, of which he was permanent under-secretary), Professor Baskn Oran, Ambassador Mfit zde (a descendant of a personal friend of Atatrk), Professor Azmi Ssl (who heads the Atatrk research centre in Ankara) and Professor Mete Tuncay. I owe a double debt of gratitude to my friend Professor Metin And, for his hospitality during my visits to Turkey and his encouragement and advice throughout. I thank my friends Canan and Peter Reeves for reading and commenting on two draft chapters, and for their hospitality in Istanbul and Bodrum. I am grateful to the military history department (ATASE) of the Turkish General Staff for arranging for me an escorted tour of the Anatolian battlefields of the Turkish War of Independence.