Atatürk and the Turkish Nation
Istanbul Ataturk returned at the end of the war, his military reputation by the defeat of the empire that he had served untroubled. Revered by his troops and the Turkish masses, Atatürk soon proved to be the standard bearer of the Turkish nationalist movement.
Born in Thessaloniki in 1881, Ataturk was the son of a small government officials in a city where Turks outnumbered Greeks. His ardent Turkish nationalism from his early days as a cadet in military school in Monastir (today in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia dated) during a time of constant conflict between Ottoman troops and Macedonian guerrillas who attacked the Turkish population in the region. After completion of the military academy in Istanbul, Atatürk held various staff positions and served in garrisons at Damascus and Thessaloniki, where he was in nationalist activities. He assumed that the coup Abdul Hamid II forced to abdicate in 1909. Atatürk organized irregular forces in Libya during the war with Italy in 1911 and subsequently held field commands in the two Balkan wars (1912-13). Assigned to a post in the Ministry of War after the armistice, Atatürk quickly realized the extent of Allied intentions toward the Ottoman Empire.
Plans for the partitioning of Turkey
Allied troops – British, Italian and French, and a contingent of Greeks – occupied Istanbul and were permitted under the terms of the armistice, in areas where they intervene when their interests to be jeopardized. During the war the Allies had a series of agreements, which described not only the definitive dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, but also negotiating the partitioning among them of what Turkish nationalists had come to be regarded as the Turkish homeland. Under those agreements, Russia was finally rewarded with the possession of Istanbul and the Straits, as well as eastern Anatolia as far south as Bitlis below Lake Van.France and Italy have been granted to parts of Anatolia, and Britain had promised to Izmir to Greece – although he had been promised to Italy – to promote the Greek entry into the war in 1917.
The Bolshevik government had renounced tsarist claims when their separate peace of Brest-Litovsk, but Britain, France, Italy, Greece and all their respective claims at the Paris peace talks, expressed in 1919. All were in agreement with the provisions require the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan. As the Allies would provide for the clause that the Turkish-speaking nation “should implement a secure sovereignty guarantee” was not clear.
The conditions for a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire were presented by the Allies in April 1920 in San Remo, Italy, and were in the Treaty of Sèvres, which was closed the following August embodies. The contract was influenced by the agreements of the war made by the Allies. In addition, France received a mandate over Lebanon and Syria (including what is now Hatay province in Turkey) and Britain’s mandate covered Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. Eastern Thrace to a line from the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea, Izmir and its hinterland were to be occupied by Greece, with the final disposition of the territory to be decided in a referendum. The Treaty of Sèvres was never as such, as events in Turkey soon made it enforced irrelevant.
Nationalist Movement
The sultan was kept in the custody of the Allies, to include cooperation in the Ottoman administration, an effective jurisdiction only in Istanbul and part of northern Anatolia was to ensure, as she removed the rest of his empire. At the same time a Turkish nationalist movement led by Ataturk was organized to resist the dismemberment of the Turkish language.Atatürk had been sent to eastern Anatolia as inspector general, said to monitor the demobilization of Ottoman forces and the disposition of supplies, but mainly to remove him from the capital, after resistance to the Allied occupation authorities put it. On his arrival in Samsun May 1919, Atatürk went to gain support for the nationalist cause and to recruit a nationalist army. Guerrilla war against the government gradually to full-fledged campaign against the Greek army, which threatened to be involved in the other allied occupation troops.
advocate in July 1919, a Nationalist Congress in Erzurum with Atatürk presiding appeal to a protocol for an independent Turkish state meets. In September the congress reconvened at Sivas. Although the delegates voiced their loyalty to the Sultan-Caliph, they also pledged to maintain the integrity of the Turkish people. Congress passed the National Pact, the objectives of the nationalist movement that no compromises were defined open. Among the provisions were the renunciation of claims to the Arab provinces, the principle of absolute integrity of all remaining Ottoman territory by a Turkish Muslim majority, a guarantee of the rights of minorities are inhabited, the retention of Istanbul and the straits, and rejection of any restriction on the political, legal and financial rights of the nation.
Negotiations between the Nationalist Congress and the Ottoman government, but without success. Ataturk emerged from the army, relieved as his office. The appointment of a Chief Minister in Istanbul brought as sympathetic to the nationalist cause only a brief improvement in relations, however, and the Ottoman Parliament, which met in January 1920, has the National Pact. In response to these developments, Allied occupation forces seized public buildings and reinforced their position in the capital, arrested and deported numerous nationalist leaders, and the Parliament had rejected.
Allied actions brought a quick reaction from the nationalists. In April they convened the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, was elected in defiance of the Ottoman regime and its President Atatürk. The law of fundamental Organization (also known as the Organic Law) was adopted in January 1921st With this scheme, the nationalists proclaimed that sovereignty belonged to the nation and was exercised in the name of the Grand National Assembly.
War of Independence
In summer and autumn of 1919, with the permission of the Supreme Allied Council, the Greeks occupied Edirne, Bursa, Izmir and. A landing was made recorded on a port under the protection of an allied naval warships, the United States. The Greeks soon moved as far as Usak, 175 kilometers inland from Izmir. Military action between Turks and Greeks in Anatolia in 1920 was inconclusive, but the nationalist cause was strengthened in the coming years through a series of important victories. In January and again in April, Ismet Pasha, the Greek army at Inönü, blocking its advance defeated in the interior of Anatolia. In July, in the face of a third offensive, the Turkish forces fell back in good order to the Sakarya River, eighty kilometers from Ankara, where Atatürk took personal command and decisively defeated the Greeks in a twenty-day battle.
An improvement of the diplomatic situation of Turkey, accompanied by his military success.Impressed by the viability of the nationalist forces of France and Italy moved from Anatolia to October 1921st Contracts were signed to recognize this year with the Soviet Union to the first European power to nationalists, on the border between the two countries. In 1919, the Turkish nationalists had cooperated with the Bolshevik government in attacking the newly proclaimed Republic of Armenia. Armenian resistance was broken by the summer of 1921, and the Kars region was occupied by the Turks. In 1922 the nationalists recognized the Soviet absorption of what remained of the Armenian state.
The last drive against the Greeks began in August 1922nd In September the Turks moved into Izmir, where thousands followed during the subsequent fighting killed and in the disorder that capture the city. Greek soldiers and refugees who had crowded into Izmir, were rescued by Allied ships.
The nationalist army then on the journey remaining Greek troops from the eastern Thrace concentrated, but the new campaign threatened the Turks in direct confrontation with Allied contingents defending access to the straits and holding Istanbul, where they were protecting the Ottoman government made. A crisis was averted when Atatürk proposed a British-ceasefire that brought an end to the fighting and also signaled that the Allies were adopted not prepared to intervene on behalf of the Greeks. completed in accordance with the Armistice of Mundanya, in October, Greek troops moved beyond the Maritsa River, allowing the Turkish nationalists to occupy territory up to this limit. The agreement involved the adoption of a continued Allied presence in the streets and in Istanbul, could be reached until a comprehensive settlement.
At the end of October 1922 the Allies invited the nationalist and Ottoman governments to a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, but Ataturk was determined that the nationalist government of Turkey should be the only representative. abolished in November 1922, the Grand National Assembly of the offices of the Sultan and Caliph separated and the former. The Assembly also stated that the Ottoman regime had ceased, the Turkish government, when the Allies seized the capital in 1920, will be in effect abolishing the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet VI went into exile on Malta, and his cousin, Abdülmecid said that Caliph.
Turkey was the only power in the Second World War, I defeated the allies to negotiate as an equal and the provisions of the contract resulting influence. Ismet Pasha was the chief Turkish negotiator at the Lausanne Conference, which opened in November 1922. The National Pact of 1919 was the foundation of the Turkish negotiating position, and its provisions were included in the Treaty of Lausanne, concluded in July 1923. With this contract, the Allies recognized the present-day territory of Turkey and Turkey denied the right to Mosul in the east (in modern Iraq) and Hatay, which included the Mediterranean port of Alexandretta (Iskenderun). The border with the newly created state of Iraq was settled by an initiative of the League of Nations in 1926, and Iskenderun was ceded in 1939 by France during its rule as mandatory power in Syria.
Detailed provisions of the treaty regulated use of the Straits. General supervisory powers have been given to the strait Commission under the League of Nations, and the straits area was to be demilitarized after the conclusion of the Allied retreat. Turkey was the chair of the Commission, which the Soviet Union were among its members to hold. The capitulations and foreign administration of the Ottoman public debt, which infringed on the sovereignty of Turkey, were abolished. Turkey, however, assumed 40 percent of the Ottoman debt, the rest is divided among the other former Ottoman territories. Turkey was also required to maintain low tariffs on imports from signatory to 1929. The Treaty of Lausanne reaffirmed the equality of Muslims and non-Muslim Turkish nationals. Turkey and Greece arranged a mandatory exchange of their respective ethnic Greek and Turkish minorities, with the exception of some Greeks in Istanbul and the Turks in Western Thrace and the Dodecanese Islands.
29 October 1923 announced the Grand National Assembly of the Republic of Turkey. Atatürk was named its president and Ankara its capital, and the modern state was born in Turkey.
Ataturk’s reforms
On taking office, Atatürk initiated a series of radical reforms to the country’s political, social and economic life that were aimed at rapidly transforming Turkey into a modern state (see Table A).A secular code, modeled along European lines, was introduced, which are completely altered laws affecting women, marriage, family and relationships.
Atatürk also urged his fellow citizens to look and act like the Europeans. Turks were encouraged to wear European-style clothing. Surnames were adopted: Mustafa Kemal, for example, was Kemal Ataturk, Ismet Pasha and took Inönü as his surname commemorate his victories there. Likewise, Atatürk insisted on cutting links with the past, which he described as anachronistic. Honorary titles were abolished. The wearing of the fez, introduced a century earlier as a modernizing reform to replace the turban banned because it had become for the nationalists a symbol of the reactionary Ottoman regime.
The ideological foundation of Atatürk’s reform program became known as Kemalism. The main points were enumerated in the “six arrows” of Kemalism: republicanism, nationalism, populism, reformism, statism (statism), and secularism. These were regarded as “fundamental and unchanging principles” guiding the republic, and were written into its constitution. The principle of republicanism in the constitution included a statement that “the sovereignty is vested in the nation” and not a single ruler. Displaying considerable ingenuity share, on Ataturk, the Turkish language to reinvent and recasting Turkish history in a nationalist mold. The President himself went to the park in Ankara on Sunday, the newly established day of rest teach the Latin alphabet adapted to Turkish as part of the language reform. Populism encompassed not only the notion that all Turkish citizens are equal, but that all of them were Turks. What remained of the millet system, the community of autonomy if the other ethnic groups had been abolished.Reformism legitimized the radical means by which changes were implemented in the Turkish political and social life. Statism emphasized the central role of the state reserve in the leadership of the nation’s economic activity. This concept was cited particularly to justify state planning of the mixed economy of Turkey and major investment in state enterprises. An important objective of economic policy Ataturk was to prevent foreign interests from exercising undue influence on the Turkish economy.
Of all the Kemalist reforms, the exclusion of Islam from an official role in the life of the nation shocked Atatürk’s contemporaries deeply. The abolition of the caliphate ended a connection between the state and religion. The Islamic religious orders were suppressed, religious schools were closed, public education was secularized, and was withdrawn Seriate. These changes must be a readjustment of the entire social framework of the Turkish people. Despite subsequent protests, Atatürk conceded nothing to the traditionalists.
In 1924, the Grand National Assembly adopted a new constitution to replace around 1876 document that had continued to serve as the legal framework of the republican government.1924 Constitution assigns sovereign power in the Grand National Assembly as a representative of the people to whom it also guaranteed basic civil rights. Under the new document, the Assembly would be a unicameral body elected to a term of office shall be four years by universal suffrage. The legislature would also declared responsibility for the approval of the budget, ratifying treaties and war. The President of the Republic would be elected to a term of four years by the Assembly, and he would turn the Prime Minister, who expected that the confidence of the Assembly was to appoint to enjoy (see Table 3, Annex A).
During his presidency, repeatedly extended by the assembly, Atatürk governed Turkey essentially by personal rule in one-party state. He founded the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – CHP) in 1923 to represent the nationalist movement in elections and serve as a vanguard party in support of the Kemalist reform program. Atatürk’s six arrows were an integral part of the political platform of the CHP. was used by the control of the CHP, Atatürk also controlled the assembly and assured support there is for the government. Atatürk regarded a stage of personal authoritarian rule as necessary to secure his reforms before he entrusted the government of the country’s democratic process.
Foreign Policy
Atatürk’s foreign policy, which had as main objective the preservation of the independence and integrity of the new republic, was careful, conservative and successful. The President proclaims the principle of “peace at home and peace abroad.” This Directive, compliance with which was necessary to the task of the internal structure of the nation, laid the foundation for foreign relations of Turkey.
Until the end of 1925 friendship had been negotiated contracts with fifteen states. To a twenty year treaty of friendship and neutrality were signed this year with the Soviet Union, which shall remain in force until revoked unilaterally by the former Soviet Union in 1945. Then moved to Turkey, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia meet in the Balkan Pact, to the increasingly aggressive foreign policy of fascist Italy and the impact of a potential Bulgarian alignment with Nazi Germany. Turkey entered into a nonaggression pact with Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran in 1937.
Atatürk attained his greatest diplomatic success in 1936 when the Turkish forces of the signatories of the Treaty of Lausanne persuaded Turkish control and re-militarization of the Straits under the Montreux Convention to enable. Under those provisions, merchant ships were to continue to have the freedom of navigation of the straits, but Turkey took over the tasks of the International Commission for registry, sanitary inspection, and the collection of tolls. Turkey was the strait area refortify and when at war or under imminent threat of war, close them to warships.
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