(1881-1938)

 

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the military and political leader who brought about the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of modern Turkey.  Ataturk laid the foundations for a pro-Western secular state. In recent weeks, terrorists employing indiscriminate bombing attacks have sought to undermine Turkey’s pro-Western and pro-Israeli policy.

 

Ataturk was the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. Ataturk, who ruled Turkey from 1923-1938, provided the political and social infrastructure for modern Turkey. Under his rule, Turkey has paid lip service to the Islamic world while defining its future among the dynamic economies of the West. He modernized the country’s legal and educational systems and encouraged the adoption of a European way of life, with Turkish written in the Latin alphabet and with citizens adopting European-style names. He is still revered in Turkey for restoring to his people pride in their Turkishness, coupled with a new sense of accomplishment as their backward nation was brought into the modern world. His legacy remains a counter balance to the wave of Islamic fundamentalism that threatens regimes outside of the predominantly Arab lands.

 

The bases of Mustafa Kemal’s policies were enshrined in the Turkish constitution. The six fundamental principles were republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism, and economic systems. Populism was the effort to mobilize popular support for a national culture in provincial towns.  The creation of a sense of nationalism was encouraged by changes in school curricula, the rewriting of history to glorify the Turkish past. Statism was the movement toward state-controlled economic development. Secularism included the reform of law, involving the abolition of religious courts and schools and the adoption of a purely secular system of family law. The abolition of the fez and wearing clerical garb outside places of worship was forbidden.

 

Turkey, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s only Muslim member, has carefully cultivated and jealously guarded a European-style secular political culture that is crucial to the American program to send pro-Western values percolating through the tribal and theocratic grid of he Middle East. 

 

Turkey was the first among Muslim nations to recognize Israel and has developed extensive economic and military ties  (Turkey and Israel have conducted joint military exercises) since then with it. It has been a model NATO member and has tried hard in recent years to win the favor of the European Union. Arab Muslim countries resent Turkey’s foreign policy. Moreover, within Turkey most of its population opposed America’s Iraqi adventure. The main concern of Turks opposed to the war was that it would reignite a Kurdish separatist movement near the border with Iraq.