Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an Ottoman army officer who led the Turkish national movement to victory after the First World War and founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923, serving as its first president until his death in 1938. In fifteen years he abolished the sultanate and the caliphate, separated religion from the state, replaced Islamic law with European-style codes, introduced the Latin alphabet and gave women the vote. He ruled through a single party, and his reforms were imposed from above, sometimes by force.

He was born Mustafa in Salonica, in the Ottoman Empire, today's Thessaloniki in Greece, in 1881 (some sources give 1880, as Ottoman calendar years straddled two Western ones); the exact date was not recorded, and he later chose 19 May as his symbolic birthday. His father, Ali Rıza, was a minor customs official and timber merchant who died when Mustafa was a boy, and he was raised by his mother, Zübeyde. At military school a teacher gave him the second name Kemal, meaning "perfection". He graduated from the War College in Istanbul as a staff captain in 1905.

As a young officer he was drawn into the constitutional, nationalist politics of the time and was connected with the Committee of Union and Progress, which forced the sultan to restore the constitution in 1908, though he was never among its leaders. He fought against Italy in Libya in 1911–1912 and in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, in which the empire lost almost all its European territory.

In the First World War the Ottoman Empire fought on the side of Germany. In 1915 Mustafa Kemal commanded a division on the Gallipoli peninsula, where British, Australian, New Zealand and French troops landed in an attempt to reach Istanbul. His decisive actions in holding the high ground against the first landings, and again in August, made him a national hero, and the Allies withdrew at the start of 1916. He later served on the Caucasus and Syrian fronts. During the war the Ottoman government, led by the Committee of Union and Progress, carried out the deportation and mass murder of the Armenians; Mustafa Kemal was not among those who organised it.

After the empire's defeat in 1918, Allied forces occupied Istanbul, and in May 1919 Greek troops landed at Smyrna (İzmir) with Allied approval. On 19 May 1919 Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast, nominally as an army inspector, and began organising resistance. National congresses at Erzurum and Sivas set out the goal of an independent state within the Turkish-majority lands, and in April 1920 a Grand National Assembly met in Ankara, electing him its president. The sultan's government condemned him to death in absentia and in August 1920 signed the Treaty of Sèvres, which would have partitioned Anatolia.

The nationalists fought on several fronts. They defeated Armenian forces in the east, came to terms with France and Italy, and received arms and gold from Soviet Russia. The main war was against Greece. Mustafa Kemal, now commander-in-chief, halted the Greek advance at the Sakarya River in August and September 1921, and in August 1922 launched an offensive that drove the Greek army out of Anatolia. Turkish troops entered Smyrna in September 1922, and much of the city burned, with heavy loss of life among its Greek and Armenian inhabitants. The Treaty of Lausanne of July 1923 recognised Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia and eastern Thrace, and a compulsory exchange of populations moved over a million Orthodox Christians to Greece and some 400,000 Muslims to Turkey.

The assembly abolished the sultanate in November 1922, and on 29 October 1923 proclaimed the Republic of Turkey, with Mustafa Kemal as president and Ankara as capital. In March 1924 the caliphate, the office of spiritual leader of Sunni Muslims held by the Ottoman dynasty, was abolished and the royal family exiled. Religious courts and schools were closed and the dervish orders were banned.

His rule was authoritarian. After a Kurdish and religious rebellion led by Sheikh Said in 1925, the government passed emergency laws, closed the only opposition party and set up special tribunals, which had hundreds of people executed. Following a plot to assassinate him in İzmir in 1926, several former leading nationalists were tried and hanged. An experiment with a loyal opposition party in 1930 was ended after a few months. His Republican People's Party remained the only legal party, and Kurdish identity was suppressed; the army's campaign in Dersim in 1937–1938 killed many thousands of people.

The reforms aimed to make Turkey a modern, secular nation state on the European model. The fez was banned in 1925 in favour of Western hats, and the Western calendar and clock were adopted. New civil, criminal and commercial codes, based on Swiss, Italian and German law, replaced Islamic law in 1926; polygamy was abolished and women gained equal rights in divorce and inheritance. In 1928 Islam ceased to be the state religion and the Arabic script was replaced by a new Latin alphabet, followed by a mass literacy campaign. Women won the vote in local elections in 1930 and in national elections in 1934, earlier than in France or Italy. The Surname Law of 1934 required all citizens to take family names, and the assembly gave him the surname Atatürk, "father of the Turks". The state also pursued industrialisation through state-owned enterprises, and promoted a Turkish national identity through new theories of history and language.

Atatürk, a heavy drinker, died of cirrhosis of the liver at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul on 10 November 1938, aged 57. He was succeeded by İsmet İnönü, and in 1953 his body was moved to a monumental mausoleum, Anıtkabir, in Ankara.

In Turkey he is honoured as the founder of the nation; his portrait hangs in offices and schools, and insulting his memory is a crime under a law of 1951. The six principles of his party, including republicanism, nationalism and secularism, became the official ideology of the state, and for decades the army saw itself as their guardian. Admirers see him as a military genius and visionary reformer who saved Turkish independence and modernised society. Critics point to the one-party rule, the repression of Kurds and religious conservatives, and the imposition of change on a largely rural population, and debate over his secular legacy remains central to Turkish politics today. Abroad, his reforms were studied by modernising leaders across the Middle East and Asia, including Reza Shah of Iran and the rulers of Afghanistan.