OTTOMAN TURKEY AND THE TROUBLED LEGACY OF KEMAL ATATURK
By Matein Khalid

Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates
Sept 22 2005

HIS memory still haunts the Dolma Bache Palace in Istanbul where he
died, the magnificent mausoleum in Ankara where he is buried. His
portraits and busts are prominent in Turkish embassies worldwide. The
founder of the first secular state in Islamic history is a hero to
reformers and anathema to mullahs from the Maghreb to Pakistan.

Mustafa Kemal Pasha was unquestionably an iconic statesman and nation
builder, the Washington, de Gaulle, Cavour and Jinnah of the Turkish
Republic. Yet what is the relevance and legacy of the Ataturk legend
in out time? Is the ideology of Kemalism still the dominant theme in
Turkish history?

Kemalist ideology exalted Turkish nationalism as the core value
of the new Republic. Mustafa Kemal, after all, lived during the
pathological death rattle of the Ottoman Empire when Greek, Arab,
Armenian, Bulgarian and Serbian nationalists collided in their revolt
against the decrepit state of the sultans for the past two generations.

As the Ottoman regime imploded, Ataturk faced the Allied invasion of
Gallipolli, Tsarist Russia’s depredations in the Balkans, the British
and French occupation of Istanbul and secessionist revolts everywhere
from Bulgaria to Kurdistan to the Hijaz. As a heroic general hailed
as Gazi (victor) for his military exploits at Gallipolli and Smyrna,
Ataturk had to create an instant national consciousness in the
Anatolian rump of the sultan’s defunct empire.

In Ottoman times, “Turk” was a slightly derogatory term for Anatolian
peasants in the cosmopolitan salons and palaces of Istanbul. It was
the genius of Ataturk that he created a new national myth at a time
when the Treaty of Sevres threatened the very existence of Turkey on
the world’s political map.

Yet Turkish nationalism in its Kemalist incarnation was exclusivist and
unwilling to accommodate demographic realities of the new Republic. It
acquiesced in the mass migration of Greeks and Armenians. It isolated
Turkey from the Arab world the Ottoman sultans had ruled for four
centuries. Above all, it created the nightmare of Kurdish secessionism
since the genesis of the Republic in the 1920’s.

Kemalist ideology inflicted linguistic genocide on the Kurds – the
Kurdish language was banned, Kurds were declared “mountain Turks” and
resettled in the ghettos of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The Turkish
Army generals who acted as the guardians and enforcers of Kemalist
ideology, plunged eastern Anatolia into a generation of war after
General Evren’s military coup in September 1980.

The PKK under Abdullah Ocalan declared war on the Kemalist state in
the 1990’s and the subsequent civil war claimed 30,000 lives. The
uber-nationalism of Ataturk and the Turkish General Staff bought
only tragedy and war to the mountains of Kurdistan, as well as led
to successive Turkish invasions of northern Iraq and threat of war
with Syria.

Ataturk is hailed by the West and the Turkish secular elite for
his revolutionary transformation of an ancient, traditional Muslim
society with good reason. After all, he abolished the Caliphate,
replaced the Sharia with the Swiss Legal Code, banned the ancient
Turkic dervish brotherhoods and the Ottoman fez, emancipated women
and abolished the veil, replaced the Arabic script with Latin and
even replaced the Islamic with the Gregorian Calendar.

Yet the general who had used Islam in his war against the invading
Greeks and enjoyed the same title of Gazi as Mehmet Fatih, the Ottoman
sultan who conquered Constantinople for Islam from the Byzantines in
1453, jettisoned it as an instrument of national integration after
the establishment of the Republic.

This act of theological lobotomy created an existential confrontation
between successive military regimes and Islamist politicians for six
decades after his death. The aggressively secular ethos implicit in
the Kemalist message also made it impossible for Ankara to become
the natural leader in the Muslim world. Yet not even Presidential
edicts could change the ancient religious and spiritual heritage of
the Turkish people.

In 2005, a moderate Islamist party controls two thirds of the seat
in the Ankara Parliament founded by Ataturk. The Kemalist version of
state intervention, magnified by hyperinflation, currency collapse
and the ruinous costs of the Kurdistan wars, has also been discredited
by time, the IMF and Wall Street.

Time heals all wounds in the lives of human beings and history of great
empires. It is so ironic that the scenes of the Ottoman twilight are
once again theatres of the Great Game and East-West conflict – Bosnia,
Central Asia, Kurdistan the Levant, Palestine, Hijaz, the Balkans,
Armenia. The Turkish Republic Kemal Pasha founded still straddles
the global geopolitical axis, the vectors of war and peace in the
Middle East.

The pageant of Turkish history still resonates to the power and
passions of the ancient faith which even a legendary colossus like
Kemal Ataturk could not destroy.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker. He can be reached
at matein@emirates.net.ae

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