Montreal Gazette , Canada
June 3 2007
Mustapha Kemal Ataturk: still worshipped after all these years
Founder of modern Turkey has his influence felt even today
NORMAN WEBSTER, The Gazette
Published: Sunday, June 03, 2007
"Revered" is too mean a word to describe how Mustapha Kemal Ataturk
is regarded by his countrymen. Hero worship is closer to the mark,
the way Mao Zedong was seen by Chinese in earlier days, but without
the brainless hysteria that used to play such a part in Mao idolatry.
Everywhere, Ataturk gazes down on his people – from portraits in
waiting rooms, from snapshots of his life (swimming, declaiming,
teaching the alphabet) posted on public walls, or pointing the way
dramatically forward, from astride a rearing horse, in the town
square of Nevsehir in Cappadocia, deep in Turkey’s Asian heartland.
Although he died in 1938, he remains a guiding force. Founding father
of the Turkish republic in 1923, he decreed that this overwhelmingly
Muslim nation should be Western-oriented and secular in its public
life. The army remains loyal to the vision, periodically overthrowing
governments it considers to be straying from the true path.
Ataturk. Take George Washington (father of his nation), add in some
Abraham Lincoln (moral force), then a dose of Maggie Thatcher
(implacable, often unpleasant) and our own Sir John A. (a visionary
with a fondness for the bottle – Ataturk died of cirrhosis of the
liver), put them all together and you approach the figure this man
still cuts in his world.
Westerners might know him best as the soldier who beat the British
(plus Aussies and New Zealanders) at Gallipoli in 1915. His real
contribution to history, though, was to rescue the republic from the
ruins of the Ottoman empire and drag it Westward by the scruff of the
neck.
His ambition was phenomenal. He abolished the sultanate and the
religious caliphate, changed the nation’s script from Arabic to a
Latin alphabet, adopted the Gregorian calendar, outlawed the fez and
the veil, granted suffrage to women and required all Turks to adopt
surnames, taking Ataturk ("Father of Turks") for himself.
This was a leader who literally changed the way people dressed,
spoke, worshipped, were named and governed, not little things by any
measure. And the amazing thing is, he’s still on the job.
Istanbul was the recent site of the annual assembly of the
International Press Institute, a global group which keeps a watch on
press freedom.
Nations that wish to stifle freedom of speech find all sorts of
ingenious ways to do so. Turkey has a beaut, Article 301 of the
Criminal Code, which applies savage penalties for "insulting
Turkishness" – such as, for example, indicating the Turks committed
genocide against the Armenians during the First World War.
We asked the prime minister what he was going to do to correct this.
He said he was working on it. He might be some time.
It has been 20 years since I first went to Turkey, and the change is
striking. The air is cleaner, the buildings sturdier, the streets in
better shape, the taxis no longer battered and polluting, the people
better dressed, the prosperity almost palpable.
Returning to Montreal these days feels less like returning from the
Third World than the other way round. You really have to go abroad to
appreciate how unbelievably badly our streets, roads and public
spaces compare – and how pervasive and degrading are our so-called
graffiti (a.k.a., mindless scrawls by vandals).
Face it, our town is scruffy, shabby and down at the heels. Less and
less do we resemble Paris or Singapore, and more and more Harare,
say, or Cairo. Mogadishu? Not yet, although our potholes would do
credit to a war zone.
The Topkapi Palace remains a wonder, especially its collections of
precious stones. We gape at a 68-carat diamond once used, incredibly,
as a ring before being retired to a turban ornament.
There are ropes of pearls, gigantic rubies, emeralds seemingly the
size of billiard balls. Then the famed Topkapi Dagger, with its three
huge emeralds, the one Melina Mercouri and her lads set out to steal
in the 1960 film Topkapi.
Those sultans might not be missed by the masses, but they did have a
certain style.
Finally, a quote that adds to the feeling that Turkey really must
succeed, eventually, in winning admittance to the European Union. It
comes from Jeffrey Kopstein, director of the Centre for European,
Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk Centre for International
Studies at the University of Toronto.
Kopstein writes that Europe’s political elites "fail to consider the
broader implications of refusing Turkey altogether. If left out,
Turkey will pursue its own security agenda and, in the context of
Iran’s nuclear ambitions, that can only mean developing its own
nuclear program. Who could blame them?"
I don’t know about you, but that made me sit up in my chair.
Norman Webster is a former editor of The Gazette.
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