TURKEY’S HERO, BEHIND THE BRONZE VENEER

New York Times
pe/13ataturk.html?hp
Nov 13 2008

ISTANBUL — After nearly a century of looking serious, Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, has started to smile.

Portraits of a serious Ataturk hang all over Turkey, but a new film
may alter his image.

Ataturk — a war-hero-turned-statesman who defended Turkey during
the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire — is the subject of what is
perhaps the world’s longest personality cult.

His portrait hangs in every tea shop, government office and
classroom. Insulting his memory is a crime under Turkish law. And
every Nov. 10, Turkey observes a moment of silence to commemorate
his death in 1938.

But the ironclad official version might be softening. Last month a
documentary on Ataturk was released that looks at his human side. That
might not sound like much, but in a country where official history
is kept under lock and key, the film, "Mustafa," was a brave endeavor.

The film is by no means an effort to tear the leader down. It is a
largely sympathetic portrayal. But the mere fact that its director,
Can Dundar, was able to show Ataturk looking less like a bronze statue
and more like a man with a bad drinking habit who sometimes got bored,
says a lot about how far Turkey has come in the past 10 years.

"Can Dundar opened the gates of an ivory cage that we have locked
ourselves in," Mehmet Ali Birand, a journalist, wrote in the daily
newspaper Posta.

Founded in 1923, modern Turkey in its early years was monochromatic,
as authorities scrubbed the country of differences to forge a national
identity. But as wealth and democracy have increased, so have efforts
to re-evaluate the past, bringing some of those differences, ethnic
and religious, into focus.

Turkish intellectuals like Mr. Dundar have begun to question the
official line, opening up painful debates on topics that have long
been considered closed. Ataturk, whose name means father of the Turks,
was one of the most important figures of the 20th century, but his
story is not broadly known in the West, in part because his godlike
status in Turkey has made it too politically prickly to tell.

Previous attempts to tell it on film have failed. In an article
last year titled "The 56-Year Story of the Unmade Ataturk Film," an
English-language newspaper, The Turkish Daily News, said, "Actors
have grown old waiting for the role," citing reported efforts by
Antonio Banderas, Kevin Costner and Yul Brynner.

"Turkey would never want to see its founding father, which it sees
as a holy person, be portrayed as a person with human weaknesses,"
the paper said.

That trait is at the heart of many of this country’s problems. Turkey
has a tremendous capacity for denial, which includes the Armenian
genocide early in the last century and a large Kurdish minority whose
existence the state is only beginning to acknowledge. Without facing
that history, intellectuals here argue, Turkey will never be able to
move beyond it.

"Ataturk is used as a shield by those who are blocking discussions
on many deformities in this country," wrote Ahmet Altan, one of the
country’s most prominent intellectuals and a columnist for Taraf,
a liberal daily newspaper. "They attribute godlike status to Ataturk
and then hide behind it."

Mr. Dundar drew on a wide selection of Ataturk’s diaries and letters
that had been closed in military archives for decades. The man who
emerges in the film is even more radical in his beliefs than Turks
have been taught, Mr. Dundar said.

Ataturk was determined, for example, to subordinate Islam and to force
Turks to look and behave as Westerners. In 1914, Mr. Dundar said,
the 33-year-old Ataturk attended a ball in the Czech spa of Carlsbad
with a Turkish diplomat and his wife, who remarked that she could not
imagine such a scene — the dancing, the dress — in her home country.

In a later entry in his diaries, Ataturk wrote that "it would not be
difficult at all," Mr. Dundar said. "If I would be given the power,
I would do it overnight," Ataturk wrote.

"Ataturk didn’t believe it should happen over time," Mr. Dundar
said. "He thought it should be abrupt."

Mr. Dundar said he could use only a small fraction of the material
he sifted through that revealed something about Ataturk’s thoughts
on Islam. The rest was too explosive, he said.

There were a few sharp divergences from the official history, though
the film veered close. In one scene, Ataturk says, just before an
address to an early Parliament, that he believes the areas populated
predominantly by Kurds should have a special status. The concept
is extremely controversial in Turkey, which fears that its largely
Kurdish southeast will want to secede, and discussions of special
status for the region are strictly taboo.

The film, which opened on Oct. 29, National Day, and is being shown in
more than 200 theaters around Turkey, was praised by intellectuals but
drew a frenzy of angry reactions. (Mr. Dundar, knowing the delicacy of
the topic, preferred to speak in his native Turkish for the interview
for maximum precision of language, though his English is fluent.)

"Your production is a priceless source for people who want to tarnish
young minds with their dark thoughts," wrote a viewer on the movie’s
Web site who identified himself as Tulay. "Surely, you would also
qualify for a Nobel Prize," he wrote in a reference to the Nobel
Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was spurned by the
Turkish establishment after discussing the Armenian genocide.

"I denounce you."

Nevertheless, the kinder, gentler Ataturk seems to be a turning point
of some sort for Turkey. Even the Turkish state seems to feel the
need for some adjustments: New bank notes planned for circulation in
2009 picture the leader smiling, not scowling.