Mustafa Kemal Pasha has disproved the adage, "Where is a Turk his own master?" by substituting the answer, "In Turkey! " for the usual retort, "In hell." These words sum up the fundamental characteristics of Kemal's policy. He stands today as the Emancipator of Turkey. He has lifted the people out of the slough of servile submission to alien authority, brought them to a realization of their inherent qualities and to an independence of thought and action.
TIme Magazine, 24 March 1923
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is known to be one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century. He was born in Thessaloniki in today’s Greece in 1881 and became the founder and first president of the modern Turkish Republic.
After graduating from military college he joined the Ottoman army and served in many wars including World War I where he was commander of the 19th Division at the Battle of Gallipoli.
Australian journalist E R Peacock interviewed Ataturk for The Herald on 27 December 1918 and wrote the following:
“It was difficult to realise that one was in the presence of the man who fought us so bitterly. He spoke so sincerely of the courage and resourcefulness of the Australians that before departing I found myself saying that if ever, he visited Australia he would find many of his old opponents glad to see him.”
Today Ataturk’s letter to ANZAC mothers is inscribed on monuments in almost every corner of Australia and New Zealand as a tribute to his ability to build friendship out of animosity.
“Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country to ours,” wrote Ataturk to honour the bravery and courage of the ANZACs.
At the end of the war the Ottoman Empire was defeated and two of its major cities occupied. This began the Turkish War of Independence with Ataturk leading the forces that eventually brought peace to the region and established the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
His political realism showed itself in his foreign policy, which, unlike his counterparts’, was “not based on expansionism but on retraction of frontiers”, according to Patrick Kinross who had written one of the most comprehensive biographies of Ataturk. He ended a century-long conflict with Turkey and its neighbours, as acknowledged by his opponent, the Greek leader Venizelos in his letter nominating Ataturk to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934. According to Kinross, it was “his realistic spirit that regenerated his country, transforming the old sprawling Ottoman Empire into a compact new Turkish Republic.”
Ataturk was known as a humanitarian, statesman and military genius. From Mahatma Gandhi to John F Kennedy, and Winston Churchill to Fidel Castro, Ataturk’s revolutions, approach to global issues and modernisation of Turkey won the praise of world leaders. (Insert Kennedy Video from 4 November 1963)
UNESCO dedicated the year 1981 to Ataturk for his contributions to world peace.
Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Australia’s 8th Prime Minister, who faced Kemal’s troops in Gallipoli and presided over the League of Nations conference to decide on the status of Turkish straits, respected Ataturk so much that he always carried a gold plated cigarette box given to him by the leader. Bruce had only his wife’s and Ataturk’s pictures on his desk.
In his widely popular book on Ataturk, historian Andrew Mango remarked that “His aim was not imitation but participation in a universal civilization, which, like the thinkers of the European Enlightenment, he saw as the onward march of humanity, regardless of religion and the division it caused.”
For this reason he paid the utmost importance to education and the youth of Turkey during his years as a statesman.
“Teachers are the one and only people who save nations.”
Ataturk’s belief that education was the key to modernising Turkey and progressing it on a world stage came from his father, Ali Riza. His father ensured that Mustafa was sent to a modern secular school which, many believe, set Ataturk on the path of modernisation.
Ataturk took his studies very seriously and received the nickname of Kemal, meaning “The Wise One,” from his secondary school maths teacher.
When Ataturk came to power and swept through a raft of reforms across Turkey, making education more accessible was one of his priorities. According to him one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was the widespread illiteracy and lack of enough scientific research at universities. Ataturk himself was a positivist, a staunch advocate of the pillars of enlightenment, reason, scientific method and progress. The new Republic needed to endorse the same pillars to progress, as it had lacked the knowhow to utilise its resources.
“For everything in the world, for life, civilization, and success, the only and true compass must be science. It would be illiterate and wrong to seek guidance from anything else.”
He unified the curriculum in 1924 under a centralised state-run structure in less than a year of the foundation of the modern Turkish Republic and forced independent religious schools to close. A literacy movement, aimed at adult education, raised literacy rates from 9% to 33% in just 10 years.
Ataturk did this in a number of ways, but the greatest change came from replacing the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, setting Turkey on the path to achieving one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East. The change to Latin script was another step to modernisation which Ataturk saw as a way for the Turkish nation to “show with its script and mentality that it is on the side of world civilisation.”
The alphabet revolution was to simplify access to knowledge according to Ataturk and his reformist agenda. He saw Arabic an alien language to the people of Turkey, and incompatible with the Western style modernisation he had envisaged for the new nation.
The alphabet reform along with other initiatives began paying off dividends quickly.
Through his reforms, between 1923 and 1938, the number of students attending primary schools increased by 224%. Another reason for this spike was Ataturk’s strong support for co-education and the education of women and girls. By 1927 co-education became the norm in Turkey, allowing girls equal education opportunities and paving the way for gender equality.
Ataturk sent dozens of students to study in Western universities as early as 1924 in areas of sports, industrial relations, economy, history, archelogy, medicine, chemistry, various disciplines of engineering and biology.
Upon completion of their studies, the returning graduates took up most important roles in building the new nation. He knew it wasn’t enough. Turkey offered many European academics leading positions at new universities. In one of the instances, Albert Einstein wrote to Mustafa Kemal asking him to accept Jewish German academics to Turkey at a time of Nazi’s rise in Berlin. Mustafa Kemal accepted the request without hesitation. Firstly, he knew, it was the right thing to do, but also he valued science above and beyond everything in life.
In a quote attributed to him, he once famously said:
“If one day, science contradicts my teachings, choose science.”