Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk^[c][f] (c. 1881^[g] – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish field marshal and revolutionary statesman who was the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrializing nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and socio-political theories became known as Kemalism.

Born in Salonica in the Ottoman Empire, his early military career saw him involved in the Italo-Turkish and Balkan Wars, but he rose to prominence with his role in the Defence of Gallipoli during World War I. Following the defeat of the empire after the war, he led the Turkish National Movement, which resisted the empire's partition among the victorious Allied powers. Establishing the provisional "Ankara government", he defeated the forces sent by the Allies, thus emerging victorious from the Turkish War of Independence. During and after the war, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia outside of Istanbul, including the Kars region invaded by the Kemalist armies, was largely completed via large-scale massacres, flight, expulsions, and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. His government subsequently proceeded to abolish the Ottoman sultanate in 1922 and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey in its place in 1923.

As the president of the newly formed Turkish Republic, Atatürk initiated political, economic, and cultural reforms to build a republican and secular nation-state. He made primary education free and compulsory, opening thousands of new schools all over the country. He also introduced the Latin-based Turkish alphabet. Turkish women received equal civil and political rights during his presidency. His government carried out a policy of Turkification, trying to create a homogeneous, unified and above all secular nation under the Turkish banner. The Turkish Parliament granted him the surname Atatürk in 1934, which means "Father of the Turks", in recognition of the role he played in building the modern Turkish Republic. He died on 10 November 1938 at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, at the age of 57; he was succeeded as president by his long-time prime minister İsmet İnönü.

In 1981, the centennial of Atatürk's birth, his memory was honoured by the United Nations and UNESCO, which declared it The Atatürk Year in the World and adopted the Resolution on the Atatürk Centennial, describing him as "the leader of the first struggle given against colonialism and imperialism".^[3][4] Atatürk followed a peace-oriented foreign policy and friendship with the close countries such as Iran, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Greece, as well as the creation of the Balkan Pact that resisted the expansionist aggressions of Fascist Italy and Tsarist Bulgaria during the interwar period of the 1930s, however, his critics denounce him as a dictator responsible for numerous acts of repression and massacres.

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