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October 2 - November 17, 2018
He differed from the dictators of his age in two significant respects: his foreign policy was based not on expansion but on retraction of frontiers; his home policy on the foundation of a political system which could survive his own time.
His strength lay in the Capitulations, extra-territorial privileges which exempted him from taxes and enabled him to trade freely, to practise his own religion and to live by his own laws, regardless of the central Turkish authority.
It was the Moslem religion, which oppressed them and stunted their growth, shutting them off from the more advanced and enlightened ways of the Christian peoples.
Islam stood for authority not discussion, for submission not freedom of thought. The roundabout habits of mind and method which he abhorred were habits inherent in the Moslem mentality. To him political reform meant, in the first place, religious reform.
In its place was arising a new concept of nationalism, which put race before religion and saw Turks, for the first time, as Turks.
Macedonia had gone.
In the army commander’s mess, in this wild remote outpost of the Empire, Kemal insisted on keeping up civilized appearances.
Despite Kemal’s absence it was the first Cabinet with effective Nationalist representation. Its immediate task was to seek an Armistice.
Thus, after four long disastrous years of war, Kemal emerged from the general carnage as the only Turkish commander without a defeat to his name.
THE MUSTAFA KEMAL who now embarked on the crucial phase of his own and his country’s career was a seasoned and self-confident campaigner, two years short of forty, who had proved himself as a soldier in fourteen years of hard service.
The intellectual side of him knew that it was to be won by the force, not merely of guns but of an idea, which must be sown and cultivated in the minds of the people. The achievement of all this would demand an intense concentration, a superhuman effort of will, the kind of elemental driving force which Kemal alone possessed.
Kemal saw the Turkish people without illusion. He knew that they were dour, conservative, fatalistic, slow in mind and initiative. But he knew also that they were stubborn, patient, capable of endurance; a race of fighters ruthless in battle, responsive to leadership and ready to die to order.
Meanwhile, announcing the opening of the Assembly in a personal message to the Sultan, Kemal reminded him in eloquent terms of a dream of his forbear, Sultan Osman, the founder of the dynasty, which had passed into oral tradition. The sacred tree, he dreamt, which cast a shadow over three continents and sheltered a hundred million Moslems, had been deprived of its branches, and only its bare trunk remained. ‘The trunk of that sacred tree,’ Kemal assured the monarch, ‘is in our hearts.’
Early in October 1920 the young King Alexander, while watching the antics of a pair of pet monkeys in the garden of his palace, was bitten by one of them and died. ‘It is perhaps no exaggeration,’ commented Churchill, ‘to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite.’
Of all Kemal’s early associates Rauf, though there was at this time no quarrel between them, was the most opposed to him in outlook and character.
Sick and ageing, bent with rheumatism, she had never recovered from the loss of her native Salonika.
A month or so after his departure, one of his eunuchs came to Constantinople to arrange for the transfer of his wives and family. The news of this brought a telegram to the British Embassy from a certain American impresario. It read: ‘Hippodrome New York could use wives of ex-Sultan kindly put me in touch with party who could procure them.’ When this message was shown to King George V he was greatly amused. Such was the last act in the Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire.
There was to be an end to the harem, to the separation of women from men.
The session was closed with prayers for the Republic’s future welfare. The news of the proclamation was celebrated throughout the country with a salute of a hundred and one guns. The date of it was 29th October 1923.
Never did she appear with him at social gatherings; thus there was in effect no mixed Moslem society.
Rejep Peker, on the other hand, Kemal’s party boss, submitted a report to him after a visit to Italy, in which he praised the Fascist system and proposed, in some detail, a similar form of government for Turkey. Kemal glanced at the report and handed it back with the remark, ‘You’ll do all that after I die.’
What he was seeking to do, in making a nation of Turkey, was to wean his people away from their old sense of identity with the supra-national ‘fatherland’ of Islam and to create for them a new allegiance to their own national fatherland.
