TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY

TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY While all this was going on in Ankara, in Istanbul the final congress of the Committee of Union and Progress took place. It was convoked by Kara Kemal Bey, the former Unionist party boss in Istanbul and one of the founders of Karakol, who had had secret discussions about the future role of the Unionists with Mustafa Kemal Pasha in İzmit in January. The congress drew up its own nine-point programme and offered the leadership of a revived CUP to Mustafa Kemal – an honour he declined. The two-stage elections for a new assembly were held in June and July and, since Mustafa Kemal himself had thoroughly vetted the candidates, hardly any former Second Group members entered the new assembly. It met for the first time on 9 August 1923 and then – but only then – the Defence of Rights Group (now encompassing the whole assembly) reconstituted itself as the People’s Party (PP). The new party took over all the assets of the Association for the Defence of the National Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia, which gave it a nationwide organization in one go. It was this new, much more tightly controlled, assembly that debated and ratified the peace treaty that was concluded in Lausanne between Turkey and the Entente powers. The Peace Treaty of Lausanne Soon after the cessation of hostilities, the Entente invited the Turks to start negotiations. The Turkish side wanted them to take place in İzmir (in which case Mustafa Kemal himself would lead the delegation) but the Entente refused to negotiate on Turkish soil and eventually Lausanne was chosen. Britain, France, Italy and Greece were the hosts, while on the Turkish side both the government in Ankara and that in Istanbul were invited to send delegations. In reaction to this, the last grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, Ahmet Tevfik Pasha (Okday), sent a telegram to Ankara suggesting that a joint delegation be sent. This caused a furore in the national assembly and led directly to the adoption, on 1 November 1922, of a motion to abolish the sultanate. Four days later, Tevfik Pasha handed over his seal of office to the nationalist representative in Istanbul, Refet Pasha (Bele), who ordered the Ottoman ministries to terminate all activities and, on 17 November, the last Ottoman sultan sought refuge on a British warship, which took him to Malta. His cousin Abdülmecit succeeded him, but only as caliph, not as sultan. To the surprise of everyone, including himself, İsmet Pasha (İnönü) was appointed leader of the Turkish delegation in Lausanne. Mustafa Kemal chose him partly because İsmet was his most loyal and dependable supporter, but also because the prime minister, Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay), was known as an Anglophile, while the commissar for foreign THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE 161 affairs Yusuf Kemal (Tengirşenk) was too pro-Soviet. İsmet duly left for Lausanne, armed with strict instructions not to deviate from the National Pact in any way. The conference opened on 20 November. Represented were Great Britain, France, Italy, Greece and Turkey, while the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Georgia, Romania and Bulgaria were invited to those sessions in which they had a direct interest. It was clear from the start that the negotiations would be extremely difficult because of the different perspectives of the two sides. The Entente, among whom the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon was by far the most dominant figure, saw themselves as the victors of the First World War. In their eyes the conference was meant to adjust the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres to the new situation. In the eyes of the Turks, they themselves were the victors in their national independence war and Sèvres for them was past history. They came to Lausanne with a maximalist interpretation of the National Pact, and with a brief to include the district of Alexandrette, the Syrian inland down to the Euphrates river, the province of Mosul and the Aegean islands adjacent to the Anatolian coast in the new Turkey, and to insist on a plebiscite for Western Thrace. The Turkish delegation had a very hard time at Lausanne, especially in the beginning. They were not considered equal partners. Curzon adopted an extremely patronizing and arrogant attitude, which contributed to the bad-tempered atmosphere. The Turks were severely handicapped by their lack of diplomatic expertise. For fear of being tricked into major concessions, they remained almost totally inflexible, refusing to give direct answers or to be drawn into impromptu discussions. İsmet’s deafness often served as a useful excuse. The Turkish delegation continually consulted Ankara, unaware that British intelligence intercepted all their messages. The problems discussed came under three headings: territorial and military; economic and financial; and the position of foreigners and minorities. Little was achieved on any of these fronts in the first two months. Early in February all the main territorial problems (the border in Thrace, the future regime of the Straits) had been solved, with the parties agreeing to postpone the discussion of the Mosul question until later. The problems in the other two areas, however, proved insuperable. The Entente presented the Turks with a draft treaty, which it considered its final offer. The Turks refused to sign. The conference broke down and the delegations went home. Extreme nationalist fervour now reigned in Ankara and at the beginning of March both İsmet and the government were vehemently attacked in the assembly for the few concessions they had made. 162 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY Mustafa Kemal had to intervene personally to get the assembly to empower the government to continue negotiations. The Turkish side handed over 100 pages of amendments to the draft treaty it had been given in February. At the end of March, after its experts had studied the amendments, the Entente invited the Turks to reopen negotiations and, on 23 April, the parties reconvened. The Greek and Turkish delegations soon solved their bilateral problems, Turkey receiving a small border correction in Thrace in exchange for renouncing its claim to war reparations, but the main problem remained the Entente countries’ insistence on economic and judicial concessions in exchange for recognition of the abolition of the capitulations. The Turkish side refused anything that amounted to an infringement of the complete sovereignty of the new Turkish state. The Entente position was weak because in none of its countries was the population prepared to go to war over these issues. Therefore, agreement was eventually reached on 17 July. İsmet asked the government in Ankara for permission to sign. When no answer was forthcoming, he asked for permission from Mustafa Kemal and got it. The treaty was signed on 24 July 1923. Basically, though not in every detail, the goals of the National Pact had been attained and within the borders of the National Pact the Turkey that emerged was a completely sovereign state. The province of Mosul, which Turkey claimed but Britain occupied, remained part of Iraq pending a decision by the League of Nations; the sancak of Alexandrette remained with French Syria and, except for Imroz (Gökçe Ada) and Tenedos (Bozca Ada), the Aegean islands adjacent to Asia Minor, which the Turks had claimed, remained with Greece and Italy. But Anatolia and eastern Thrace became part of the new state and there was no mention of Armenia or Kurdistan. The Straits zone was internationalized under a commission chaired by a Turk and demilitarized, except for a garrison of up to 12,000 men in Istanbul. The capitulations remained abolished, but Turkey had to honour all existing foreign concessions and it was not free to change its customs tariffs until 1929. All attempts by the powers to establish supervision over the Turkish judicial system had failed and all inhabitants of Turkey, including foreigners, were now subject to the Turkish courts. The only concession was that foreign observers were to be admitted to the Turkish courts. All wartime reparation claims were renounced. As far as the minorities were concerned, a clause was inserted, in which Turkey bound itself to protect its citizens, regardless of creed, nationality or language, but there was to be no supervision of Turkey’s handling of its minorities. The Entente had wanted a general amnesty to be part of the treaty. THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE 163 Proposals for this were discussed in the sub-commission on minorities, but the Turks did not want to grant a general amnesty to opponents of the nationalists and, since no lists of ‘undesirables’ had been prepared, they were unable to specify who should be excluded from any amnesty. In the end, the Turkish government accepted the amnesty but reserved the right to make 150 – as yet unnamed – exceptions. The amnesty was announced on 16 April 1924, but the exceptions were still undetermined. A list was finally submitted to the assembly in June and, shortly afterwards, those of ‘the 150’ (yüzellilikler) who were still in the country were ordered to leave. The assembly accepted the peace treaty (although not unanimously) and it was ratified on 21 August. The Entente immediately began withdrawing its occupation forces. On 1 October 1923, the last British troops left Istanbul. Turkey in 1923 It is hard to envisage the condition of the country that had won its continued survival and its independence in Lausanne. After ten years of almost continuous warfare it was depopulated, impoverished and in ruins to a degree almost unparalleled in modern history. Demographically, it showed the effects of large-scale migration and mortality. Mortality among the Anatolian population had been incredibly high. The Ottoman army had always recruited most of its soldiers among the peasant population of Asia Minor (the ‘soldier mines of the empire’) and the countless casualties of the campaigns in the Caucasus, Gallipoli, Palestine and Mesopotamia turn up in the population statistics of Anatolia. Furthermore, from early 1915 onwards, eastern Anatolia had become a war theatre itself. This had led to great suffering among the Muslim population, which had partly followed the retreating Ottoman armies. It had also led to the deportation and partial extermination of the Armenian community. The First World War was followed by the independence war, during which campaigns had been fought both in the east and in the west. On the western front the retreating and fleeing Greek forces had committed large-scale atrocities among the Muslim population and some of the advancing Turkish troops had acted with comparable brutality against the Greek Orthodox population. Some 2.5 million Anatolian Muslims lost their lives, as well as between 600,000 and 800,000 Armenians and up to 300,000 Greeks. All in all, the population of Anatolia declined by 20 per cent through mortality, a percentage 20 times as high as that of France, which had been the hardest-hit country among the large European protagonists in the First World War. Only Serbia had lost a larger part of its population in the war. Even this number is deceptive, however. In the war zones 164 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY the number was higher: in some eastern provinces half the population was dead and another quarter had become refugees. There were 12 provinces, most of them in the west, where the number of widows among the female population exceeded 30 per cent. Anatolia’s high mortality rate was not due only to warfare and atrocities. The wars had led to disruption of the infrastructure and a shortage of labour in agriculture. These in turn had led to famine and famines usually had epidemics, notably of cholera and typhoid, trailing in their wake. Next to mortality, migration was the major demographic phenomenon. It has already been noted that the war of 1878 and the Balkan War of 1912–13 had brought hundreds of thousands of Muslim (mainly Turkish) refugees into the country. During and after the First World War several hundred thousand Armenians emigrated from Anatolia, mainly to the Soviet Union, France and the USA. Their example was followed by large numbers of Greeks from western Anatolia. Finally, under the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne, the remainder of the Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia (but not that of Istanbul), about 900,000 people, was exchanged against the Muslims from Greece (except the community in western Thrace) who numbered about 400,000. In actual fact, the large majority of the Greek population had already fled the country in 1922. The communities that were exchanged under the agreement were the inhabitants of the Black Sea coastal region and the Turkish speaking Greek Orthodox from Karaman. The migratory movements meant a net loss to the population of Anatolia of about 10 per cent, which should be added to the 20 per cent loss due to mortality. The population changes meant that, culturally also, Anatolia in 1923 was a completely different place from what it had been in 1913. The larger Christian communities were practically gone (the Armenian community had shrunk to about 65,000 and the Greek community was down from around two million to 120,000); and Anatolia, which had been 80 per cent Muslim before the wars, was now approximately 98 per cent Muslim. Linguistically, only two large groups were left: the Turks and the Kurds, with many smaller groups (Greek, Armenian and Syriac-speaking Christians, Spanish-speaking Jews, and Circassian, Laz and Arabic-speaking Muslims) as well as immigrants from the Balkans. The city population had shrunk even further than the rural population. As a result of this ruralization of the country, 18 per cent of the people now lived in the towns, as opposed to 25 per cent before the wars started.22 In economic terms the havoc wrought by the wars was also considerable. The actual physical damage was limited: there were relatively few industrial installations that could be damaged and most THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE 165 of those were in the Istanbul region, which had not been directly afflicted by the war. The major structural damage was to the railways and bridges in western Anatolia and to housing. It was caused both by the fighting and by deliberate destruction by the withdrawing Greek army. Large parts of the Greek and Armenian quarters of the great port city of İzmir were burnt to the ground in September 1922. It is still unclear who was to blame for this catastrophe. Far more serious was the fact that the emigration of the Greeks and Armenians also meant the exodus of the large majority of entrepreneurs and managers. With them went an irreplaceable stock of industrial and commercial know-how. And it was not just highly skilled personnel that was now lacking in Turkey. It went much further. There were whole regions where not a single welder or electrician could now be found. International trade in 1923 was one-third of what it had been ten years earlier. By far the most important sector of the Turkish economy was agriculture, which recuperated relatively quickly after 1923. Nevertheless, it took until about 1930 for the gross national product to reach pre-First World War levels.23 In one respect Turkey was lucky. Like other protagonists, the Ottoman government had incurred heavy war debts, but in the Ottoman case these debts were not to the United States, a victor, but to Germany, a defeated country. Therefore, the debt, which totalled about 160 million Turkish gold pounds, or 720 million US dollars, was informally written off.24 This was not the case with the old consolidated Ottoman public debt. At Lausanne, it was decided that this should be apportioned to the successor states or territories of the empire and five years later an agreement was reached under which 65 per cent (a total of £78 million) of the debt fell on Turkey and was duly paid back over the years.25 10 · The Emergence of the One- Party State, 1923–27 The republic and the caliphate As we have seen, Mustafa Kemal Pasha had started to consolidate his political position even before the independence war had formally come to an end with the signing and ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne. The means he had employed were: a change in the High Treason Law; the dissolution of the assembly and tightly controlled elections; the creation of a new party, the People’s Party, and the takeover by this party of the whole Defence of Rights organization. This process of consolidation, of gathering power in the hands of Mustafa Kemal and an assembly and party that were both under his complete control, continued after the coming of peace. The exact nature of the emerging new Turkish state was still somewhat indeterminate at this time. The Ottoman sultanate had been abolished nearly a year before. The country was ruled by the national assembly, which elected not only the president but also every minister or rather ‘commissar’ (vekil) directly. The constitutional relationship between the assembly and the caliph, Abdülmecit Efendi, was unclear. The caliphate as conceived in 1922 was a purely religious function, but it was inevitable that many people continued to see the caliph as the head of state, even if only in a ceremonial sense. Furthermore, as caliph, his jurisdiction transcended the boundaries of the Turkish state and – at least in theory – encompassed the whole Muslim world. In his interviews with the Turkish press in January, Mustafa Kemal had already hinted that he intended to change this confused situation and declare a republic, and he reaffirmed this in an interview with a Viennese daily in September. An opportunity arose when, in October, the assembly elected Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay) and Sabit (Sağıroğlu) to the posts of vice-president of the assembly and home secretary respectively, in preference to the government candidates. Mustafa Kemal persuaded the government of Prime Minister Ali Fethi (Okyar) that this constituted a motion of no confidence, upon which the government THE EMERGENCE OF THE ONE-PARTY STATE, 1923–27 167 resigned. The assembly was automatically charged with replacing it with a new council of vekils, but once Mustafa Kemal had instructed his more prominent followers not to accept posts, this proved impossible. When the assembly then decided to consult the president, he submitted a proposal to proclaim a republic, with an elected president, a prime minister appointed by the president and a conventional cabinet system. The majority in the assembly accepted the proposals and, on 29 October 1923, the Turkish Republic was proclaimed, with Mustafa Kemal as its first president and İsmet (İnönü) as its first prime minister. The decision was taken while a number of celebrities from the independence war, Hüseyin Rauf, Ali Fuat (Cebesoy), Adnan (Adıvar), Refet (Bele) and Kâzım (Karabekir) were not in the capital. They reacted angrily to the proclamation in interviews in the Istanbul press, calling the decision premature, and stressing that calling the state a republic did not in itself bring freedom and that the real difference was between despotism and democracy, whether under a republican or a monarchic system. The Istanbul papers took up their criticism with relish. The government was highly unpopular in Istanbul at the time, not so much because of the proclamation of the republic as because it had officially made Ankara the new capital of Turkey a fortnight earlier. This was something that not only hurt the pride of the inhabitants of the old capital, but it also meant continuing unemployment for the tens of thousands of civil servants among them. Rauf’s critical remarks (with their implied accusation that the government was despotic despite its new name) led to a row within the PP parliamentary faction, which came close to splitting the party in December. The anti-republican feeling was partly fuelled by concern over the future of the caliph. Many people, certainly in Istanbul, were emotionally attached to the dynasty, but it was also felt that the caliph was the only possible counterweight to Mustafa Kemal’s dominance of the political scene. It was – rightly – feared that the proclamation of the republic sounded the death knell of the caliphate. In November the president of the Istanbul bar association, Lûtfi Fikri, sent an open letter to the press in which he pleaded for a more influential position for the caliph; and in December two eminent Indian Muslims, Ameer Ali and the Aga Khan, sent a similar letter both to the prime minister and to the press. Because of the difficulty of communications with Ankara, the letter was published in Istanbul before it had been delivered to Prime Minister İsmet, which was something that angered him and his followers in the assembly. It was decided to send an Independence Tribunal to Istanbul to investigate whether Lûtfi Fikri or the newspapers had committed treason. The newspaper editors were acquitted 168 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY but Fikri was sent to jail for five years. All this indicated growing tensions within the People’s Party and between Ankara and Istanbul. In February talks between the president and the leading editors of the Istanbul newspapers failed to heal the rift. Immediately after the opening of the new parliamentary year on 1 March the expected blow fell: the caliphate was abolished and all members of the Ottoman dynasty were ordered out of the country. After extensive discussions, a new republican constitution was adopted in April. This replaced the old Ottoman constitution of 1876, which had been modified in 1909 and again in January 1921 when the first assembly adopted the Law on Fundamental Organization (Teşkilât-i Esasye Kanunu), the de facto constitution of the resistance movement, which had allowed it to function to all practical purposes as a republic within the legal framework of the Ottoman Empire. The nationalist movement is split: the establishment of the Progressive Republican Party All through the winter and spring of 1924, the radical wing of the People’s Party led by Mustafa Kemal and İsmet continued to increase the pressure on the smaller moderate group led by Hüseyin Rauf, which had objected to the way in which the republic had been proclaimed. Continued opposition to this group from within the party became stronger and stronger and by late summer it was clear that the minority had no option but to found a separate opposition party. The actual split took place in the context of a debate over how the government had handled the resettlement of Muslims from Greece, especially with respect to the possessions of the Greeks who had had to leave, which was something that had given rise to widespread corruption. When, after a heated debate in the assembly, İsmet asked for a vote of confidence and easily won it, 32 deputies around Hüseyin Rauf left the party and founded the Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası) on 17 November. The rumour that the new party would use the adjective ‘Republican’ led the People’s Party to change its name to ‘Republican People’s Party’ (RPP). When the new party published its manifesto and its programme, it became evident that it was a party in the Western European liberal mould. It stood for secular and nationalist policies, like the majority party, but it clearly opposed its radical, centralist and authoritarian tendencies. Instead it advocated decentralization, separation of powers and evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. It also had a more liberal economic policy, accepting foreign loans as necessary. It was clear that the mood in many parts of the country, certainly in THE EMERGENCE OF THE ONE-PARTY STATE, 1923–27 169 the conservative east, in Istanbul and in the areas where resettlement problems were particularly bad (such as the area around İzmir), favoured an opposition party. The leadership of the RPP recognized the danger and took countermeasures. Discipline within the parliamentary party was tightened (deputies being bound to vote in the assembly according to the majority decision in the closed session of the faction), and an accord was reached with a group of conservative representatives from the east. Most importantly, İsmet, who had had a personal feud with Rauf since Lausanne and who was considered an outspoken radical, was replaced by the much more conciliatory Ali Fethi (Okyar) on 21 November. These measures prevented mass desertions from the RPP. The conciliatory line was only a temporary expedient, however. A number of hardliners, led by Recep (Peker), the interior minister, were put into the cabinet as watchdogs and by the beginning of 1925 it was clear that the radical wing was putting more and more pressure on Fethi to deal with the opposition, which was gradually building up a grassroots organization in Istanbul and the east. For a time Fethi resisted the pressure, but outside events gave the radical wing its chance. The Sheikh Sait rebellion and Kurdish nationalism The event that the hardliners and the president used to put an end to political opposition was the eruption of Kurdish discontent into an armed rebellion to the north of Diyarbakır in February 1925. Kurdish nationalism was a relative newcomer among the ideologies of the region. The Kurds had always been divided along tribal lines and since the suppression of the Kurdish emirates under Sultan Mahmut II their society had been increasingly fragmented. Sultan Abdülhamit had exploited the divisions among the Kurds, and at the same time used their martial qualities when he created his Cossack-like Hamidiye regiments out of some (but by no means all) of the tribes after 1891. The Young Turks had abolished the Hamidiye but law and order problems had soon forced them to reinstate them in the form of a militia. Regiments of this militia fought in the Balkan War and in the First World War. After the constitutional revolution in 1908, members of the Kurdish elite in the capital had founded the Kürt Teavun ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Society for Support and Progress of the Kurds), of which Sait Nursi, the religious reformer, had also been a member. This, however, had social and not political aims and it kept aloof from the mass of the population in the southeast. In 1912 a number of Kurdish students in Istanbul formed Hevi (Hope), a society with a more pronounced nationalist tendency. 170 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY During the war, the removal of the Armenian population from the eastern Anatolian provinces left the Kurds masters of the terrain, but this and the collapse of the Russian front also meant that the Kurds’ and Turks’ common enemies disappeared and that the two communities were left in competition with each other. In 1918, the Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti (Society for the Elevation of Kurdistan) was founded in Istanbul, with branches in Kurdistan itself, both among the Kormancispeaking majority and among the Zaza-speaking groups to the northwest of Diyarbakır and both among Sunnis and Alevis. During the independence war there was one major Kurdish insurrection against the nationalists in the Dersim (now Tunceli) area, led by tribal chiefs who demanded autonomy, but it was easily suppressed. By and large, the Kurds supported the resistance movement, despite the efforts of British agents to influence them and despite the fact that they were granted autonomy under the Treaty of Sèvres. There were Kurdish representatives at Erzurum and at Sivas and even on the nationalists’ representative committee. Within the new borders of the republic (which, incidentally, in the southeast ran right across traditional pasture areas of the tribes) about 20 per cent of the population was Kurdish, but they were not mentioned in the peace treaty of Lausanne and promises of autonomy made by the nationalist leaders, including Mustafa Kemal himself, during the independence struggle,1 were forgotten. This was a great disappointment to the Kurdish nationalists. In 1923 former militia officers founded the Azadi (Freedom Society), which held its first congress in 1924. One person at that congress whose performance drew attention was Sheikh Sait of Palu, who was very influential among the Zaza tribes. That a sheikh, a religious leader, exerted great political influence was not at all extraordinary in Kurdistan, where the two great dervish orders of the Kadiriyya and – especially – the Nakşibendi were the only organizations that transcended tribal differences. The leaders of these dervish orders were often called in to decide quarrels between different tribes and this brought them prestige, connections and, often, considerable wealth. Sheikh Sait was himself an influential member of the Nakşibendi order. Relations between the Kurds and the predominantly Turkish republican government deteriorated in 1924. The abolition of the caliphate removed an important religious symbol that bound the two communities together. At the same time, the nationalist republic, in its efforts to construct a new national consciousness, developed a repressive policy towards Kurdish identity: the public use of Kurdish and the teaching of Kurdish were prohibited. Influential Kurdish landowners THE EMERGENCE OF THE ONE-PARTY STATE, 1923–27 171 and tribal chiefs were forcibly resettled in the west of the country. The first sign of resistance against these policies was an abortive rebellion by the garrison in Beytüşşebap in the extreme southeast in August 1924. The great rebellion, which the Azadi and Sheikh Sait planned for May 1925, broke out prematurely when a shooting incident with the gendarmes in the little town of Piran got out of hand on 8 February. Nearly all the Zaza tribes and two large Kormanci tribes took part in the insurrection, but the divisions between the Kurds showed themselves again: the Alevi Kurds fiercely attacked the Sunni insurgents. That they did so is understandable given the dual character of the rebellion. While the leadership was undoubtedly motivated by the desire for an autonomous or even independent Kurdistan, the rank and file acted from religious motives, demanding the restoration of the holy law and the caliphate. The Alevis, as a heterodox community, generally supported the republic’s secularist tendencies against the partisans of the caliphate and orthodox establishment – for good reason because prejudice against the Alevis was and is deeply rooted among the Sunnis. Although at one time they threatened Diyarbakır, the only town the rebels managed to seize was Elazığ and that only for a short time. The government in Ankara took strong countermeasures as soon as the extent of the insurrection became clear. The assembly was informed about the situation on 25 February. The same day, martial law was declared in the eastern provinces for one month and the High Treason Law was amended to include the political use of religion among the treasonable offences. Around this time the prime minister, Fethi, asked the PRP leaders to disband voluntarily. This they refused to do, but the party chairman, Kâzım Karabekir, did support the government policy in the east very emphatically, both in the assembly and in the press. Meanwhile, the pressure of the hawks within the RPP on Fethi was rising, İsmet had already returned to Ankara and attended the cabinet meetings. On 2 March Fethi lost a vote of confidence by the RPP faction, when Mustafa Kemal himself sided with the hardliners who demanded stronger measures.2 He resigned and the next day İsmet became prime minister. His first act was to have the assembly pass the Takrir-i Sükûn Kanunu (Law on the Maintenance of Order). This empowered the government for two years to ban by administrative measure any organization or publication it considered might cause disturbance to law and order. The law, which the PRP opposed as being too elastic, would be in force in the whole country, not only in the southeast. At the same time two independence tribunals were reinstated, one for the eastern provinces and one for the rest of the country. The Kurdish rebels were now rapidly pushed back into the moun172 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY tains. The capture on 27 April of Sheikh Sait really marked the end of the rebellion, although small groups continued a guerrilla war all through the summer. In 1926, a new Kurdish insurrection broke out on the slopes of Mount Ararat, which lasted for four years and can be considered a direct sequel to the Sheikh Sait rebellion, but it did not spread. After the rebellion was over, the government through the military authorities and the independence tribunals dealt very harshly with the Kurds. Many of their leaders were executed and large numbers of Kurds, more than 20,000 in all, were deported from the southeast and forcibly settled in the west of the country.3 From now on, the existence of a separate Kurdish identity was officially denied. The Law on the Maintenance of Order was not, however, only used to suppress the Kurds. Eight of the most important newspapers and periodicals (conservative, liberal and even Marxist) in Istanbul were closed down, as were several provincial papers, leaving the government organs Hâkimiyet-i Milliye (National Sovereignty) in Ankara and Cumhuriyet (Republic) in Istanbul as the only national papers. All the leading journalists from Istanbul were arrested and brought before the Independence Tribunal in the east. Eventually they were released, but they were not allowed to resume their work. With the press out of the way, on the advice of the Independence Tribunal the government closed down the Progressive Republican Party on 3 June. According to the tribunal, members of the party had supported the rebellion and tried to exploit religion for political purposes. Reforms and executions With complete domination of the political scene assured, Mustafa Kemal and his government embarked on an extensive programme of reforms. There is an interesting parallel here with the second constitutional period, when a movement that had started out as a campaign for the restoration of the constitution had gained power (in 1908), shared that power for a certain period (until 1913) with others in a pluralistic and relatively free environment, and finally had established its own power monopoly, which it used to push through a radical programme of secularization and modernization (1913–18). The same pattern now repeated itself with a movement for national sovereignty being victorious (1922), going through a pluralistic phase (until 1925) and then establishing an authoritarian regime, which embarked on a programme of reforms. The authoritarian nationalist phases of both the Unionist and the Kemalist eras also witnessed the brutal suppression of minority communities: the Armenians in the first case, the Kurds in the second. This seems to suggest that in both these phases of THE EMERGENCE OF THE ONE-PARTY STATE, 1923–27 173 the Young Turk movement, when the choice was between a democratic system with a slower pace of reform and an authoritarian one with more opportunities for radical measures, the second alternative won out because what counted for the Young Turks in the end was the strengthening and survival of the state, democracy (or ‘constitutionalism’ or ‘national sovereignty’) being a means to that end, not an end in itself. Like those of 1913–18, the Kemalist reforms aimed to secularize and modernize society. In September 1925 the religious shrines (türbes) and dervish convents (tekkes) were closed down and in November the turban and fez, the red felt cap that had been the Ottoman gentleman’s traditional headgear since the days of Sultan Mahmut II, were prohibited and replaced by the Western-style hat or cap. These measures met with stubborn resistance from the population. Tekkes and türbes played an important role in everyday Muslim life and the hat was considered a symbol of Christian Europe. The Independence Tribunals played their part in suppressing this resistance. Under the Law on the Maintenance of Order nearly 7500 people were arrested and 660 were executed.4 In the first half of 1926, the European calendar was adopted, as were the Swiss civil code and the penal code from Mussolini’s Italy. A number of laws restructuring the banking sector were passed and, except in the army, all courtesy titles (like Bey, Efendi or Paşa) were abolished. Together with the abolition of the sultanate and caliphate and the proclamation of the republic, these measures form the first wave of the Kemalist reforms. It is clear that they constituted an extension of the Tanzimat and Unionist reforms, which had secularized most of the legal and educational systems. With the relegation of the sultan-caliph to the role of ornament and the removal of the Şeyhülislam from the cabinet, the state itself had been secularized to a large extent already. Islam had been the state religion of the empire, but so it was under the early republic. The major new step of the Kemalists was the complete secularization of family law, which, through the abolition of religious marriages and polygamy, touched the daily life of the population. They also went much further in the secularization of society (see below). That the sartorial aspects of the reforms (for example the ‘hat reform’) played such an important role (under the supporters of reform as well as under its enemies) fits into a tradition that went back to the new Western-style uniforms, the fezzes and the stamboulines of Mahmut II’s servants. That this tradition lives on to the present day is shown by the recent debates about the wearing of scarves by female Muslim students. Like the Unionist reformers before them, the Kemalists stopped short of unleashing a real socio-economic revolution or reform programme. There was no attempt to change the ownership relations in the country. 174 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY The day of reckoning: the İzmir conspiracy The political opposition and its press had been silenced in 1925, but Mustafa Kemal, being well aware of the capabilities of his opponents and of their expertise in underground organization (going back to the days before the revolution of 1908), still felt insecure. As long as the former leaders of the CUP and the PRP were still around, with their prestige as heroes from the independence war intact, they could exploit the prevailing discontent arising from the continuing bad economic situation and the unpopularity of the reforms. Mustafa Kemal spent May and June 1926 on an extended inspection tour of the south and west of the country. When he was about to arrive in İzmir on 15 June (he was unexpectedly delayed), a plot to assassinate him was uncovered. The plotters were arrested and turned out to be a small band of professional gunmen, led by a former representative in the national assembly (and secretary of the Defence of Rights Group), Ziya Hurşit. The Ankara Independence Tribunal was sent to İzmir and immediately after its arrival on 18 June waves of arrests began. Almost all the surviving prominent Unionists were arrested, as well as the former PRP members of the assembly, except for Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay) and Adnan (Adıvar), who were abroad at the time. During the trial, held from 26 June to 12 July, the arrested politicians were accused of having supported the assassination plot and of having planned a coup d’état. Of the accused, 16 were condemned to death, despite the fact that most of them had not been proved to be involved. The military heroes associated with the PRP, Kâzım Karabekir, Ali Fuat (Cebesoy), Refet (Bele), and Cafer Tayyar (Eğilmez), were released under the pressure of public opinion and of signs of discontent from the army. It was clear, however, that their position in politics had been irretrievably lost. A second trial opened in Ankara in August against more than 50 important former Unionists. Even more than the first, this was a show trial during which the policies of the CUP leaders when in power and their opposition to Mustafa Kemal were the real themes and the conspiracy of June 1926 was a side issue. Four of the accused were hanged, while a number of others received prison sentences. Hüseyin Rauf, who was officially regarded as the main culprit, was sentenced in absentia to ten years imprisonment. Kara Kemal, whom the prosecution regarded as the brains behind the actual assassination attempt, had been sentenced to death in absentia during the first part of the trial. When his hiding place in Istanbul was discovered, he shot himself. End of an era: ‘The Speech’ The troubled postwar period was symbolically closed with Mustafa THE EMERGENCE OF THE ONE-PARTY STATE, 1923–27 175 Kemal’s 36-hour speech before the congress of the Republican People’s Party from 15 to 20 October 1927. This is a remarkable and hugely influential text, which deserves consideration. He presented it as a report on the history of the Turkish national movement from 1919 to 1927 and generally the historical character he claimed for his text has been accepted, although later generations in Turkey have debated whether it should be considered a historical source or as a piece of historiography. The author’s prestige and the political climate of the period have seen to it that the text has become the basis for nearly all Turkish historiography on the period to the present day. It was translated into German, French and English in 1928–29 and has been deeply influential in foreign historiography as well. In reality, the Nutuk (Speech), as it is simply known, is not a history of the period from 1919 to 1927, but it ends with the emergence of the Progressive Republican Party in November 1924. Only 1.5 per cent of the text is concerned with later events. The reason is that the speech is not really a survey of modern Turkish history at all. It is a vindication of the purges of 1925–26, and criticizing the former leaders of the PRP is its main theme, just as criticism of the old CUP leaders had been the theme of Mustafa Kemal’s ‘memoirs’ published in March 1926. In his attempt to disgrace his former colleagues, he presents them throughout as doubters, incompetents and traitors, and depicts himself as the one who led the movement from the outset. It is significant that the speech begins with his arrival in Anatolia in May 1919, disregarding the earlier phase of the national resistance movement. In what is obviously a distortion of the historical truth, it presents the independence struggle not as one to preserve parts of the Ottoman Empire, but as a movement for the establishment of a new Turkish state. The context in which the speech was given also served to distort the historical picture. The RPP called its 1927 congress – and it is generally described as such – the ‘second congress of the RPP’ though in fact it was the first. The RPP called it the second because it retrospectively adopted the congress at Sivas in 1919 as its first, thus emphasizing the (false) identification of the RPP with the national liberation movement and monopolizing its heritage. While the period from 1923 to 1926 decisively influenced political life in Turkey in an authoritarian sense for the next 20 years, the congress of 1927 and Mustafa Kemal’s speech determined the historical vision of the genesis of the new Turkish state for generations. 11 · The Kemalist One-Party State, 1925–45 The political system of Kemalist Turkey: party and state From the promulgation of the Law on the Maintenance of Order in March 1925, Turkey’s government was an authoritarian one-party regime and, not to put too fine a point on it, a dictatorship. We have seen how the law and the tribunals established under it were used in 1925–26 to silence all opposition and how, in his great speech of 1927, Mustafa Kemal Pasha vindicated this repression. The Law on the Maintenance of Order remained in force until 1929, when the government felt secure enough to allow it to lapse. To all intents and purposes, the Republican People’s Party had established a power monopoly and, at the party congress of 1931, Turkey’s political system was officially declared to be that of a one-party state.1 Apart from an experiment with a ‘tame’ opposition party in 1930, no legal opposition was active in Turkey until after the Second World War. Underground opposition was limited to an insignificant communist movement and more important actions of Kurdish nationalists. There were almost continuous small uprisings in the mountains of the southeast and one major insurrection in Dersim (Tunceli) in 1937–38. This was again suppressed with the utmost severity and again tens of thousands of Kurds were forcibly resettled in the west of the country. Small groups of émigrés of different political colours (royalists, liberals, Islamists and socialists) continued to attack the regime in pamphlets and periodicals from places as far apart as Paris, Sofia, Damascus and Cairo, but none carried any real weight.2 According to the 1924 constitution, all power resided in the Great National Assembly of Turkey, which was the only legitimate representative of the nation’s sovereign will. But one of the reactions of the RPP leadership to the emergence of opposition in 1924 had been to tighten party discipline to the extent that free discussion was only allowed in the (closed) meetings of the parliamentary party. After a decision on any topic had been reached in these meetings, delegates were bound by THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 177 the majority decision and were required to vote for it in the assembly. This meant that even before March 1925 the assembly votes were a foregone conclusion. During the one-party era they became a mere formality. Discussion was restricted, even within the meetings of the parliamentary party, which served as the forum in which the cabinet announced and explained its decisions. Although the leeway of the faction varied according to the field of policy concerned (the economy being debated much more freely than foreign affairs, for instance, which were left almost completely to the cabinet), the function of its meetings was essentially to ratify and legitimize cabinet decisions. While the RPP had a rank-and-file organization throughout the country, which its secretary-general led, the members of the national assembly, the cabinet, the prime minister (who was also executive chairman of the party) and the president (who doubled as party chairman) dominated it. State and party were closely identified. One important result was that the party itself never developed an independent ideological or organizational ‘personality’ and became heavily bureaucratized. Attempts by the party’s long-serving secretary-general, Recep (Peker), to make the party more independent and to develop an independent ‘Kemalist’ ideology failed when, at the 1936 congress, İsmet (İnönü) declared the congruency between the state apparatus and the party organization to be official policy. This meant that, to take just one example, the governor of a province would automatically be the head of the RPP branch in his province. Four-yearly parliamentary elections were held throughout the oneparty period, but they served only a ceremonial function. The slates of candidates for parliamentary seats were drawn up by the chairman of the party, the executive chairman and the secretary-general and then ratified by the party congress and there was no way in which citizens, even if they were active party members, could stand for parliament on their own initiative. Even if elections were tightly controlled, the fact that women were given the right to vote and to be elected on 5 December 1934 was still an important step in the emancipation of Turkish women. From March 1935 onwards, 18 women deputies took their places in the Great National Assembly in Ankara. In this respect at least Turkey had caught up with the most advanced countries of Europe. Tutelary democracy: the Free Republican Party The monolithic political system established after 1925 left very little room for the ventilation of competing ideas within the leadership, and none at all for the expression of social discontent from without. At the same time, the authoritarian behaviour of the RPP and of its regional 178 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY and local representatives, the attendant favouritism and corruption, the lack of civil liberties, and also the reform policies of the government, created widespread resentment. By the end of the 1920s, the world economic crisis, which hit Turkey very hard as it did other agricultural producers, had compounded this situation. The RPP had no real means of managing this discontent (other than suppressing its expression) since its authoritarian structure left it without the means of communication with the mass of the population. The crisis in the country was not reflected in more lively debates in the assembly at all. At the opening of the 1931 party congress party chairman İsmet not once mentioned the economic crisis. In 1930, Mustafa Kemal, who was aware of the existence of discontent (though probably not of its scale) through reports and through his frequent inspection tours in the country, decided to allow and even encourage the founding of a loyal opposition party, with the twin aims of channelling the social discontent and of shaking up the lethargic RPP. He may also have wanted to put pressure on İsmet who, after five years in power, had gradually built up his own power base and was no longer only the president’s puppet. Mustafa Kemal approached his old friend Fethi (Okyar) with an offer to found a new party. Fethi had recently returned from a tour of duty as ambassador in Paris (where he had been sent after his defeat as prime minister in March 1925) and he had submitted a highly critical report on the state of the country and İsmet’s policies to the president. The two men discussed the proposal for a few days. Fethi asked for guarantees that the government would allow his party to function and that Mustafa Kemal himself would remain impartial. For his part, Mustafa Kemal demanded that the new party remain faithful to the ideals of republicanism and secularism. When they agreed, Fethi proceeded to found the Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Free Republican Party). Mustafa Kemal ordered a number of his closest collaborators, among them his oldest friend Nuri (Conker), to join the new party. To prove his good faith, he also announced that his own sister, Makbule, had joined it. In the end, only 15 representatives joined the FRP but they were all eminent members of the Kemalist establishment. The party produced an 11-point manifesto, which echoed that of the Progressive Republican Party of 1924 in that it advocated a liberal economic policy and encouragement of foreign investment, as well as freedom of speech and direct elections (Turkey still had a system of two-tier elections). The new party was greeted with widespread enthusiasm. Its branch offices were literally inundated with applications for membership. Huge and ecstatic crowds met Fethi when he visited İzmir early in September. THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 179 There were skirmishes with the police, and when the police fired into the crowd a number of people were wounded and a boy was killed. This was a turning point in the party’s short history. The RPP leaders were alarmed and demanded that Mustafa Kemal should state openly that he was and would remain at the head of their party, which he did on 10 September.3 In October 1930, local elections were held and the FRP managed to win in 30 of the 502 councils.4 Even though this was only a small minority of the seats, the governing party was surprised and alarmed. Then, in an assembly debate directly after the elections, Fethi accused the governing party of large-scale irregularities and electoral fraud. This in turn led to fierce attacks on the FRP, in which it and its leader were accused of high treason. Mustafa Kemal now told Fethi privately that he could no longer remain impartial in this atmosphere. Unwilling to conduct political opposition against the president himself, Fethi felt he had no choice but to close down the FRP on 16 November 1930. For the rest of his life he remained bitter about what he felt to be Mustafa Kemal’s desertion at this juncture.5 A month later, on 23 December, an incident occurred in the town of Menemen, not far from İzmir. A group of young dervishes from Manisa, led by a certain Mehmet, walked into town, unfurled a green banner and called for the restoration of the şeriat and the caliphate. When word of this reached the headquarters of the gendarmerie, it sent out a company of soldiers under reserve lieutenant Mustafa Fehmi Kubilay. When he demanded the surrender of the dervishes, they attacked him and cut off his head, which they then paraded on a stick. A gendarmerie unit arrived and opened fire, killing three of the ringleaders, including Mehmet. The aspect of the matter that was really shocking to the Kemalist leadership was not so much the action of the dervishes, however, but the fact that over a thousand bystanders had watched these events unfold without anyone raising his voice in protest. This could be, and was, interpreted as tacit support by the public for the rebels. The government took stern action, with martial law being declared and over 2000 arrests made (among them many former FRP supporters). Some 28 people were executed, but the bill envisaging the razing to the ground of Menemen and the deportation of its inhabitants, though initially supported by Mustafa Kemal, was eventually dropped.6 The RPP’s totalitarian tendencies The extent of resentment and opposition to the RPP regime, which the Free Party episode had brought to light were a sobering experience for Mustafa Kemal and his followers, who thereafter tightened their hold 180 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY on the country by bringing under their direct control all the country’s cultural and intellectual life, suppressing those independent social and cultural organizations that had survived from the CUP era. There were no more experiments with opposition, although Mustafa Kemal tried to combat the lethargy of the assembly by having a number of seats (30 in the 1931 elections, 16 in 1935) reserved for independents. In the prevailing climate, however, this was not very effective: in 1931 not even the 30 seats left vacant by the People’s Party for independent candidates could be filled and in 1935 the number of independents dropped to 13.7 First and foremost among the social and cultural institutions to be suppressed was the Türk Ocakları (the Turkish Hearth movement). It had been reactivated under the leadership of the minister of education, Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver), and it tried to spread nationalist, positivist and secularist ideas in the country through lectures, courses and exhibitions. When it was closed down in 1931, it had more than 30,000 members and 267 branches.8 From 1932 it was replaced by the socalled Halk Evleri (People’s Homes) in towns and by Halk Odaları (People’s Rooms) in large villages; they served essentially the same function but were tightly controlled by the provincial branches of the party. By the end of the Second World War there were nearly 500 of these People’s Homes in all parts of the country. Another organization to be closed down was the Türk Kadınlar Birliği (Turkish Women’s Union), which women who had been active in the national resistance movement had founded in 1924. At an extraordinary congress in May 1935 it decided, at the request of the RPP leadership, to disband officially because its aims (equal rights for Turkish women) had been achieved with the granting of the vote to Turkey’s women. The Turkish Freemasons’ lodges, whose members had often been prominent in the Young Turk movement from the beginning of the century, were closed down in the same year, as was the union of journalists. All newspapers and periodicals leaning towards the liberal or socialist opposition had been closed down in 1925. From then on only government-controlled newspapers appeared, with the one exception of Yarın (Tomorrow), published in 1929–30 by Arif (Oruç), a left-wing journalist and – significantly – an old friend of Mustafa Kemal and Fethi. Yarın had been allowed to attack İsmet’s economic policies (and as such it was a kind of forerunner of the FRP), but it was closed down in 1931 after the adoption of a new press law that gave the government powers to close down any paper that published anything contradicting the ‘general policies of the country’. THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 181 Finally, in 1933, the old Darülfünun (‘House of Sciences’, the university) in Istanbul was given a new charter and reconstituted as the University of Istanbul. In the process two-thirds of its teaching staff, more than 100 people, lost their tenure and only the most dependable followers of the Kemalist line were kept on. It was the first of many purges the Turkish universities were to experience in the following 50 years. Starting in 1933, however, academic life in Turkey was also strengthened by an influx of German scholars and scientists, who left Germany after Hitler came to power. The Turkish government invited 63 German professors to come and teach in Turkey, where they raised the level of academic learning dramatically and provided a formative influence on several generations of students.9 Both the press and the educational institutions were mobilized to spread the Kemalist message. The stifling political and intellectual climate that resulted has often been overlooked in traditional historiography and needs to be given due attention. Nevertheless, it should also be pointed out that the Kemalist leadership did inspire a great many people – mostly writers, teachers, doctors and other professionals and students – with its vision of a modern, secular, independent Turkey. These people, who saw themselves as an elite, with a mission to guide their ignorant compatriots, often worked very hard and with great personal sacrifice for their ideals. This ‘noblesse oblige’ attitude of the Kemalist elite is something that modern revisionist writers of the right and the left tend to overlook. The Kemalist message The set of ideas or ideals that together formed Kemalizm (Kemalism) or Atatürkçülük (Atatürkism) as it came to be called in the 1930s, evolved gradually. It never became a coherent, all-embracing ideology, but can best be described as a set of attitudes and opinions that were never defined in any detail. As we have seen, Recep Peker’s attempts to do so failed. As a result, Kemalism remained a flexible concept and people with widely differing worldviews have been able to call themselves Kemalist. The basic principles of Kemalism were laid down in the party programme of 1931. They were republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism and revolutionism (or reformism). Secularism and nationalism had of course been among the distinctive characteristics of Young Turk ideology at least since 1913. During the 1930s both were carried to extremes, secularism being interpreted not only as a separation of state and religion, but as the removal of religion from public life and the establishment of complete state control over remaining religious institutions. An extreme form of nationalism, with 182 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY the attendant creation of historical myths, was used as the prime instrument in the building of a new national identity, and as such was intended to take the place of religion in many respects. Republicanism had been a basic principle since 1923 (when, it will be remembered, political activity in favour of a return of the monarchy had been outlawed). ‘Populism’ meant the notion, first emphasized during the First World War, of national solidarity and putting the interests of the whole nation before those of any group or class. In a negative sense it entailed a denial of class interests (according to Kemalism, Turkey did not have classes in the European sense) and a prohibition of political activity based on class (and thus of all socialist or communist activity). Revolutionism – or reformism, as Atatürk’s more conservative followers have preferred to interpret the Turkish term İnkılapçılık – meant a commitment to ongoing (but orderly and state-led) change and support for the Kemalist reform programme. Statism was a new concept that recognized the pre-eminence of the state in the economic field; and it was probably the most widely discussed issue in Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s. It is treated in more detail below. These six principles, symbolized in the party emblem as six arrows (the Altı Ok), were incorporated into the Turkish constitution in 1937. Together they formed the state ideology of Kemalism and the basis for indoctrination in schools, the media and the army. Sometimes Kemalism was even described as the ‘Turkish religion’. Nevertheless, as an ideology it lacked coherence and, perhaps even more importantly, emotional appeal. This ideological void was filled to some extent by the personality cult that grew up around Mustafa Kemal during and even more so after his lifetime. From 1926 onwards statues of him were erected in the major towns. He was presented as the father of the nation, its saviour and its teacher. Indoctrination in schools and universities (where ‘History of the Turkish Revolution’ became a compulsory subject in 1934) focused on him to an extraordinary degree. The fact that he was not associated with a very definite ideology that could be discredited, as fascism, national socialism and Marxism–Leninism have been, has meant that his personality cult could survive changes in the political climate. At the time of writing it is still very much part of the official culture of Turkey. Friction within the leadership While the political leadership was in complete control over both party and parliament, tensions gradually built up within the leadership, notably between İsmet, who served as prime minister for 12 consecutive years from 1925 to 1937, and the president, Mustafa Kemal. In his THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 183 later years the president largely withdrew from politics and left the dayto- day running of the country in İsmet’s hands, while he interested himself in specific reform projects such as that of the script and language. He surrounded himself with a small group of supporters and friends with whom he spent most nights eating, drinking and discussing the country’s problems and future. Experts from different walks of life were often invited to these sessions in the presidential villa in Çankaya, which as a rule lasted from late in the evening until the break of day. Suggestions were made, criticisms voiced, plans drawn up and decisions taken. What made the situation potentially dangerous was Mustafa Kemal’s relative isolation from the daily affairs of the government. His plans and decisions therefore tended to become increasingly poorly coordinated with those of the prime minister, İsmet. The fact that, even in semi-retirement, Mustafa Kemal remained the undisputed master of the country meant that he could overrule the prime minister and his cabinet if he chose to do so under the influence of his circle of friends and advisers. Over the years there were several instances of this happening, in internal, economic and foreign affairs. Twice the president forced a cabinet minister to resign without consulting İsmet. His interference irritated İsmet, who became increasingly wary of what he saw as the president’s kitchen cabinet in Çankaya.10 Finally, in September 1937, there was an open row between the two men, which led to Atatürk (as he had become in 1934 with the introduction of family names) demanding İsmet’s resignation. İnönü duly resigned, ostensibly for health reasons. Mahmut Celâl (Bayar), a former CUP secretary and Teşkilât-i Mahsusa chief in İzmir, first head of the Business Bank of Turkey (Türkiye İş Bankası) created in 1924 and minister of economic affairs since 1932, replaced him. Atatürk’s death and İsmet’s return to power Some of Atatürk’s irritability and erratic behaviour during 1937–38 may have been due to his deteriorating health. Apart from two heart attacks, in 1923 and 1927, which seem to have left no permanent damage, he was generally healthy until early in 1937, when the symptoms of advanced cirrhosis of the liver, due to excessive consumption of alcohol over many years, started to become apparent. The illness was officially diagnosed only at the beginning of 1938 and from March onwards his condition deteriorated quickly. His illness was kept a secret from the public (even in October a newspaper that mentioned it was immediately closed for three months), but leading political circles were well aware of the impending end and a struggle for power began. Despite the events of the previous year, İsmet İnönü was clearly the 184 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY leading candidate for the succession, but he had made many enemies during his years in office, the most determined being the members of Atatürk’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. They attempted to remove him (by having him appointed ambassador to Washington) and to engineer new elections for the assembly, which would have to elect Atatürk’s successor and which was still packed with İsmet’s supporters. There was even talk of a verbal political testament of the president, in which he pronounced himself against İsmet’s succession.11 All these attempts, however, proved fruitless. Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatürk died on 10 November 1938 in the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, where he had been lying ill for the past few months. On 11 November the national assembly elected İsmet İnönü the second president of the republic. His succession was due to four factors: the refusal of the prime minister, Bayar, to cooperate with his adversaries (Bayar had kept in touch with İnönü throughout this period); his adversaries’ inability to come up with a credible candidate; the fact that the parliamentary deputies, as well as the party bureaucrats, were people who had been picked by İnönü himself years before; and the decision of the military leaders to support İnönü and of the Chief of General Staff, Marshal Fevzi Çakmak, not to stand as a candidate, even though it was made clear to him that his candidacy would have considerable support in the assembly. Atatürk’s body was brought to Ankara amid widespread demonstrations of grief and mourning and laid to rest temporarily in the Ethnographic Museum. In 1953 it was finally interred in an imposing purpose-built mausoleum on what was then a hill on the outskirts of the capital but is now right in its centre. An obituary Under the influence of the official historiography of the Turkish Republic (and ultimately of Atatürk himself in his great speech), historians have depicted the emergence of modern Turkey as the single-handed achievement of one man. The reader will have noticed that in this book an attempt has been made to paint a different picture. Nevertheless, it remains true that it is doubtful whether Turkey would have survived as an independent state without his unique combination of tactical mastery, ruthlessness, realism and sense of purpose. Up to 1919 he had been a member of the military inner circle of the CUP with a reputation as both a brilliant staff officer and commander and a quarrelsome and over ambitious personality. His rule after 1925 may be regarded both as a daring attempt at achieving a modernization leap for Turkish society and as a regressive phase in the development of mature and democratic THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 185 political institutions in Turkey, but there can be hardly any doubt that he was absolutely the right man on the right spot during the greatest crisis in the history of his country and that he contributed more than anyone else to its survival. İsmet İnönü as ‘National Leader’ Around the time of Atatürk’s death there had been widespread speculation about whether there would be a change in policy and even about whether the republic would endure. It was soon clear, however, that İsmet İnönü meant to continue the basic policies of his predecessor. His position as leader was formalized at an extraordinary party congress in December 1938, at which the party statutes were changed to make Atatürk the ‘eternal party chairman’, while İnönü was made ‘permanent party chairman’. The term millî şef (national leader), which from time to time had been used for Atatürk in the 1930s, now became İnönü’s official title. For a few months İnönü kept Bayar as prime minister, but on 25 January 1939 the latter handed in his resignation. The main reason was the basic difference of opinion between the president and the prime minister over economic policies, but İnönü had also made life difficult for the cabinet by inspiring a number of press campaigns, inquiries and lawsuits aimed at the administration that had been in power in 1937–38. At the same time İnönü tried to broaden his political base by a policy of reconciliation with the old leaders of the independence movement who had been purged in 1926. Two of these, Ali Fuat Cebesoy and Refet Bele had made their peace with Atatürk during his last years, but the rest had remained in limbo. A number of them had lived abroad since 1926. They now returned to the country and were given parliamentary seats. Celâl Bayar was succeeded by Dr Refik Saydam who served as prime minister until his death in July 1942. He in turn was succeeded by the foreign minister, Şükrü Saraçoğlu, who remained in power until 1945, but during these years, which were of course entirely dominated by the Second World War, İsmet İnönü was in complete control and his prime ministers (who were always at the same time vice-chairmen of the party) executed the policies determined by the president.12 The Turkish regime of the 1930s and 1940s, of which the main characteristics have been outlined above, thus in many ways resembled the other authoritarian regimes that sprang up all over southern Europe in this era (such as the regimes of Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain and Metaxas in Greece). It differed from them, however, in that it was not culturally and religiously conservative, but on the contrary attempted a far-reaching cultural revolution in a conservatively religious society. 186 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY The example of the most important dictatorship in the Mediterranean, fascist Italy, was certainly important to the Turkish leadership. The way in which Mussolini seemed to forge national unity and to energize Italian society impressed many in Turkey (as, indeed, it did in many other European countries), and a number of new laws promulgated under the republic were straight copies of Italian legislation. There were many similarities between the Italian fascist regime and the Kemalists: the extreme nationalism, with its attendant development of a legitimizing historical mythology and racist rhetoric, the authoritarian character of the regime and its efforts to establish a complete totalitarian monopoly for its party of the political, social and cultural scene, the personality cult that developed around both Mussolini on the one hand and Atatürk and İnönü on the other, and the emphasis on national unity and solidarity with its attendant denial of class conflicts. Nevertheless, the differences between the two regimes are greater than the similarities. Fascism came into being as a genuinely (albeit orchestrated) popular movement, in reaction to the disruption of traditional society brought about by the industrial revolution and to the threat posed by the socialist movement to the middle class; the Young Turk regimes in Turkey imposed their policies from above on an indifferent population. Unlike the fascists, the Kemalists never attempted any large-scale or permanent mobilization of the population for its goals. It has been pointed out that of all the speeches made by Atatürk in these years not a single one took place before a mass rally in the fascist style. Also, while the Kemalist state was undoubtedly authoritarian and totalitarian, the existence of an all-powerful leader was not made into a guiding political principle with its own legitimacy, a ‘leader principle’. Atatürk intensely disliked being called a dictator.13 The semblance of a democratic system with a parliament and elections was carefully left in place. Finally, one great, and possibly decisive, difference from the Italian example is the lack of militarist rhetoric and expansionist (or irredentist) propaganda and policies in the Turkish case and the cautious, defensive and realistic policies of Turkey’s leaders. Reform policies 1925–35: secularism and nationalism In the secularist drive, which was the most characteristic element of Kemalist reform, three areas can be discerned. The first was the secularization of state, education and law: the attack on the traditional strongholds of the institutionalized Islam of the ulema. The second was the attack on religious symbols and their replacement by the symbols of European civilization. The third was the secularization of social life and the attack on popular Islam it entailed. THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 187 It can be argued that the first wave of Kemalist reforms had finished the process of secularization of state, education and law, which had begun under Sultan Mahmut a century before and which had been almost completed under the CUP during its rule from 1913 to 1918. The abolition of the sultanate and caliphate, the proclamation of the republic and the new constitution in 1922–24 were the final stages in the secularization of the state, and the seal was set on this development with the removal from the 1928 constitution of the clause that made Islam the state religion of Turkey.14 Even before the birth of the republic, the role of the şeriat, the holy law, had been limited almost exclusively to the realm of family law. Now this sector too was taken from the jurisdiction of the ulema with the adoption of the Swiss civil code and the Italian penal code in 1926. The penal code prohibited the forming of associations on a religious basis. The educational system, which had already been brought into the control of the Ministry of Education under the CUP, was now completely secularized through the Law on the Unification of Education in March 1924. At the same time the medreses, or religious colleges, were abolished, and their place was taken by schools for preachers and by a theological faculty established at the University of Istanbul. The year 1924 also witnessed the abolition of the venerable function of Şeyhülislam and of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Pious Foundations. Two directorates were created in its place, the Diyanet Işleri Müdürlüğü (Directorate for Religious Affairs) and the Evkaf Umum Müdürlüğü (Directorate-General for Pious Foundations). Both were attached directly to the prime minister’s office. The establishment of these directorates clearly shows that the Kemalist perception of secularism meant not so much separation of state and religion as state control of religion. The second area in which secularization took place was that of religious symbols. This was the most important aspect of measures like banning traditional headgear (such as the fez and turban) for men in 1925 and restricting religious attire to prayer services in the mosques, which was ordered in September of that year. It also inspired the attacks made by Atatürk and his followers on wearing the veil (although this was never actually forbidden) and, for instance, the decree of 1935, which made Sunday the official day of rest instead of Friday. It is clear from Atatürk’s own statements that measures such as the ban on religious attire were motivated as much by the desire to claim all visible expression of authority as a monopoly of the state (and its uniformed servants) as by the wish to secularize society. A number of other reforms, which were not specifically aimed at 188 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY religion, were nevertheless symbolic. The adoption of the Western clock and calendar in 1926, of Western numerals in 1928 and of Western weights and measures in 1931 not only gave Turkey a more European image, but also made communication with the Western world much easier. It was also one more measure designed to cut links with the Islamic world. The changes in the position of women also have religious connotations, or at least were felt to do so by many people. These changes, after all, consisted not only of formal emancipation (the right to vote), but also of the active promotion of new and very different role models: professional women, women pilots, opera singers and beauty queens. The introduction of family names in 1934 was a great step forward insofar as registration was concerned. The assembly voted to bestow on Mustafa Kemal Pasha the family name Atatürk (Father-Turk). The name was exclusive to him and his descendants, but since he died childless no other Turk has ever been called Atatürk. Perhaps the most drastic measure was the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928. Ottoman Turkish was written with a version of the Arabic/ Persian alphabet. While this suited the Arabic and Persian vocabulary, which made up three-quarters of written late Ottoman, it was highly unsuitable for expressing the sounds of the Turkish part of the vocabulary, Arabic being rich in consonants but very poor in vowels while Turkish is exactly the opposite. The result was that Ottoman Turkish sometimes had four different signs for one single sound, while it could not express other sounds at all. When the written language became an important means of communication with the advent of new media such as the press and the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century, reform of the alphabet was needed. The first attempt was made by Münif Pasha, one of the statesmen of the Tanzimat, in a lecture in 1862.15 During the second constitutional period several Young Turk writers – Hüseyin Cahit (Yalçın), Abdullah Cevdet, Celâl Nuri (İleri) – had advocated the adoption of the Latin alphabet, while Enver Pasha had experimented with a reformed version of the Ottoman script, which the army had tried out. From 1923 onwards there had been sporadic discussions of the matter, at the İzmir economic congress and – in February 1924 – in the assembly. At that time there was still much opposition to the adoption of the Latin script in conservative and religious circles, but from 1925 the opposition was silenced. Furthermore, in 1926 the Turkic republics of the Soviet Union decided to adopt the Latin alphabet, which gave added impetus to the discussions in Turkey. In the summer of 1928, a commission under the personal direction of Mustafa Kemal drew up a report on the matter and on 9 August the THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 189 president officially announced for the first time that the Turkish script would replace the Ottoman alphabet. An ‘alphabet mobilization’ was proclaimed and in the following months Mustafa Kemal toured the country explaining the new letters and exhorting everyone to learn them quickly and to teach them to their compatriots. On 1 November a law was passed that made the use of the new alphabet in public communications compulsory from 1 January 1929. While there were good rational arguments for the change, the reason Mustafa Kemal and his followers pushed it through so energetically was undoubtedly ideological: it was yet another way to cut off Turkish society from its Ottoman and Middle Eastern Islamic traditions and to reorient it towards the West. The change was carried through with amazing speed and eventually gained widespread acceptance, but its effect on the struggle against illiteracy was disappointing. There was a huge effort to spread literacy (in the new script) through the millet mektepleri (schools of the nation) for adults, but the lack of primary education in the villages meant that illiteracy has remained relatively high, even compared with other developing countries. In the early 1990s it was still over 35 per cent. Under those people who had received their education before 1928, the old script remained in use in private correspondence, notes and diaries until well into the 1960s. The success of the alphabet reform encouraged those who wanted to reform the language itself. By the nineteenth century the chasm between the written Ottoman of the literate elite and the vernacular of the Turkish population had become very wide. Attempts to bring the written language closer to the spoken one dated from the middle of the nineteenth century – the Young Ottomans, as the first Ottoman journalists, had played a pioneering role. During the reign of the CUP this trend had been reinforced. Ziya Gökalp and his circle advocated the replacement of Arabic and Persian grammatical elements in the language with Turkish ones and the discarding of ‘superfluous’ synonyms, but unlike the purists they accepted Arabic and Persian words that had become part of everyday language. After the alphabet reform, for several reasons the more extreme purists came to the fore. In the first place, the success of the alphabet reform encouraged the idea that this type of ‘revolution by decree’ was possible. In the second place, the nature of the new script encouraged purism. It had been designed to reflect the actual sounds of spoken Turkish, not to transcribe the shape of the old Ottoman writing in new letters. As a result, many of the originally Arabic and Persian words looked alien and even unintelligible in the new script. In the third place, the radical solutions of the purists – to remove all Arabic and Persian 190 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY words from the language and create a pure Turkish one – were in tune with the extreme nationalism of the 1930s. In 1932 Mustafa Kemal took the initiative in convening the first Turkish linguistic congress. During it there was a showdown between the purists and the moderates, and the former won. The moderates argued that language could not be changed by revolution or decree, which was held to be an indirect attack on the revolutionary changes the president had pushed through and a sign of a counter-revolutionary mentality. A reform programme was drawn up and a Society for the Study of the Turkish Language (Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti, later Türk Dil Kurumu) was founded. Its members enthusiastically started to collect words from dialects, ancient literary sources and even Turkic languages from Central Asia to replace the Ottoman vocabulary. The movement soon ran into difficulties. The population only adopted some of the new words and these often existed side-by-side with the word they were intended to replace, acquiring a different meaning. A kind of artificial language, intelligible only to insiders, came into existence. Mustafa Kemal himself gave a number of perfectly unintelligible speeches in the ‘new language’ in 1934, but by 1935 he had reverted to more conventional usage.16 The language reform movement was temporarily saved from deadlock by the launching in 1935 of the Güneş-Dil Teorisi (Sun-Language Theory). This theory held that all languages derived originally from one primeval language, spoken in Central Asia, that Turkish was closest of all languages to this origin and that all languages had developed from the primeval language through Turkish. The theory, concocted by a Viennese ‘Orientalist’ by the name of Kvergic, was greeted with scepticism among Turkish linguists, but it gained the support of Mustafa Kemal, who ordered the Society for the Study of the Turkish Language to study it in detail. The society’s third congress in 1936 officially adopted the theory, and courses in it were made obligatory at the Arts Faculty in Ankara. There was one very good practical reason for the success of the theory: if all words came from Turkish originally, there was no need to purge them now: they could simply be ‘nationalized’ through a fake etymology. Nevertheless, it is clear that many Turks, along with their president, were actually fascinated by the doctrine. After Atatürk’s death in 1938 the language reform movement lost much of its élan. After the Second World War it was continued, but the government no longer actively promoted it. While it lasted, both the existence and the theorizing of the linguistic society owed much to the work of the Society for the Study of Turkish History (Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti, later Türk Tarih Kurumu), which had been founded slightly earlier, in 1931. At its first congress, held in THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 191 Ankara in 1932, the ‘Turkish historical thesis’ was propounded for the first time. This theory, which Mustafa Kemal emphatically supported, held that the Turks were descendants of white (Aryan) inhabitants of Central Asia, who had been forced by drought and hunger to migrate to other areas, such as China, Europe and the Near East. In doing so, they had created the world’s great civilizations. In the Near East, the Sumerians and the Hittites were really proto-Turks. (It is no coincidence that the two major state banks founded in the 1930s were called Sümerbank (Sumerian Bank) and Etibank (Hittite Bank). Attila and Genghis Khan were described as executing civilizing missions. The theory aimed to give Turks a sense of pride in their history and national identity, separate from the immediate past, that is to say the Ottoman era. Declaring the Hittites (and the Trojans) proto-Turks had the added advantage of proving that Anatolia had been a Turkish country since time immemorial, thus extending the roots of the citizens of the republic in the soil they inhabited. It was one of the means whereby the Kemalist leadership tried to construct a new national identity and strong national cohesion. That is not to say that it was a purely cynical form of indoctrination. As with the linguistic theories, there is every indication that Mustafa Kemal himself, and many in the national political leadership and educational establishment, believed in it. From 1932 onwards, the historical thesis formed the mainstay of history teaching in schools and universities. Its more extreme claims were quietly dropped from the late 1940s onwards, but traces remain even in the schoolbooks of today.17 The extreme nationalism of which the historical thesis was a part seems to contradict the admiration for and imitation of Western ways that was the other characteristic of Kemalist policies, but in fact it served to facilitate the adoption of Western ways. On the one hand, the emphasis on the Turkish heritage, even if it was largely mythical, as something separate from the Middle Eastern and Islamic civilization of the Ottoman Empire, made it easier to exchange elements from traditional Middle Eastern civilization for those of the West. On the other hand, it instilled in the Turks, especially those of the younger generations, a strong feeling of national identity and national pride, sometimes bordering on a feeling of superiority, which in a sense psychologically counterbalanced the need to follow Europe. The most significant step in the secularization of social life was the suppression of the dervish orders (tarikats), announced in September and put into operation in November 1925. These mystical brotherhoods had served vital religious and social functions throughout Ottoman history. On a psychological level they offered a mystical, emotional 192 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY dimension that was lacking in the high religion of the ulema and at the same time they served as networks offering cohesion, protection and social mobility. As part of the reaction against Western economic, political and cultural penetration, they seem to have become even more active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As had been the case with the Ottoman state, the relations between the Young Turks and the orders had been unstable. On the one hand, the heterodox (close to Shi’ite Islam) Bektaşi order seems to have supported both the CUP and the Anatolian resistance movement. The Mevlevi order (the followers of the mystic Celâleddin Rumi) had contributed its own battalions during the First World War. On the other hand, members of the Nakşibendi order had led both the anti-constitutionalist uprising in 1909 and the Kurdish rebellion of 1925. Whatever their political position, their widespread networks of convents and shrines, the obedience their followers owed to their sheikhs and the closed and secretive culture of the brotherhoods made them independent to a degree that was unacceptable to a modern centralist national government. By extending their secularization drive beyond the formal, institutionalized Islam the Kemalists now touched such vital elements of popular religion as dress, amulets, soothsayers, holy sheikhs, saints’ shrines, pilgrimages and festivals. The resentment these measures caused and the resistance put up against them was far greater than, for instance, in the case of the abolition of the caliphate, the position of şeyhülislam, or the medreses, which was only important to official ‘high’ religion. While the government succeeded in suppressing most expressions of popular religion, at least in the towns, this did not, of course, disappear. To a large extent, the tarikats simply went underground. But through the simultaneous imposition of an authoritarian and – especially during the 1940s – increasingly unpopular regime and suppression of popular Islam, the Kemalists politicized Islam and turned it into a vehicle for opposition. One could say that, in turning against popular religion, they cut the ties that bound them to the mass of the population. During the 1930s, there were government-inspired attempts to nationalize and modernize Islam, but interest in this ‘Turkish reformation’ was limited to a small part of the elite, and its most obvious manifestation was the replacement of the Arabic ezan (call to prayer from the minaret) with a Turkish one, recited to a melody the state conservatory had composed in 1932.18 This was introduced after earlier stateinduced experiments with the reading of the mevlut, the text recited on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday and with completely Turkified Friday sermons. Much more important was the movement the Islamic modernist Sait THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 193 Nursi, whom his followers called Bediüzzaman (Marvel of the Time), founded in the 1930s. Nursi had had a chequered relationship with the Young Turks, taking part in the counter-revolution of 1909, but also serving as a Teşkilât-i Mahsusa propagandist in the First World War, supporting the national resistance movement but warning against its secularist tendencies in 1923. From the early years of the century, Sait had acquired a reputation as a religious scholar, especially in the east. After the Sheikh Sait rebellion, he was arrested along with many other prominent Kurds and resettled in the town of Isparta in the west. From the 1920s onwards, he laid down the ideas he preached in brochures and booklets, which were later collectively known as the Risale-i Nur (Message of Light). In it, he enjoined Muslims to take God’s unity as the basis of their lives, but also to study modern science and technology and to use them in the cause of Islam, which in his eyes was the only true basis for social cohesion. Between 1935 and 1953, Sait Nursi was arrested and tried a number of times for alleged political use of religion. But while he preached social mobilization and rejected both secularism and nationalism, Sait did not indulge in direct political activity until the late 1950s. During the Kemalist period, his writings were banned, but his growing circle of disciples copied them by hand. After his death the Nurcu movement, as it is called, continued to grow and became very influential in Turkey and among Turkish migrant workers abroad. Taken together, the Kemalist reforms literally altered the face of Turkey. The fact that a non-Western and Muslim country chose to discard its past and seek to join the West made a huge impression in the West, where the fact that an entirely new, modern and different Turkey had sprung up was generally accepted (witness the titles of well-known books about Turkey which appeared in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s: The Turkish Transformation (Henry Elisha Alien, 1935), The New Turks (Eleanor Bisbee, 1951), The Old Turkey and the New (Sir Harry Luke, 1935), Die neue Turkei (Kurt Ziemke, 1930), Modern Turkey (Geoffrey Lewis, 1955) and many more). Generally, these writers overestimated the extent to which Turkish society had changed. By the late 1930s the provincial towns had begun to change visibly. The old town centres more often than not were still in bad repair, but the Kemalists had begun to build new towns, often along the road to the (often equally new) railway station, with ‘rational’ modern architecture, public parks, tea gardens, cinemas and statues of Atatürk. Most provincial centres now had their own electricity plant. In the towns and cities the Kemalists succeeded in dramatically enlarging the group that supported their positivist, secularist and modernist ideals. 194 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY Typically, the backbone of the Kemalist ‘revolution’ in the towns consisted of bureaucrats, officers, teachers, doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs of larger commercial enterprises. The craftsmen and small traders formed the backbone of the suppressed traditional culture. At the same time, the reforms hardly influenced the life of the villagers who made up the great mass of the Turkish population. A farmer or shepherd from Anatolia had never worn a fez, so he was not especially bothered about its abolition. His wife wore no veil anyway, so the fact that its use was discouraged did not mean anything to him or her. He could not read or write, so the nature of the script was in a sense immaterial to him, although the fact that the only man in the village who was able to read and write was the local imam tended to strengthen the religious connotation of the Arabic alphabet. He had to take a family name in 1934, but the whole village would continue to use first names (as is still the case) and the family names remained for official use only. The new family law made polygamy illegal, but those farmers who could afford it would still quite often take into the house a second woman, without marrying her, ascribing her children to his legal wife, if need be. There were attempts to extend the reforms to the villages, to spread modern techniques and to instil a secular and positivist attitude. The ‘People’s Rooms’ constituted one such attempt. Another was the creation of the ‘Village Institutes’ (Köy Enstitüleri). In 1935, an alphabetization drive was begun to combat illiteracy in the Turkish countryside. At that time only about 5000 of the 40,000 Turkish villages had schools (mostly with three classes). Most of them were very primitive and had only one teacher. The man responsible for the campaign was Ismail Hakki Tonguç, Turkey’s leading pedagogue, who had studied the educational ideas of Dewey and Kerschensteiner in Germany. The first attempt to solve the illiteracy problem was to take young villagers who had learnt to read and write in the army, to have them follow a six-month course and then to send them to their villages as ‘educators’ (eğitmenler). When this solution proved unsatisfactory, Tonguç was given the chance to execute his own ideas and to experiment with institutes in which village youngsters trained as primary school teachers, and at the same time acquired modern technical and agricultural skills. The idea was to supply the villages with people who could not only teach their children to read and write, but who could also introduce the villagers to twentieth-century science and technology on a practical level. The village institutes were very successful while they lasted, but with the advent of political pluralism after the Second World War they became a liability to the government, THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 195 when the opposition accused them of spreading communist propaganda. In 1948, the government turned the institutes into ordinary teachertraining establishments. When the Democratic Party came to power in 1950, it abolished them altogether. Economic developments in the one-party era The one subject that dominated Turkish politics and public opinion in the 1930s was the economy. That the Turkish leadership realized the importance of economic problems is shown by the convening as early as February 1923 of the ‘First Turkish Economic Congress’ in İzmir. Mustafa Kemal opened the congress with a speech in which he emphasized the importance of economic independence now that political independence had been won. In this he no doubt addressed the French and British delegates at the peace conference over the heads of his audience. At the congress, 1100 delegates of farmers, traders, workers and industrialists discussed economic policies. Its resolutions were partly incorporated in the dokuz umde (nine principles), the nine-point programme of the People’s Party, which was published in April.19 Much of the debate at the congress was devoted to the same issue that had divided the Young Turks of the prewar era: the choice between liberalism and the state intervention of the ‘National Economy’ programme. The congress did call for protection of local industry, but it did not oppose foreign investment, provided foreigners were not given preferential treatment. The leadership took the rather disparate resolutions of the congress to mean that it called for a mixed economy, with the state being responsible for major investments. The minister of economic affairs at the time, Mahmut Esat (Bozkurt), announced that Turkish economic policies would be based on the ‘New Turkish Economic School’, which was neither capitalist nor socialist. What the new school amounted to never became very clear, however. Basically, the economic policies pursued in the 1920s were liberal, in the sense that they were based on private ownership and initiative. They were not liberal, however, in the sense of non-interference on the part of the state. The state did interfere where major investments were concerned. By far the most important investment concerned railway building. Eight hundred kilometres of track were laid between 1923 and 1929, and in 1929 another 800 kilometres were under construction. In 1924 the government decided to buy out the foreign-owned railway companies, which dominated the west of the country. By 1930, 3000 kilometres of track had been bought and another 2400 still remained in foreign hands. Eventually, all would be bought by the Turkish state. In 1925, the other major foreign presence in the economy, the old 196 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY Ottoman tobacco monopoly, was bought out. It was turned into a state monopoly into which a number of other sectors (alcohol, sugar, matches and explosives) were integrated. The state then partly farmed out these monopolies to private companies. The state also tried to improve the financial infrastructure. The largest bank in the country was still the Ottoman Bank, but in 1924–25 the old Agricultural Bank was reorganized and two new banks were founded; the Business Bank (İş Bankası) and the Industrial Bank (Sanayi Bankası), Mustafa Kemal took a personal interest in the Business Bank. He invested the donations sent to him by Indian Muslims during the national struggle, but the main impetus for the new Business Bank came from the forced merger with the much bigger National Credit Bank (İtibar-i Millî Bankası), which the CUP had founded as part of its National Economy programme during the First World War.20 Turkish industry was still very weak and took a long time to recover from the effects of the departure of the Greeks and Armenians. Until 1929, the provisions of the Lausanne treaty prevented Turkey from raising its import tariffs and it has been pointed out by some historians that the disappearance of the Greek and Armenian traders actually made it easier for foreign companies to penetrate the Turkish markets directly, with their main competitors out of the way. By 1927, Turkey had slightly over 65,000 industrial firms, employing a total of 250,000 workers, but of these firms only 2822 used mechanical power; the overwhelming majority were artisans’ workshops.21 In 1927, the ‘Law on the Encouragement of Industry’, which built on the similar law adopted in 1913, was passed. It provided tax exemptions for new and expanding industrial firms. When the restrictions imposed at Lausanne lapsed in 1929, the import tariffs were immediately raised drastically (which hit many Turkish trading firms harder than it did the foreign producers). The lack of entrepreneurial know-how and the lack of a prosperous market, however, prevented a quick expansion of the industrial sector. By far the largest sector of the Turkish economy was still the agricultural one. Here, recovery in the first postwar years had been spectacular (90 per cent during the years 1923–26). The farmers were helped by the abolition of the tithe (aşar) in 1925 and its replacement by a sales tax. In 1927 and 1928 agriculture was hit by a long drought and over the period between 1927 and 1930 growth in this sector was only 11 per cent. The government’s financial policies were conservative, aiming at a balanced budget, low inflation and a strong lira through a tight monetary policy, but Turkey had a trade deficit with the outside world throughout the 1920s and this gradually forced down the exchange rate of the Turkish lira. Then in 1929 and 1930 the world economic crisis THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 197 reached Turkey and, like all agricultural producers, it was hit very hard. The price of wheat declined by two-thirds in a few years and if the terms of trade for wheat producers (against industrial producers) are set at 100 for 1929, they had gone down to 30 by 1933.22 There was as yet no system of buffer stocks to regulate prices so the producers felt the full impact of the crisis. As a result of the loss of the population’s purchasing power and of government-imposed quotas and restrictions, imports declined from 256 million liras in 1929 to just 85 million in 1932. The import of consumer goods declined even faster. As a result, despite falling agricultural producer prices Turkey’s trade deficit turned into a surplus in the 1930s, but many of the small luxuries to which Turkish citizens had become accustomed simply disappeared from the market. It also meant that autarky was no longer a political ideal but became a practical necessity. There had been successes in the building of an autonomous Turkish industry to replace imports, but they were limited to the production of sugar and textiles. Like many governments around the world the Turkish government was at a loss over what to do about the crisis. The years from 1929 to 1932 were a period of searching. The debate between the RPP and the opposition party created by the regime in 1930, the FRP, was almost exclusively about economic policy, with the opposition advocating liberalism and the RPP under İnönü demanding a greater role for the state in the economy. At the 1931 RPP congress ‘statism’ (devletçilik) was officially adopted as the new economic policy and one of the pillars of Kemalist ideology. What this term meant exactly was never clearly defined. It was certainly not a form of socialism: private ownership remained the basis of economic life. Rather, it meant that the state took over responsibility for creating and running industries for which the private sector could not accumulate the necessary capital. A major influence on the formulation of Turkish statist policies was the Soviet Union, which had started its own first five-year plan in 1927. In 1932 a Soviet delegation visited Turkey and drew up a report on the development of Turkish industry. It recommended concentrating on textiles, iron and steel, paper, cement, glass and chemicals. The Soviet Union also made available $8 million in gold to aid the Turkish industrialization programme.23 In 1933 the first Turkish five-year plan was announced, which largely followed the Soviet recommendations. One result was the building of an enormous textile ‘kombinat’ in Kayseri, which significantly lessened the dependence of Turkey, a raw cotton producer and exporter, on imported cotton cloth. In Turkey, the most enthusiastic supporters of the policy of statism (apart from İnönü who was very committed to this line himself) were a 198 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY group of young Kemalist writers who published the journal Kadro (Cadre) from 1932 to 1934. The Kadro group went much further than the party leadership. It wanted to transform the RPP into a trained elite, a cadre that would act as a vanguard of the Kemalist revolution. They advocated state planning in all areas of social, economic and cultural life and saw statism as a viable alternative to communism and capitalism, a sort of ‘third way’. In the end, their wider ideas were not taken up by the leadership, which limited planning to the economic field. Within the leadership itself there were two conflicting currents. One, led by İsmet İnönü, saw statism as a permanent solution and as preferable to liberal capitalism in the Turkish situation. The other, headed by Mahmut Celâl Bayar, the president of the İş Bankası saw it as a transitory stage, necessary until Turkish industry could fend for itself. The friction between the two groups was aggravated because both the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Business Bank were faced with limited investment opportunities, so both ended up pursuing the same projects. The conflict was resolved when Mustafa Kemal intervened and had Celâl appointed minister of economic affairs in İsmet’s cabinet in 1932, thus assuring coordination of economic policies. When İsmet İnönü was ousted and replaced by Celâl Bayar in 1937, a more liberal approach was adopted, but from 1939 onwards the more statist approach of İnönü dominated once more. Under the five-year plan two large holding companies were founded: the Sümerbank (Sumerian Bank), responsible for industry, in 1933, and the Etibank (Hittite Bank), responsible for mining, in 1935. Most stateowned economic enterprises were brought under the umbrella of these two holdings. They were given all kinds of advantages. Among other things, they were allowed to borrow from the Central Bank against 1 per cent interest. A law of 1938 regulated their operations. In theory the state economic enterprises, as they were called, were supposed to operate in a businesslike manner with as much autonomy as possible. In practice their decision-making was heavily influenced by political considerations, which were often irrational from a strictly commercial point of view. While the contributions of the state sector to the Turkish economy have been fiercely criticized over the last few decades, it should also be pointed out that a whole new generation of managers and engineers, who later played an important role in the development of private industry, learned its trade in the state economic enterprises. The state also intervened in the agricultural sector. In 1932, the Agricultural Bank was ordered to regulate prices by building up and selling off stocks, a responsibility transferred in 1938 to the newly created Office for Soil Products (Toprak Mahsulleri Ofisi or TMO). THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 199 During the second half of the 1930s, there was a steady increase in Turkey’s GNP in line with the recovery of the world economy. Trade recovered, too, although much of it now took place within the bounds of bilateral agreements between governments. Nearly 50 per cent of Turkey’s trade in the years before the Second World War was with Germany or its allies, which offered more scope for this type of trade than the more liberal economies of the West. Nevertheless, the economy was still very vulnerable when the Second World War broke out. As we shall see, Turkey managed to remain neutral and stay out of the war until the very end, but in order to do so, it increased its army from a peacetime strength of 120,000 to 1.5 million (although without official mobilization). Feeding and equipping this army brought tremendous economic strains. The Ministry of Defence’s share of the national budget went up from 30 to 50 per cent. Basically, the government had no option but to finance this expenditure by raising taxes and by having the Central Bank print money, thus encouraging inflation. The official consumer price index went from 100 to 459 during the war,24 and this took no account of the black market prices. The war occasioned a new wave of state intervention in all sectors of the economy, which was legitimized by the ‘National Defence Law’ (Millî Korunma Kanunu) passed in January 1940, giving the government almost unlimited powers to fix prices, requisition materials and even to impose forced labour. Forced labour was widely used during the war, especially in the mining industry. The fact that the government used its powers to combat inflation by fixing prices at unrealistically low levels while stimulating inflation through its monetary and budgetary policies led to a booming black market economy, while fewer and fewer products were available through regular retail channels. In the second half of the war the government bowed to this reality and more or less relinquished price controls between 1942 and 1944. Turkey’s GDP, which had been rising steadily throughout the latter half of the 1930s, dropped sharply during the war. It did not reach its 1939 level again until 1950. The standard of living also went down and only recovered in the early 1950s. While for the great majority of Turkish citizens the war meant a sharp drop in their standard of living, there were exceptions. The black market on the one hand and the large degree of government intervention on the other gave those who were in a position to exploit them (big farmers, importers and traders and those officials who handled government contracts and permits) huge profit opportunities. There was a great deal of resentment against these war profiteers and the government reacted by introducing the ‘wealth tax’ (varlık vergisi) in 200 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY November 1942. But the way in which this law was applied was scandalous: local committees consisting of local government officials and representatives of the local councils and chambers of commerce made the tax assessments. There was no fixed rate. The result was that the tax was almost wholly paid by traders in the big cities, notably Istanbul, and that the small non-Muslim communities, who were subjected to rates ten times higher than those of Muslims, paid 55 per cent of the total tax revenue. In addition, non-Muslims were not allowed to spread their payments and as a result often had to sell their businesses or properties to Muslim businessmen in order to pay. Those unable to pay were deported and sentenced to forced labour. The wealth tax was withdrawn in March 1944, under the influence of criticism from Britain and the United States, but by then irreparable damage to the confidence of the minorities in the Turkish state had been done.25 Five months after the passing of the wealth tax law a tax on agricultural produce was introduced to tax the new wealth in the countryside (which was concentrated in the hands of the large commercial landowners). The power relations in the countryside were such, however, that this tax (which in practice meant a return of the tithe abolished in 1925) failed to skim off excess profits from large farmers and fell relatively heavily on small subsistence farmers whose standard of living was already low and falling. Although there are no dependable figures available, up to the early 1950s there probably was a shortage of labour in towns and countryside alike. Widespread unemployment would become a scourge in Turkey in later years, but not yet. According to the laws of economics, this should have meant that the labour force was in a good position to demand better wages and working conditions. The opposite, however, was true. In line with the Young Turk tradition the Kemalist state sided with the traders and entrepreneurs, whom it saw as the standard-bearers of a new and modern society, and it suppressed the labour movement. The Labour Law of 1936 was a direct copy of that of fascist Italy and, while it brought some safeguards to workers in industry, and promised some forms of workers’ insurance (the introduction of which was actually begun in 1946), it also prohibited the formation of trade unions and the calling of strikes. When a Trade Unions Law was introduced in 1947, it still did not allow strikes. Real wages in Turkish industry declined throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Foreign relations The Turkish Republic’s foreign policy throughout the period from 1923 to 1945 can be characterized as cautious, realistic and generally aimed THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 201 at the preservation of the status quo and the hard-won victory of 1923. Until the end of the 1920s, its relations with the Western European democracies were dogged by the aftermath of Lausanne, where a number of problems had not been solved. Most important was the quarrel with Britain over Mosul, an oil-rich province, largely inhabited by Kurds, though with Arab and Turkish minorities. The British army had occupied Mosul after the armistice of 1918, so the Turks included it among the areas whose independence they claimed in the ‘National Pact’. In negotiations during 1923 and 1924 the British insisted on including Mosul in Iraq, rejecting the Turkish proposal of a plebiscite. When the parties could not agree, the issue was submitted to the League of Nations in Geneva, of which Turkey was not yet a member. The League started its discussion of the matter in September 1924. At the same time there were skirmishes between Turkish and British troops in the north of the province and on 9 October the British government issued an ultimatum in which it demanded the withdrawal of the Turkish troops. Turkey backed down and a temporary border was established. A year later, in September 1925, a commission of the League investigated the situation on the spot and, to the surprise of no one at all, announced that it favoured the inclusion of Mosul in Iraq. The League of Nations took a decision to this effect in December 1925 and in June 1926 Turkey formally acquiesced. In return it received 10 per cent of the province’s oil revenues over the next 25 years. This claim was then relinquished in return for a payment by Britain of £700,000. The main problem between Turkey and France was the payment of the Ottoman public debt, in which France had been by far the largest investor before the war. In 1928 an arrangement on the part of the debt to be shouldered by Turkey was reached, but the world economic crisis led to a suspension of payments in 1930. After prolonged negotiations, in 1933 the debt was rescheduled on more favourable terms to Turkey. Apart from these major diplomatic wrangles, in the first years after Lausanne there were continuous irritations between Turkey and the powers. Turkey made a point of asserting its sovereign rights to the full, while France and Britain showed that they had difficulty shedding old habits acquired during the regime of the capitulations. Frictions arose over the European powers’ refusal to move their embassies to Ankara, over the jurisdiction of the Turkish Ministry of Education over mission schools, over the degree of independence of the International Straits Commission established at Lausanne to supervise shipping through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, and over the supranational character of the Orthodox patriarchate in Istanbul. All these matters were eventually settled to Turkey’s satisfaction. 202 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY The late 1920s and early 1930s saw a gradual improvement in Turkey’s relations with its neighbours. A non-aggression pact was concluded with Italy in 1928 and, partly through Italian diplomatic efforts, reconciliation with Greece took place. In October 1930 a friendship treaty with Greece was signed, motivated by shared fear of Bulgarian irredentism. After a number of Balkan conferences, a Balkan Pact was concluded in 1934 with Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania and Turkey as its members. In 1937 the Sadabad Pact linked Turkey to its eastern neighbours, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, in a similar fashion. Throughout the period after the war of independence, when distrust of the West was still rife, the cornerstone of Turkish foreign policy had been the maintenance of good relations with the Soviet Union. In the 1930s relations with the Soviet Union remained excellent (a ten-year friendship treaty was signed in 1935) but it was no longer the sole pillar of Turkish foreign policy. Apart from the rapprochement with its neighbours, Turkey’s relations with the Western powers improved markedly. At the root of this improvement lay the fact that, together with France and Britain, Turkey now definitely supported the status quo and rejected the aspirations of the ‘revisionist’ powers such as Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, which wanted to redraw the map of Europe. Turkey maintained good relations with Hitler’s Germany in spite of this, but saw Italy’s expansionism in the eastern Mediterranean as a great threat. The fact that its ally, the Soviet Union, too, joined the anti-revisionist camp, facilitated Turkey’s rapprochement with the West. In 1932 Turkey joined the League of Nations. In April 1936 it sent the signatories of the Treaty of Lausanne a note in which it asked for a change in the demilitarization of the Straits, in view of the increasingly tense international situation, and received a sympathetic hearing. A conference was held in Montreux and in the resulting treaty Turkey regained full control of the Straits. The Straits Commission was abolished. All parties accepted a number of restrictions on the passage of warships through the Straits, but commercial traffic would be free for countries not at war with Turkey itself. The one issue over which Turkey and France clashed in the 1930s was that of the sancak (district) of Alexandrette, the ethnically extremely mixed area known to Turkish nationalists as ‘Hatay’ (Land of the Hittites, who it will be remembered were considered proto-Turks at the time) with the towns of Antakya and Iskenderun (Alexandrette). In the Franco–Turkish agreement of 1921 and at Lausanne this area had remained outside the borders of the new Turkish state, but cultural autonomy was extended to its Turkish community, which had close THE KEMALIST ONE-PARTY STATE, 1925–45 203 links with Turkey and followed developments in Turkey closely. A Hatay Halk Fırkası (People’s Party of Hatay) was formed and it even carried through such things as the ‘hat’ and ‘alphabet’ reforms. In September 1936 France announced that it would grant independence to Syria and that it intended to include Hatay in the new Syrian state. This was unacceptable to the Turkish community. The issue was brought before the League of Nations, which sent a mission to the district in January 1937. The mission concluded that the Turks constituted a majority. Britain, anxious to avert a breach between France and Turkey in view of the Italian threat, now mediated and an agreement was reached whereby Hatay would become an ‘independent entity’, represented in external matters by Syria. An international committee of lawyers drew up a constitution and elections were held in April 1938. During the elections there were bloody riots all over the sancak, so the elections were annulled. By now the international situation was so threatening that France was ready to come to terms with Turkey and secure its support against Nazi Germany and Italy at almost any price. In July, new elections were held under joint Franco–Turkish military control and they produced a narrow Turkish majority of 22 in the 40- seat parliament. In its first session, the new parliament proclaimed the independent Republic of Hatay. Almost exactly a year later, on 29 June 1939, it announced the union of that state with Turkey – to the great anger of the Syrians, who even today depict the area as Syrian on their maps. Turkey in the Second World War Possible aggression by Italy remained the foremost concern of the Turkish leadership in the late 1930s. Concern was intensified by Italy’s occupation of Albania in April 1939, which brought Turkey, France and Britain closer together. Discussions about a treaty of mutual assistance between Turkey, France and Britain went on all through 1939. They proceeded only slowly because Turkey demanded large amounts of military and financial assistance in view of its own weakness and because it was determined to preclude any possibility of becoming embroiled in a war with the Soviet Union. The Turkish government very much hoped to include the Soviets in the alliance. The sudden announcement of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in August 1939, in which Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia more or less divided eastern Europe between them, therefore came as a tremendous shock to Ankara. France and Britain now became even more anxious to secure Turkish support and on 19 October 1939 the Anglo–Franco–Turkish treaty of mutual support was 204 TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY signed. With it, the Turks got most of what they wanted. A loan of £16 million in gold and a credit of £25 million for the purchase of military equipment were granted. In a separate protocol attached to the treaty, Turkey was excused from any obligation that could involve her in a war with the Soviet Union.26 The treaty stipulated that Turkey would ‘collaborate effectively’ with France and Britain in the event of an act of aggression of a European power leading to war in the Mediterranean (a clear reflection of the importance attached to the Italian threat). A casus foederi had clearly arisen after Italy declared war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940. By then, however, the collapse of France had drastically changed the balance of power and, despite its obligations, Turkey devoted all its energy to staying out of the war, invoking the separate protocol as a pretext. The British government saw Turkey as a valuable source of manpower and exerted pressure to get it to enter the war, but Turkey resisted and Britain had no choice but to accept. After the German occupation of Greece and Bulgaria’s siding with the Axis in 1941, the war had reached Turkey’s borders. As a consequence, in June 1941, almost simultaneously with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, it concluded a treaty of friendship with Germany. Throughout the next year and a half, the period of the greatest German expansion, Turkey kept up a scrupulously neutral position, pleading lack of preparation and the need for supplies with the British government. After the German defeat at Stalingrad (November 1942) allied pressure gradually increased, but Turkey was still very exposed to a German attack. The allies’ requirements had changed and they now regarded Turkey as a forward base for allied troops and aircraft rather than as a source of manpower, but the Germans threatened that the arrival of even a single allied fighter plane would mean war. In January 1943, Churchill and İnönü reached agreement over a programme of preparations for the arrival – in due course – of allied warplanes, but the preparations were subsequently sabotaged and the building of installations intentionally slowed down by the Turks.27 The pressure increased even further at a conference of İnönü, Churchill and Roosevelt in Cairo in December 1943. The allies now clearly held the winning hand and they pointed out that, if Turkey stayed out of the war for much longer, it risked being completely isolated after the war. The implied threat was that it would have to face the Red Army and any demands Stalin might make on its own. İnonü now finally accepted that Turkey would become an active belligerent on the allied side, but he asked for an overall campaign plan for the allied conquest of the Balkans first. This was a clever ploy because the allied powers differed