Ataturk and the issue of “great leaders”

Last week I wrote about Prime Minister Erdogan’s slide from bold, effective leadership to increasingly paranoid, lost authoritarianism. In my conclusion I juxtaposed his behaviour to that of leaders like Nelson Mandela, George Washington and Kemal Ataturk. Readers and friends were quick to take issue with the placing of these names in a single category of “good leaders.”

For the most part, I think their criticisms of what I wrote were quite justified – I should not have framed the issue like this. Nelson Mandela in particular was one of those rare people who seemed to capture what is best in humanity, doing his best to build a tolerant, inclusive state and demonstrating no resentment for the years of imprisonment and suffering inflicted upon him by the previous regime, nor any vanity for his post-Apartheid elevation to power.

As for Kemal Ataturk, he of course died while still the leader of Turkish Republic he founded, so trying to use him as a foil for a current Turkish Prime Minister who seems determined to stay in office indefinitely was not a good idea either. Ataturk also presided over a state that reneged on promises made to Kurds during the Turkish War of Independence from 1919 to 1923, went on to deny and suppress Kurdish identity, and killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurdish rebels and civilians in the 1925 Sheikh Said Uprising, the 1927-30 Mount Ararat Uprising and the 1937-38 Dersim revolt. In its interpretation of secularism, Ataturk’s state also trampled on the most basic personal freedoms of its people, controlling religious sermons and even banning the wearing of the veil in public institutions or the growing of beards by civil servants. The Turkish state remained authoritarian until 1950, and remains a fairly illiberal electoral democracy even today.

 

What then, could have possessed me to think of Ataturk as a great leader? I suppose I should start by asking if the likes of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were great leaders as well? Most of the world seems to think they were. Like Ataturk, however, they also did terrible things. Churchill opposed Indian independence from Britain and tried to see Ghandi’s movement crushed and Gandhi himself starved to death.  As British Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he essentially created Iraq and installed a Sunni a dictatorship in the new state. As Prime Minister of Britain, he presided over British military campaigns that included fire bombing whole cities, such as Dresden, that had no significant military targets in them. Franklin Roosevelt as United States President also ordered the firebombing of hundreds of thousands of German civilians, interned tens of thousands of Japanese and German Americans in camps during World War Two, and oversaw the development of Atomic bomb.

So how, one may ask, can the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt be seen as great leaders?  On one level, they should not be viewed as such because they did, or ordered, terrible things. We should reserve the “great leader” designation for the likes of Mandela and Gandhi. Yet for the more fallible, complex leaders like Ataturk, Churchill and Roosevelt, there are still things to admire. They did not use their power to amass great wealth, they did not descend into paranoid suspicions of any and all of their critics, rivals or even friends (Joseph Stalin comes to mind as the counter-example here), and they did not define their state’s interests as completely synonymous with their own. Each leader came forward to steer their people through times of great difficulty, risk and instability, showing a determination that not many of us could manage in similar circumstances.

Ataturk, it should be remembered, started his political rise in the Battle of Gallipoli when he refused to give up against all odds and displayed excellent strategic thinking. He again delivered an unlikely success in the Turkish War of Independence. In the process, he salvaged his people’s pride and saved Turkey from falling into a self-loathing victimhood complex that might have destroyed the chances of later political development and the fostering of civic virtues important for complex societies. Ataturk could have taken his 1923 War of Independence victory and gone down the easy path – keeping tradition and religion (and presumably a new Sultan beholden to him) as the basis of the state’s identity, clinging to the Ottoman past and still claiming all the empire’s territories. Instead, he sought reconciliation with the West and limited his state’s ambitions to match its power. He also embarked his country on a series of truly revolutionary reforms – changing the calendar and the Arabic script to Western ones, adopting a Swiss-based legal system, establishing a merit-based civil service, enshrining equal rights for women and all citizens and starting an ambitious development and modernization program – all from the ashes of World War One. What he accomplished for the new state, against all odds, was truly remarkable.

 

He did all these things because he thought they must be done for the sake of his nation, to prevent colonization and subjugation of what remained of the Ottoman empire. This utilitarian thinking led to the authoritarian excesses and massacres of dissidents when taken too far, as happens in so many places. It should also be remembered, however, that in an era of rising fascism, the Kemalist state program refrained from racism – anyone could become a Turk by adopting the Turkish language, customs and culture. No true racist tries to assimilate other “races” to their own. The concomitant denial of especially Kurdish language and culture proved very chauvinist, of course, but such was the model they adopted from revolutionary France, Bismarckian Germany and the other European nation-states.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).