Death of a dictator

Title

Death of a dictator

Language

English

Year

1939

Subject

Gen. Inonu, Ismet, (1884-1973)

Ataturk, Kemal (Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), 1881-1938

History of dictatorships -- Turkey

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

1[Making a weak nation strongDEATH OF A DICTATOR OVER the alabaster palace of Dolma Baghche in Istanbul the crescent flag of Turkey floated at half staff for Kemal Ataturk. At 9: 05 a. m. Nov. 10, Turkey's greatest hero since Suleiman the Magnificent die-d of cirrhosis of the liver. Twenty-six hours later the National Assembly at Angora, without a dissenting vote, chose General Ismet Inonu as the new president. Inonu was chief of staff in the Greek War, negotiated the Lausanne Treaty, and had been Ataturk's closest collaborator. He retired last year after thirteen years as premier. The two were the same age5 8-and, like A ta turk, Inonu is a disciplinarian and a poker shark. After Lenin and Pilsudski, Ataturk was the third of the postwar dictators to die in office. Lenin's ·power was divided by jealous lieutenants until Stalin got the reins. Ataturk insured against this by designating Inonu to succeed him. Thus the transition was made smoothly. It came at an acute moment. Inonu's hardest job will be to continue Ataturk's foreign policy without Ataturk's genius. 60 The dictator successfully balanced the Soviet Union, Britain, and lately Germany against each other, taking loans from each and committing himself to none. As safeguards among neighbors he engineered the Balkan Entente with Greece, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, and the Moslem alliance with Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Not until the year 1937 did Turkey have to deal with an aggressive Germany, however, and this is the tightrope which Inonu will have to walk. Ataturk was born Mustapha, of mixed Turkish. Albanian. and Macedonian ancestry, and dubbed Kemal (the Perfect One) by a schoolmaster. The Sultan made him a pasha (general). a title that became the ghazi (conqueror) after the Greek War. He died as the Ataturk (father of the Turks). Mustapha Kemal fought in the Italian and Balkan Wars and in the World war on three fronts-the Dardanelles. Armenia, and Syria. In 1920, when this continuous warfare had brought Turkey low, he gathered the remnants of the army about him at Angora and in two years rejuvenated it. PANOll-MA Then Ataturk swept away Sultan and Caliphate, founded a republic, drove the invading Greeks into the sea at Smyrna -and gained recognition of this through Ismet Inonu's diplomatic skill in framing the Treaty of Lausanne. Then came the transformation from ghazi to ataturk and a peacetime offensive against Mohammedanism and medievalism. He confiscated monasteries, hauled women out of the harem and admitted them to parliament, forbade the fez, and forcibly introduced the Latin alphabet. With political opposition crushed, he built railways and a modern capital, introduced industries, and forced peasants to learn modern agricultural methods. Finally, in private life he set his subjects an example of cosmopolitan dissipation by gambling for huge stakes, drinking brandy and champagne in incredible quantities, and disporting himself in night clubs. In 1925 he divorced his wife by the Moslem procedure of saying before witnesses: "I divorce you." After that such home life as he led centered about five arlopted daughters. On Oct. 29, only twelve days before the dictator's death, Turkey celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the republic-a personal achievement that had transformed a demoralized and devastated nation into the key power of the Near East.-Newsweek. iJJ dcufptor s d~crels SCULPTURES steal the show from human beings in a forthcoming Swissmade photoplay Life of Michelangelo that provides first closeup view of details of some of his famous sculptural masterpieces that anyone has had since the artist set them up in dimly-lit churches and palaces centuries ago. Cameras discovered things unknown before about the sculptor's technique. The producer, M. Oertel, got the first Vatican permit ever granted for floodlighting interiors of repositories of Michelangelo's work, and cameramen spent as much as three weeks photographing single sculptures. JANUARY, 1939 61

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