Kemal Ataturk: Born Mustafa Kemal in 1881, he became the savior of Turkey after World War I, earning the title of Ataturk ("father Turk"). He worked for the secularization of Turkey and decreed that Turkish would henceforth be written with the Roman alphabet. Although often brutal, Ataturk secured Turkish control of the Anatolian peninsula and successfully abrogated the Treaty of Sevres.
Tansu Ciller: Yale University-educated economist who became the first woman prime minister of Turkey in 1993. Her administration was generally considered corrupt and inefficient.
Mehmet II: Conquered Constantinople in 1453 and established the Ottoman Empire.
Mehmet VI: Reigned as the last sultan of Ottoman Turkey (1918-1922). After World War I, the Allies forced him to sign the Treaty of Sevres. Although the sultanate was abolished in 1922, Mehmet's brother, Abdulmecid II, was allowed to perform religious functions as caliph from 1922-1947.
June 29, a state security court sentenced Ocalan to death. However, Turkey's desire to become a member of the European Union saved the Kurdish leader. His case was referred to the European Court on Human Rights in 2000 and in early August, 2002, while Ocalan was still waiting on death row, Turkey abolished the death penalty in a series of reforms aimed at preparing the country for European Union membership. These reforms also included liberalizing laws regarding the teaching and use of the Kurdish language and greater recognition for Kurdish political rights.
Although the Turkish economy is not as complex or strong as the economies of Western European nations, modernization is in full swing. However, Turkey's fragile democracy has proved prone to military coups, and economic stability has been difficult to attain. Turkey's attempts to attain official candidate status in the EU were dramatically rebuffed in December, 1997. Lack of political and economic stability, combined with opposition to Turkish membership by Greece, hindered Turkish efforts to join the European Union. However, on December 10,1999, Turkey was finally made a candidate for membership in the union.
Turkey's movement toward joining the European Union was a source of optimism about the country's ability to modernize its political and economic system. However, Turkey also faced complications in the process of modernization. Like most other Muslim nations in Asia and the Middle East, Turkey experienced a rising Islamic movement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. During the 1990's, the pro-Islamic political party known as Refah, or Welfare, became active in civil affairs. A Welfare Party politician, Necmettin Erbakan, served as prime minister for a year in 1996-1997. Turkey's powerful military and many of its secular politicians saw the Islamists as a threat to the principle of a secular state established by Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk. A Turkish high court ruled in January, 1998, that the Welfare Party was a religious party and banned the party's leaders, including Necmettin Erbakan, from politics. In 2000, the Turkish government discovered that some of its civil servants, most of whom were Kurds, had ties to the radical Islamic Hezbollah group. All these officials were fired.
While it might be a problem for modernization if an Islamic party came to power in Turkey, the banning of individuals from politics was a serious problem for democratization. The Welfare Party, moreover, had won more votes than any other in the elections before it was banned. Suppressing the civil participation of religious parties raised the danger that their adherents might be radicalized and alienated from the official political system.
The role of Islam in Turkey attracted increased international attention when the Islamic-based Justice and Development Party, founded at the banning of the Welfare Party, won an overwhelming victory in an election held on November 3, 2002. Since the leader of the new party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was barred from becoming prime minister because he had been convicted of sedition in 1999, the party's Abdullah Gul took office on November 15. Gul was believed to be one of the moderate and pro-Western members of the Justice Development Party, but the election results raised questions about whether Turkey would be moving away from its nonreligious foundations.
World History
