The Father of All the Turks (who left no legitimate heirs) was born in 1881 in Salonika, then part of the Ottoman Empire, of a mild Albanian father and a forceful Macedonian mother. Mustafa was a rebel from the start. His pious Mohammedan mother urged him to become a holy man, but he became a soldier; at 22, a captain, he rebelled against the Sultan and was nearly executed; at 27, he joined the Young Turks rebellion, then rebelled against the Young Turks. The army, fearful of him, shunted him from post to post, but could neither shake him nor subdue him. At Gallipoli, in 1915, he defeated the British; in the Caucasus, he checked the Russians; in Berlin, 1918, he drunkenly needled the high panjandrum of his allies, Field Marshal von Hindenburg; in Arabia, 1918, he held off T. E. Lawrence's Bedouin hordes. At 38, he came out of the crash of the Ottoman Empire the only Turkish commander untouched by defeat.
Six Day Marathon. Eight years later, smartly turned out in his favorite civilian attirethe morning coat and striped pants of the Western diplomathe stood before the Turkish National Assembly (which he created), in the capital at Ankara (which he created), and for six full days told in the Turkish language (which he purified and revised) the full story of what he had done. He began:
"Gentlemen, I landed at Samsun on the 19th of May, 1919. This was the position at the time..."
To his hearers, it was well-remembered history. Turkey in 1919 was crushed, defeated from without, disintegrating within. Gone was the fury and might which, beginning in 1299, had sent Ottoman legions smashing at Vienna's gates and made Budapest a suburb of Constantinople. Gone was the conquering fervor that created a tri-continental empire the size of the U.S., encompassing what are now 20 modern nations stretching from the Dniester to the Nile, from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf. In 1919, British warships still rode in the Bosporus and British troops held Constantinople; Italy, France and Greece were secretly dividing up the best of the remainder. The greatest empire between Augustus and Victoria had shrunk to a small, lifeless inland state in the barren interiors of Asia Minor; its Sultan was reduced to the status of a borough president of Constantinople. There was talk of asking Woodrow Wilson to take over the mess as a U.S. mandate.
Mustafa Kemal Pasha returned from his skillful but useless defense of Syria and asked for a job. "Get this man awayanywherequickly," the Sultan cried. The government hoped to save itself by submission to the conqueror; Kemal's unyielding patriotism endangered these schemes. So Mustafa got magnificent and meaningless titlesInspector General of the Northern Area and Governor General of the Eastern Provincesand was put aboard a leaky Black Sea steamer bound for Samsun, in remote Anatolia.
This suited Kemal fine. Arriving in Anatolia, he convoked a congress and proclaimed: "The aim of the movement is to free the Sultan-Caliph from the clutches of the foreign enemy." Desperately, the Sultan, who did not want to be so freed, wired: "Cease all activity!" Replied Kemal: "I shall stay in Anatolia until the nation wins its independence." Turkey, or what was left of it, had two governments: Kemal's and the Sultan's.
Burimi ketu : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...0057-2,00.html
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