"An erect, manly figure, of unmistakable dignity, impeccably dressed; clear-cut features, penetrating ice- blue eyes, bristling eyebrows, some harsh lines on his face, usually a grave and rather stern countenance; intense vitality showed in every glance, in every gesture and even in immobility. His mind and his body seemed like springs, coiled and ready for action."
There are few Turks who would be unable to name the man described by Percy Loraine, British ambassador to Turkey from 1934 to 1939. Loraine was giving a BBC radio talk in 1948, on the tenth anniversary of the death of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk. On 10th November this year at 9.05am, cars stopped in the streets and ships on the Bosphorus blew their horns in mourning as the death of the founder of modern Turkey was remembered once more.
For visitors to the country, Atatürk's picture is the defining image of modern Turkey. Those who come to glimpse the marvels of the Byzantine or Ottoman era are greeted at Atatürk international airport by two portraits of him in the arrivals hall; there will be another picture in the hotel lobby; his portrait adorns the banknotes and coins; in the streets, there are busts and statues carrying quotations on an inexhaustible range of topics, but more often than not the quintessential thought of the man: Ne mutlu Türküm diyene - "What happiness it is to call oneself a Turk."
But what visitors see is just the tip of the iceberg. Every one of Turkey's schools - over 42,500 - has a bust, in front of which pupils daily recite the student's oath, with its reference to "great Atatürk." Inside the schools, every headmaster's office and every one of 350,000 classrooms has a portrait. Every government office, whether open to the public or not, has a portrait; nearly every room in every police station, every military barracks and every political party's office has a picture. A large proportion of shops have a portrait, either prominently displayed or tucked away by the cash register. And on Republic day in late October, the grandest buildings of Ankara are draped with vast, crude likenesses of the man. This is a cult unlike anything the democratic west has experienced, and as the country becomes increasingly remote from anything Atatürk himself would recognise, the cult seems to become more not less intense.
There is a ludicrous side to the cult. Last year a man took a bust of Atatürk hostage, holding a gun to its head, to protest about unemployment. And, this being Turkey, there is a dark side to the cult too: it is a criminal offence to insult Atatürk or to desecrate his image, punishable by up to five years in prison. Journalist Hakan Albayrak, a columnist for the newspaper Millli Gazete, is serving a 15-month prison term for suggesting that Atatürk was buried without the traditional Muslim prayer for the dead.
Nonetheless, there is good reason for Turks to celebrate Atatürk's life. Born in 1881 into a humble family, in what was then Ottoman Salonika, now Greek Thessaloniki, he joined the army of Sultan Abdul Hamid II just as the Ottoman empire in the Balkans was being torn from Istanbul's grasp by nationalism and the plotting of the European powers. Military postings in Damascus, Salonika, Albania and Tripoli exposed him to the fragility of the empire's hold on its territories and the decrepit state of its armies.
Turkey joined the first world war on Germany's side. Following the Allies' attempt in early 1915 to force their way up the Dardanelles strait to Istanbul, Atatürk led the defence of what we know as Gallipoli and Turkey calls Çanakkale. "I do not order you to fight," he told his troops, "I order you to die." The 19th division of the Sultan's army followed the orders of this intense, charismatic military commander, and died in their thousands. The allied advance was checked, Istanbul and the homeland saved.
But the empire's fortunes were tied to those of Germany and the central powers; with defeat came occupation and dispossession. The allied powers took what was left of the empire in the middle east, occupied Istanbul and prepared to carve up what is now known as Turkey among themselves. Atatürk fled Istanbul, declared Turkey sovereign, raised an army and led it to victory on the battlefield against the occupying Greeks, leading to independence in 1923. Atatürk was elected president on the day the republic was founded.
These achievements alone would have secured Atatürk's place in history. But the establishment of the republic was just a start. His republic was to be modern, secular and democratic, looking to the west for inspiration. (In its top-down attempt to wrench a largely peasant society into the 20th century, there was something Soviet about the Atatürk project - and not just in its iconography and architecture.) The Ottoman dynasty was exiled and the position of caliph which the sultan held - the spiritual head of the Islamic world - was abolished. Religious courts were closed; a new civil law was adopted giving women equal rights; a new criminal code followed; an alphabet based on Latin rather than Arabic characters was adopted; the call to prayer was now to be sung only in Turkish; surnames were made a legal requirement; the fez was banned; the international (rather than Islamic) weekend adopted; and universal suffrage introduced. All this took 11 years, against a background of an already impoverished territory ravaged by defeat, occupation and, after 1929, severe economic hardship.
Izzettin dogan is one of the leaders of the Alevi Muslim community in Turkey. (Turkey is a mainly Sunni Muslim country, but as much as one fifth of the population is thought to belong to the Alevi sect, with its rather free and easy approach to Islam.) He describes the Atatürk cult, accurately enough, as an "exaggeration," but then goes on to explain that the Alevi, who were persecuted under the Ottomans, see Atatürk, "not as a normal person but as someone sent by the gods. It has a spiritual side. For the Alevi he is another kind of Imam Ali [the central figure of Shia Islam]. In every Alevi home you will see a portrait of Atatürk."
The secularist has been deified; his portraits and statues are totems of a different kind of faith. And the country Atatürk wanted to become a shining light of modernity is everywhere exposed to the frozen black and white images of a man dressed variously in military uniform, double-breasted lounge suit, or the country tweeds of an English Edwardian gentleman.
The cult has, historically, had a political philosophy attached: Kemalism. The principles of Kemalism are the foundation stones of the republic. They are learned by rote by schoolchildren: secularism, statism, nationalism, populism (now called democracy), republicanism and revolutionism. These are the six "arrows" of the party that Atatürk founded, the Republican People's party, and the principles were enshrined in the 1937 constitution. Some of these have fallen away: where once the state controlled much of the economy, it has, following turbulent reforms in the 1980s, to some degree withdrawn.
What remains of Kemalism is secularism and democracy. They are the twin values that make Turkey such an appealing model to the west (and in particular the EU) and so out of place in gatherings such as the Organisation of Islamic Conferences, the umbrella body for the world's 57 Muslim states, whose foreign ministers met in Istanbul this year. Looking down the list of OIC member countries, one was hard pushed to see any country other than the host that held free and fair elections, and where the politicians were genuinely accountable to citizens.
Turkish secularism, however, should be taken with a pinch of salt. As Graham Fuller wrote in a recent edition of the Washington Quarterly: "Turkey's was never genuine secularism. Unlike the US model of secularism that rigidly separates church from state and requires the state to stay out of religious affairs entirely, Turkish secularism has promoted absolute domination and control of religion by the state at all levels." Thus the Turkish state employs every imam in every mosque; it funds religious schools which train those imams, appointing teachers and directing the curriculum just as it does in normal schools. Funding comes from general taxation and flows through the directorate of religious affairs, which organises religious life for the Sunni majority. The position of the directorate as an arm of the state is enshrined in the constitution, and any political party which campaigns to change the directorate's constitution can be closed down.
Atatürk despised religion because he thought it held the Turkish population in a web of cultural and social backwardness. He did not try to ban it, however, but rather to control it, and to make sure that it was never a threat to the state.
It is, no doubt, a comfort to those who weigh up Turkey's EU membership bid that religious life is tightly bound to the state, and so little influenced by the clerics who hold so much sway in the rest of the Islamic world. But the role of religion in everyday life in Turkey remains very different from secular Europe. The country is usually described as "overwhelmingly Muslim," but this tells us little. The most irreligious Turk (excepting the tiny non-Muslim minority) will call himself Muslim, even if he qualifies it with the words "by birth." And a 1999 survey cited in Andrew Mango's recent book The Turks Today reveals surprisingly high levels of piety: 92 per cent of the population said that they observed the month-long dawn until dusk fast of Ramadan; just under half said that they observed prayers five times a day; just under two thirds said they went to Friday prayers; more than 70 per cent said they hoped to perform the hajj, the journey to Mecca that every good Muslim is supposed to perform once in his life.
These figures, though, should come with a health warning; surveys in Turkey can fall prey to the same problems as elsewhere. The Ramadan observance figure seems too high, and looking at the number of restaurants, cafés and kebab stands that stay open through the day all over the country, the survey looks as if it reflects some local variant of the "spiral of silence" which led British pollsters systematically to underestimate support for the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps it should be called a "spiral of piety." In Turkey, people are likely to feel a communal pressure to pronounce themselves more religious than they are.
The treatment of religion by the state illustrates part of the unwritten philosophy of Kemalism - the desire for control, and the readiness, if necessary, to maintain it by force. "The nation," Atatürk is reported to have said, "needs to be led by the hand." This was evident in the early days of the republic; when Kurdish tribes rebelled in 1925 and again in 1937, the risings were put down and their leaders hanged; when a tame opposition party showed signs of becoming a threat, it was closed down.
Turkey's administration remains hugely overcentralised. Local officials are trusted to do little or nothing without reference to Ankara. At demonstrations, protesters are regularly outnumbered three or four to one by riot police in body armour.
The three military coups that Turkey has endured since the second world war are the ultimate expression of Kemalist control. The military saw itself - probably still sees itself - as the guardian of last resort of the state. It moved first in 1960, when the government of the day was judged to be threatening the democratic nature of the republic, then in 1971 as the general staff decided that the revolutionary ferment was overwhelming the government, and then again in 1980, as the country slid towards chaos, with left and right slugging it out in the streets and hundreds being killed every week.
The Kemalist boast is that when the military does intervene, it does so with the intention of returning power to civilians. But after the 1980 coup, something changed. The military put in place a repressive constitution and maintained its power through nominally civilian state structures. But ideologically, a shift had taken place: the progressive left, disenchanted after the 1971 coup, became embittered. This has left Kemalism looking more and more like an ideology without progressive allies - an ideology "that always says 'no,'" according to Oral Çalislar, once a student activist, who spent time in prison after both coups and is now a journalist. "I am not a Kemalist," he says. "I have a secular side and a democratic side. I am against Kemalism on the democratic side, and against Islamism on the secular side."
The military is usually seen as the guardian of the secular republic, but it was the military which after the 1980 coup introduced compulsory religious education into all schools, and the military which increased the funding and number of religious schools. When leftists were imprisoned, many were forced to read Atatürk's speeches and sing the national anthem. But Oral Çalislar was given books about Islam to read in his jail in Bursa. Bolstering Islam was thought then to be a way of combating the menace of Soviet communism. "Kemalism was corrupted in 1980," says Emre Kongar, a former civil servant, now a sociologist and writer. "In 1980, the military forced all the textbooks - even maths! - to have examples of Kemalism. The more you deviate from the content, the more you use the symbols."
What was once the Kemalist left has fractured and fractured again, and into government has swept a political grouping - the Justice and Development (AK) party - that was born out of the Islamist politics of the 1990s, when Turkey looked as if it might be about to renounce the guiding principle of Kemalism, and go the way of Iran.
In 1994, Islamists swept to power in municipal elections; two years later a right-wing coalition put Necmettin Erbakan, an avowed Islamist, into the prime minister's office. As the principles of the republic were, in the eyes of the military, once again threatened, it moved against Erbakan in 1997, easing him out of power in what became known as a "soft" or "postmodern" coup. Yet just six years later, Erbakan's protégé, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was prime minister, leading a party created from the ashes of the old Islamist parties.
What had changed? AK is fortunate that Hilmi Ozkok, the current chief of the armed forces general staff, is relatively liberal. But if you believe AK's top officials, it is the party that has changed. Erdogan, they say, chastened by the 1997 "coup" against Erbakan and his own subsequent imprisonment, has accepted the secular republic as the structure he must work within. Certainly the party pays lip service to both secular Kemalism and Atatürk. "If he were alive today," a senior AK official told me, pointing at the picture of Atatürk in his office, "he would approve of what we are doing." At the time, a few months after the 2002 election, I had trouble not laughing out loud.
But AK has brought Turkey to a point unimaginable even five years ago: the edge of EU membership. Wielding its large parliamentary majority, it has overhauled Turkey's judicial, legal and constitutional structure. Before the European commission's October decision to begin membership talks (expected to be confirmed by EU heads of government in December), it was common knowledge that two or three commissioners, and probably most EU citizens, held deep reservations about Turkey. A senior member of the EU team dealing with Turkish accession told me in September that three years ago not one commissioner believed Turkey could be a candidate. That indicates the scale of AK's achievement.
Change in Ankara is one thing. How close much of Turkey really is to Europe is another. When Günther Verheugen, then EU enlargement commissioner, finally made his long-promised journey to the country's impoverished southeast this September, he was greeted in the regional capital Diyarbakir by posters welcoming him to "Greater Europe." Just four hours' drive away is Iraq's northern border. Diyarbakir is a miserable place, full of Kurds who once lived on the land but either fled it or were forced off it during the Kurdish insurrection of the 1980s and 1990s. The entire region is desperately poor - so much poorer than western Turkey that it barely seems part of the same country. Of course, there are regional disparities throughout Europe, but few can be as great as those between eastern and western Turkey. In 2001, the most recent year for which figures are provided by Turkey's state statistics institute, per capita GDP in the leading provinces of Turkey - all of them at the western, European end of the country - was $4,109 a year; in the poorest four provinces, all of them in the far east, it was $730 a year.
The commissioner was taken by helicopter to a Kurdish village that had been forcibly evacuated in the early 1990s. There he faced demands from the village chief not for the greater cultural rights that are the chief interest of sceptical European politicians, but for food, water and housing. As the Turkish army secured the perimeter of the village - there has recently been an upsurge in Kurdish paramilitary activity in the region - I asked a villager who he thought had come to visit that day. "The president of the world," he replied. Rarely can the commissioner have felt so far from Brussels.
There is almost complete consensus within the Turkish political class about the desirability of EU membership, although for different, and often conflicting, reasons. Kemalists want to get into Europe to fulfil the westernisation dream of Atatürk and as a bulwark against Islamisation. Those leftists who fell out with Kemalism after the 1980 coup see Europe as the way to ensure that democracy is protected from the military. AK's Europhilia too is grounded in concern for human and religious rights - in particular its own. The party hopes that Europe will get the military off its back, and perhaps loosen the straitjacket of secularism that has denied places in universities to their daughters who wish to wear a headscarf. All hope that accession to the EU will improve the economic lot of the vast majority of Turks.
Kemalists of left and right dreamed of European membership for 40 years, and at times made fitful moves towards the necessary reforms. Ironically, it has fallen to the closest thing that Turkey has to an Islamist party to drive the process forward. If, as expected, a starting date for Turkey's formal entry negotiations is agreed in December, it will be AK that reaps the electoral dividend, not the old men of Atatürk's Republican People's party, whose performance in opposition has been abject.
Erdogan needs a victory such as this. Without it there will be a resurgence of nationalism, and possibly of fundamentalism, across the country. But he also needs it to hold his party together. AK is a broad coalition of interests - religious conservatives from the countryside, fundamentalists, the newly urban poor living in their millions in the shanty towns that ring Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, and those too disenchanted with the old political order to vote as their parents and grandparents did. No single ideology, identity or history binds the party together. Failure in the project that has, so far, defined AK would put Erdogan and his coalition's survival in doubt.
AK is not a particularly democratic party - no more and no less than any of Turkey's bitter and fractious factions - but after two years in power it shows no sign of wanting to overthrow the secular order. The recent spat over the criminalisation of adultery had little to do with Islamic law. It was instead the clumsy move of a morally conservative leader, reminiscent of John Major's "back to basics" campaign.
AK was also seeking to make a gesture to its more religious supporters. It has, after all, presided over a liberalisation of Turkish law, which - at least in theory - draws Turkey closer to the secularism and sex equality of western Europe and farther away from what many of its core supporters among the rural poor regard as traditional, patriarchal common sense. In this AK has followed the Turkish - one might say the Kemalist - tradition of top-down, elite politics; the public's involvement in and understanding of the reform process has been startlingly limited. The row over the possible criminalisation of adultery is the closest Turkey has got to a popular debate over the reforms. But AK is not about to challenge Turkey's secular roots, nor is it going to redraw Turkey's foreign policy - with the exception perhaps of the country's once close links to Israel. The European dream has been pursued with vigour and some finesse. The secular democratic Turkish republic, with all of its particularities, is secure. The Kemalists of all stripes may gnash their teeth at AK's electoral good fortune but in the final reckoning, the secularists have won.
At a European Green party conference recently held in Istanbul, all the big speeches started with the mandatory homily to Atatürk and his reforms and then veered off into the middle distance of Turkey's European future. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most internationally famous novelist, attended. He looked bored and morose, as if wondering what he was doing there. But when he spoke, his delivery was confident, the words punched out staccato.
"Had we discussed the issues we have talked about today six or seven years ago, we'd have been condemned as traitors," he rapped out. The hall stirred, applause broke out. "The hope of joining the EU can change a country. We are changing, we are leaving an identity," said the writer who has done more than any other to communicate Turkey's internal struggles. "We are stepping outside our muddy shoes."
Not everyone is happy about that departure from the old Turkish identity. On the same day that Pamuk spoke, delegates found on their seats a handwritten letter from arch-Kemalist, artist and author Bedri Baykam, urging them to "hear the other side of the story." In his studio in central Istanbul, Baykam seems an unlikely Kemalist. On the walls are ripped out magazine pages of half-naked women, film posters (JFK and From Russia With Love) and surrealist canvases that hang from every spare space. The only thing recognisably Kemalist is the framed black and white photo of Atatürk, impeccably dressed, a silk handkerchief perfectly arranged in his top pocket, gazing up to the heavens.
Baykam speaks rapidly, with black curly hair bobbing, his English heavily Americanised after seven years on the US west coast. He is angry at the representation of Kemalism as repressive and puts its failure to develop into an appealing, modern ideology at the door of the Republican People's party, of which his father used to be a senior member and which he has attempted to lead. You might expect him, as an artist, to be appalled by the crude manner in which the cult of Atatürk is applied. But the opposite is the case.
"I love it," he says. "It gives me trust. This picture… is freedom. If there is less De Gaulle or less Churchill there's no threat to democracy in France or Britain. But Atatürk is the symbol of a modern, free and secular state. The moment you dismantle the image, the cancer will grow everywhere." There are few shades of grey for the orthodox Kemalist; political life is viewed as a struggle between backwardness and modernity. But just as orthodox Kemalism and the cult of Atatürk seem stuck in the past, so does Baykam, as he rages against the enemies of Turkey within and without.
It is a matter of debate whether "Kemalism" actually means anything any more. Some prefer to use the word "Atatürkism" to differentiate between the appreciation of the man himself and the seemingly defunct political ideology that he spawned. Certainly the cult seems as strong as ever; several commentators said that last year's celebration of 80 years of the republic reached even dizzier heights of Atatürk-worship than the 75th anniversary. I asked Oral Çalislar whether he had ever written about the cult surrounding the republic's founder. He gave a thin smile and waved the question away. Seven years in prison was enough, thank you.
Whenever you try to generalise about a country as complex as Turkey, events tend to slap you around the face: just as parliament liberalises, a reactionary arm of the judiciary finds a new way to stifle dissent; as the government introduces sweeping progressive reform of the penal code, it attempts in the same law to criminalise adultery. But the cult of Atatürk is changing, softening at the edges as Turkey becomes more open to the world and more heterodox.
In Gloria Jeans, a local variant of Starbucks, there is gentle humour: the photograph on the wall has Atatürk sipping a cup of Turkish coffee. In a window in a suburb of Istanbul, Atatürk is "Warhol-ised," his face staring out in a variety of lurid colours, in the style of Marilyn Monroe and countless imitations.
And in the office of the headmaster of the religious school where Erdogan was educated, Atatürk is not shown wearing his immaculate morning suit. Instead he is pictured in Syria, wearing Arab clothes, surrounded by the leaders of Arab tribes. The message of the choice of picture is clear: Atatürk was one of us too, a Muslim. Perhaps, as the country unbends after 80 turbulent years, Atatürk is on his way to becoming, like the ideology that bears his name, everyone's in Turkey, to make of him what they will.
