Inonu, veteran statesman, dead

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33418, 27 December 1973, Page 9

Inonu, veteran statesman, dead

.V.Z.P.A.-Hcuter — Copyright)

ANKARA, December 26. Along with Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the creator of the Turkish Republic after the First World War, Mr Ismet Inonu, who died yesterday. aged 89. was also one of the architects of modern Turkey.

His name ran like a thread through the fabric of national history from the time when the Young Turks overthrew the Ottoman Sultan in the early 19205.

As Foreign Minister, Prime Minister, and, finally. President, Mr Inonu, who was small in physical stature, played a prominent role in shaping Turkey’s destiny for more than 40 years. In November, 1972, he resigned from the Republican People’s Party founded by his policitaJ mentor, Ataturk, withdrawing from the National Assembly (Lower House) after 52 years, and moving to the Senate. COLONEL AT 31 The son of Reshid. a Government official of the Ottoman Empire, Ismet studied at the Military Academy at Istanbul and the Army Staff College, where he was given the rank of captain. He was active in the Young Turk movement, ai group of young army officers who seized power in 1908 and forced a new constitution. Sultan Abdul Hamid II was deposed in 1909. During the First World' War. in which Turkey was: an ally of Germany, Ismet became a colonel at the age of 31, and by the end of the war he had become a majorgeneral and Under-Secretary of State for War. Charged with demobilising Obituary The ’ father” of Alcoholics Anonymous in Australia. Dr S. J. Minogue, has died in Sydney, aged 76. The Australian branch of the organisation was the first established outside the United States, and it has been estimated that about 30.000 alcoholics have been helped: h\ it since February, 1945.— Sydney, Dec. 26. i

-■ a beaten army which had degenerated into bands of ragged vagabonds, he brought order and method into a situation of chaos. At about this time, he became right-hand man to Mustapha Kemal in the Turkish Nationalist Movement: the occupation of Istanbul by the victorious Allies forced him to flee from what was then the capital and join forces with Kemal in Anatolia. DEFEAT OF GREEKS

When Greece invaded the defeated Turkey in 1920, Ismet led the troops that resisted the Greek forces. In 1921, as comander-in-chief of the Turkish western front, he twice defeated the Greeks at the village of Inonu. These battles marked the rebirth of Turkish national pride and made Ismet a national hero. Many years later, when Mustapha Kemal decreed, in 1934, that all Turks must assume full family names, Ismet adopted the name of the village, Inonu, as his own. It was at this time that Mustapha Kemal took the name, Ataturk, meaning the Father of All Turks. After the armistice of 1922, Ismet left the army for politics. As Foreign Minister, he led the Turkish delegation to the Lausanne Conference, and in the peace treaty: signed there in July, 1923, he’ gained several concessions to! Turkey’s sovereignty and prestige.

FIRST PRIME MINISTER With the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923. he became her first Prime Minister, serving under Ataturk, who was elected President.

During the next 14 years he worked with Ataturk in a political and social revolution which transformed Turkey from an oriental feudal State into a modern secular State linked with Western Europe. Mr Inonu was the administrator and executor of many important reforms, which included measures for the emancipation of women, and a law making it obligatory to wear Western clothes. The nationalisation and development of Turkey’s railways was possibly Mr Inonu’s greatest single achievement at home. In foreign affairs, his policy was based on collective security.

Mr Inonu was more moderate in his approach to re-

form than Ataturk, and the two had disagreements from time to time. In 1937, Mr Inonu resigned after 14 years in office.

Ataturk died in November, 1938, and the Grand National Assembly unanimously chose Mr Inonu as President of the republic, and he was also appointed life-time president of the Republican People’s Party. President Inonu kept Turkey technically neutral for the first few years of the Second World War. but in 1944 Turkey-broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and, in February, 1945, aligned herself with the Allied Powers, declaring war on Germany and Japan. Mr Inonu, who was reelected President in 1946, encouraged the idea of an alternative political party. The Democratic Party of Mr Celal Bayar and Mr Adnan Menderes emerged, and gained victory at free elections to Parliament in 1950. Mr Inonu,

as leader of the defeated party, thereupon resigned from the Presidency. The return of parliamentary government in 1961, after a military coup d’etat in 1960, brought Mr Inonu back to power as leader of various coalitions, but he resigned from office in 1964. From then on he was in Opposition, a veteran statesman much respected by even his bitterest political enemies. He married Emine Mevhibe in 1916, and had two sons and a daughter. His wife nursed him through about 40 heart spasms and attacks, and watched over his diabetic condition.

“I live on doctors’ prescriptions,” he once said. Mr Inonu was somewhat hard of hearing, and when he was bored by a visitor he was known quite openly, and obviously, to switch off his hearing-aid and then sit back, waiting with a face devoid of any expression for the visitor’s departure.