İsmet İnönü

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Mustafa İsmet İnönü (September 24 1884 – December 25, 1973) was a Turkish officer, statesman and the second President of the Republic of Turkey.

He was born in İzmir to a mixed Bulgarian Turkish and Kurdish family originally from Malatya.^[1][2] His father was Hacı Reşid Bey, a member of the Ottoman bureaucracy, an examining magistrate born in Malatya, and his mother was Cevriye Hanım, daughter of Russo-Turkish War refugees from Bulgaria. Due to his father's assignments, the family moved from one city to another. Thus, İsmet İnönü completed his primary education in Sivas. His son, Erdal İnönü, was a Wigner medal winner mathematical physicist and a former deputy prime minister of Turkey, as well as the former leader of the Social Democracy Party and the Social Democratic Populist Party, and the honorary leader of the Social Democratic People's Party.

[edit] Early military career

İnönü graduated from the Military Academy in 1903 and received his first military assignment in the Ottoman army. He joined the Committee of Union and Progress. He won his first military victories by suppressing two major revolts against the struggling Ottoman Empire, first in Rumelia and later in Yemen, whose leader was Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din. He served as a military officer during the Balkan Wars on the Ottoman-Bulgarian front. During World War I, he served as a miralay (colonel) on the Ottoman eastern front in Syria, and was later appointed as the commander of the western fronts. He worked together with Mustafa Kemal Pasha during his assignment at the Caucasus front.

[edit] Independence war

After World War I he went to Anatolia to join the Turkish nationalist movement and was appointed the commander-in-chief of the Turkish Western Army, a position in which he remained during the Turkish War of Independence. He was promoted to brigadier general after the "Battles of İnönü", in which he successfully defeated the Greek Army in western Anatolia. During the Turkish War of Independence he was also a member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara.

İnönü changed careers when he was appointed the chief negotiator of the Turkish delegation at the Treaty of Lausanne. He became famous for his resolve and stubbornness in defending Turkey's demands while conceding very little to the other side at the negotiating table, causing the peace conference to last longer than expected. Partially deaf, İnönü simply turned off his hearing aid when the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, launched into lengthy speeches opposing Turkish demands for recognition of the national pact, and then would restate the Turkish position as if the British foreign secretary had not said a thing.

[edit] Political career

İnönü later served as the Prime Minister of Turkey for several terms, maintaining the system that Atatürk had put in place. He acted after every major crisis (such as the rebellion of Sheikh Said or the attempted assassination of Atatürk in İzmir) to restore peace in the country. He successfully managed the economy, especially after the 1929 economic crisis, by implementing an economic plan inspired by the Five Year Plan of the Soviet Union. In doing so, he took much private property under government control. Due to his efforts, to this day, more than 70% of land in Turkey is still owned by the state, resembling now-defunct Soviet Union. Desiring a more liberal economic system, Atatürk fired Inönü from the government in 1937 and appointed Celal Bayar, the founder of the first Turkish bank IşBank as Prime Minister.

[edit] National Chief period

After the death of Atatürk, Inönü was viewed as the most appropriate candidate to succeed him, and was elected the second President of the Republic of Turkey. World War II broke out in the first year of his presidency, and both the Allies and the Axis pressured Inönü to bring Turkey into the war on their side. The Germans sent Franz von Papen to Ankara, while Winston Churchill secretly met with Inönü inside a train wagon near Adana on January 30, 1943. Inönü later met with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Second Cairo Conference on December 4-6, 1943. Until 1941, both Roosevelt and Churchill thought that Turkey's continuing neutrality would serve the interests of the Allies by blocking the Axis from reaching the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East. But the early victories of the Axis up to the end of 1942 caused Roosevelt and Churchill to re-evaluate a possible Turkish participation in the war on the side of the Allies. Turkey had maintained a decently-sized Army and Air Force throughout the war, and Churchill wanted the Turks to open a new front in the Balkans. Roosevelt, on the other hand, still believed that a Turkish attack would be too risky, and an eventual Turkish failure would have disastrous effects for the Allies. Inönü knew very well the hardships which his country had suffered during 11 years of incessant war between 1911 and 1922 and was determined to keep Turkey out of another war as long as he could. Inönü also wanted assurances on financial and military aid for Turkey, as well as a guarantee that the United States and the United Kingdom would stand beside Turkey in the event of a Soviet invasion of the Turkish Straits after the war. The fear of Soviet invasion and Stalin's unconcealed desire to control the Turkish Straits eventually caused Turkey to give up its principle of neutrality in foreign relations and join NATO in 1952.

It may be that Inönü's greatest political achievement was keeping his country out of World War II until February 1945, when Turkey entered the war on the side of the Allies against Germany and Japan.

[edit] Multi party period

Under international pressure to transform the country to a democratic state, Inönü resided over the infamous 1946 elections, in which votes were cast in the open with onlookers (most probably secret police) able to observe to which party the voters had cast their votes and ballots were tallied behind closed doors by only his own party's officials. In 1950, his party lost the first free elections in Turkish history, and Inönü presided over the peaceful transfer of power to the Democratic Party of Adnan Menderes. İnönü served for ten years as the leader of the opposition before returning to power as Prime Minister after the 1961 elections, held after the military coup-d'etat in 1960 in which he allegedly conspired. Although the opposition was imprisoned during the 1961 elections, he still did not win a majority and had to form coalition governments until the 1965 elections. He first lost the 1965 general elections to Süleyman Demirel and then in 1972 he lost his party's leadership race to Bülent Ecevit. To date, his party, the CHP, has never won a free election in Turkey.

Ismet Inönü was by the standards of his time a highly educated man, speaking Arabic, English, French and German.

İnönü died in 1973. He was interred next to Atatürk's mausoleum at Anıtkabir in Ankara.

[edit] Legacy

A university in Malatya^[3] is named after İnönü, as is a stadium in Istanbul, home of the Beşiktaş football club.

[edit] Trivia

For more than half of his life, İsmet İnönü was known as İsmet Pasha. He changed his name in the early 1930s when Atatürk decreed that all his countrymen had to have surnames. İsmet Pasha decided to take "İnönü", from the Central Anatolian town where he commanded his greatest battles as a general, known as the First Battle of İnönü and Second Battle of İnönü, which played an important role in the Turkish victory at the Turkish War of Independence.

[edit] Media

• Image:IsmetInonu1963.ogg (The sound file of the message by President İsmet İnönü on Kemal Atatürk, November 10, 1963)
• Image:IsmetInonu1963 text.pdf (The Text of the message by President İsmet İnönü on Atatürk)

[edit] References

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