Grey Wolf-- Mustafa Kemal

An Intimate Study of a Dictator

H.C. Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317330257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

Mustafa Kemal was known both as a vicious dictator and the iron-willed creator of modern Turkey however little was known about him and he was viewed as an enigma by many. Originally published in 1932, Armstrong delves into Kemal's career and personal life in great detail showing how he moved between revolutionary, soldier and politician whilst also discussing his love of women, drinking and gambling to present a clear picture of the infamous ruler. This title will be of interest to students of History and Middle-Eastern Studies.

Part I

Chapter I

ALI RIZA and Zubeida lived the threadbare life of the Ottoman Turk, poverty-stricken yet dignified.

Their house was in the Turkish quarter of Salonika, halfway up the hill, under the walls of the old fort, below which lay the squalid little commercial town, full of Jews, and the port to which came the export trade of the Balkans.

Ali Riza was an insignificant little man, without any deep beliefs or outstanding character. When a boy he had come down from the Albanian mountains on the Servian frontier and found work as a clerk in the offices of the Ottoman Debt Administration in the port of Salonika. Like a thousand other Turkish Government clerks he did his routine work without enthusiasm or particular ability. His pay was insufficient, and often so many months in arrears, that in order to keep his family and make both ends meet, he was forced to supplement it by private trading in his spare time.

The street in which they lived was a narrow alley-way of cobbles roofed over with twisting vines. The house was a broken-down affair with the upper storey projecting at an angle over the street. All the houses in the Turkish quarter were blind and silent, the doors always shut and the windows carefully latticed. There was no movement or life. Sometimes some children played gravely in the street, or a few men lounged and dawdled drinking coffee, smoking and talking before the cafe. Otherwise there was a sleepy silence. Occasionally a hodja passed on his way to the mosque, or a woman dressed in shapeless black clothes would come out of a house, close the door carefully behind her, draw her black cloak across her face as a veil leaving only one eye uncovered, and pass on her way to the fountain like a black ghost in the sunlight.

Each house was bolted and barred against its neighbours. In these—and they were little more than hovels—the women lived the shut-away life of a bygone and dead age, when there were harems and enuch-guarded favourites, and rich pashas with splendid palaces.

Zubeida was shut away like the rest. Though nearly thirty when Mustafa was born, she had been veiled since she was seven. She rarely went out, and then only with an escort. Except for her family and a few women in the neighbouring houses she spoke to no one. She was quite uneducated, could neither read nor write, and was ignorant of all the ordinary affairs of the outside world.

Yet she ruled the family. She was a masterful woman with a domineering manner and, when roused, a raging temper. She was of good peasant stock. Her father had been a small farmer in southern Albania and her mother a Macedonian. Tall and powerfully built, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, she had the vitality of robust health. She lived close to the good earth from which she had sprung and had the qualities of the peasant. She was profoundly religious, patriotic, and conservative. She had a shrewd brain and judgment for the primitive realities of life.

Like every Turkish woman, her whole life was concentrated on her man-child—an elder son had died at birth and there was a daughter, Makboula by name. She spoilt Mustafa without restraint, but he responded very little. He was a silent, reserved boy, weak and bony, with pale blue eyes and sandy hair. He rarely showed any affection, accepted his mother's petting as a matter of course, disobeyed her orders and fiercely resented any punishment. He was abnormally self-sufficient, rarely made friends with other children, but played solemnly by himself.

Ali Riza had given up his post in the Ottoman Debt and started trading in timber. He wanted Mustafa to be a merchant. Zubeida wanted him to be a priest. They sent him first to the mosque school to learn his pothooks and to intone passages of the Koran, and then to the school of one Chemsi Effendi where he made good progress.

Suddenly Ali Riza died. There was no money in the wood business. The family were penniless. Zubeida shut up the house and claimed shelter with her brother, who farmed some land at Lazasan, a village outside Salonika.

There Mustafa was put to clean stables, feed the cattle, scare crows, and tend the sheep. He seemed to like the life. The rough work and the open air suited him, making him tough, wiry, and healthy, but as he grew older he became even more reserved, solitary, and independent.

After two years, when Mustafa was eleven, Zubeida persuaded a sister to pay for his schooling. During these months when he had been working in the fields the boy had become wild and untamed: she had lost all control of him; he would not: listen to her; she did not wish him to grow into a shepherd or common farm labourer.

Mustafa went back to a school in Salonika. There he was for ever in hot water. After his open, free life he kicked against the discipline. He was truculent with his masters. With the other boys he was self-opinionated and boastful, so that he became unpopular. He refused to join in their games; if they interfered with him he fought them.

One day he was involved in a general scrimmage, A master dragged him out, and, while he kicked and fought, gave him a sound thrashing. Blind with anger, Mustafa ran away and refused to go back to school.

Chapter II

ONCE more Zubeida had Mustafa on her hands. Her sister would waste no more money in sending him to another school and he refused obstinately to go back to the same one. When Zubeida tried to reason with him he became mulish. When she stormed at him he stormed back at her.

His uncle suggested making a soldier of him: he was a difficult boy and would never settle down to a trade: they had better send him to the Military Cadet School in Salonika: it was subsidized by the Sultan and would cost them nothing: if the boy showed he had brains he would become an officer: if not he would become a private. Anyway his future would be fixed.

Zubeida would not hear of it; but Mustafa had made up his own mind. His uncle's suggestion appealed to him. Ahmed, the son of their next-door neighbour, had just become a cadet and swaggered about showing off in a uniform. Mustafa did not wish to be a priest. As to being a shop-man, that was work for Greeks, Armenians, Christians, Jews and such-like cattle, not for a Turk. He wanted to be a soldier: to be an officer, wear a uniform and give orders to men.

Without telling any one else, he persuaded an old retired officer, who had been one of his father's friends, to stand sponsor for him with the College authorities. He sat for the examination and passed in as a cadet before his mother could stop him.

At the Cadet School he found his feet. He was successful, but also unpopular. Inherently thin-skinned, he became touchy and ill-natured if criticized or spoken to roughly. He kept to himself, made no friends and yet he wished always to be noticed and to be pointed to as somebody out of the ordinary.

None of the boys dared interfere with him for he fought back at once. When they tried to get him to join in with them, or asked him what he was at, he became brusque:

'I don't mean to be like the rest of you,' he said. 'I mean to be somebody,' and went on his own way.

He succeeded in his work, for he had an uncommon flair for mathematics and all military subjects, and he was smart on parade.

In his second year one of the masters, a Captain Mustafa, took a fancy to him, promoted him to be a pupil teacher and gave him charge of a junior class. To distinguish him from himself he gave him the second name of Kemal. From that date he was known as Mustafa Kemal.

He progressed rapidly up the College, showing great ability at examinations, and even more at teaching other boys, for he enjoyed schoolmastering and lording it over his class. He showed also a jealousy, which would grow into a spiteful dislike, of any other boy who was more successful then himself. He would play second fiddle to no one. He became churlish if any one competed with him. He must be the outstanding figure or he would not be in the picture at all.

The friendship and protection of Captain Mustafa did him no good. The friendship was unhealthy. He developed over-rapidly. Before he was fourteen he had passed the boy stage: the gropings after sex: the petty dirtiness: and he had started an affair with a neighbour's daughter. While the other boys were playing games or ragging each other he was off on his own, dressed up in his best clothes, swaggering down the streets, making sheep's-eyes at the women behind the latticed windows, or ogling the cheap women in the harbour.

At seventeen he passed out well from the Cadet School and was sent to the Senior Military School at Monastir,

Part II

Chapter III

MONASTIR was full of the sound and dust of marching columns and the rumble of guns. Greece had seized Crete. Turkey had declared war and troops were hurrying to the battle-front. It was a time of trouble and strife, of wars and the rumour of wars. The Ottoman Empire was in its last agonies. The Christian Powers, with their claws set into its writhing carcass, and snarling at each other, were each getting ready to tear out a rich morsel.

It was torn also by discontent. Centred round the Sultan, its organization was the same as it had been in the great days of the Osmanlis in the sixteenth century, but it had grown effete, decrepit, and corrupt. Everywhere there was poverty and inefficiency, and with them discontent. All the young men cried out for reform.

The Sultan, Abdul Hamid the Red Fox, was as afraid of his own subjects as of the foreigners. He repressed every new idea. He refused all reforms. He covered the whole Empire with a network of spies, so that wherever three men talked together there was a fourth eavesdropping and reporting to the secret police. He allowed no liberty or personal security. He filled the prisons with Turks and massacred the Christians.

The land was full of the spirit of revolt and revolution, and especially in the Balkans round Monastir, where the 'fire of sedition' always glowed hot, ready to burst into flame. New ideas were abroad.

With the passionate earnestness of youth Mustafa Kemal absorbed them all. Like every Albanian and Macedonian, his instinct was to resist all authority. At heart he was a revolutionary. He pictured himself leading revolt, overthrowing the despot, saving and cleansing the country. In these pictures he saw himself always the centre, the leader, the ruler obeyed and respected by all.

On his holidays he went back to Salonika, but kept out of his mother's house as much as possible. She had remarried with a well-to-do merchant from Rhodes. Mustafa Kemal had told her brutally that he disapproved. They had quarrelled. After that he refused to acknowledge or speak to his stepfather.

When in Salonika he spent much of his time with some Dominican monks who taught him French. He had made friends with a pleasant, shy youth a little older than himself called Fethi, a Macedonian from Orchrida. Fethi knew French well. Together they devoured all the revolutionary literature they could get: Voltaire, Rousseau, all the French writers, and the political economy of Hobbes and John Stuart Mill. These were forbidden books. To be caught with them meant imprisonment. The danger made the reading all the sweeter.

Mustafa Kemal practised oratory and harangued the other cadets: Turkey, their Turkey, must be saved from the claws of the foreigner and from the corruption of the Sultan. On freedom and liberty he wrote articles and treatises, and fiery rich-worded poetry.

At work he was as successful in Monastir as he had been in the Cadet School in Salonika. He was reported on as 'a brilliant, difficult youth with whom it is impossible to be intimate'. He was specially selected for the General Staff College—the Harbia—in Constantinople, gazetted as a sub-lieutenant and sent there.

Chapter IV

MUSTAFA KEMAL was twenty, wiry in build, with a tough constitution and unlimited vitality.

He had no experience of life. Salonika had been a mean little port; Lazaran a country village; Monastir a dull provincial town. He had none of his mother's deep beliefs or principles to keep him steady.

At once he plunged wildly into the unclean life of the great metropolis of Constantinople. Night after night he gambled and drank in the cafes and restaurants. With women he was not fastidious. A figure, a face in profile, a laugh, could set him on fire and reaching out to get the woman, whatever she was. Sometimes it would be with the Greek and Armenian harlots in the bawdy-houses in the garbage-stinking streets by Galata Bridge, where came the pimps and the homosexualists to cater for all the vices; then for a week or two a Levantine lady in her house in Pangaldi; or some Turkish girl who came veiled and by back-ways in fear of the police to some maison de rendez-vous in Pera or Stambul.

He fell in love with none of them. He was never sentimental or romantic. Without a pang of conscience he passed rapidly from one to the next. He satisfied his appetite and was gone. He was completely Oriental in his mentality: women had no place in his life except to satisfy his sex. He plunged deep down into the lecherous life of the city.

Suddenly he reacted from all this rioting and concentrated on his work with the same energy.

His success depended on himself. In Turkey each man must rise from the bottom by his own ability. There was no ruling class; no schools specially reserved for the rich and well-born; no preference given to sons because their fathers had succeeded or been born in the purple. That Mustafa Kemal was peasant-born would not clog his rise if he had the character and the brains.

Mustafa Kemal passed all his examinations brilliantly. He was picked for the special General Staff Course. This also he passed with brilliance and was gazetted out in January 1905, with accelerated promotion to captain.

With his work he mixed politics. In Monastir he had been a senior boy among boys. At the Staff College he was surrounded by young officers who were specially picked men of the same age and calibre as himself.

He found them all revolutionaries. Every young officer worth his salt was in revolt against the soul-destroying despotism of the Sultan and the interference of foreign nations. They were the heirs to the Ottoman Empire and their heritage was being destroyed.

The college tutors and many of the senior officers were in sympathy with them, but though they shut their eyes to what their juniors did, they dared not come out into the open nor give them a lead.

There was already in the College a revolutionary society known as the Vatan, or Fatherland, which held secret debates and published a broadsheet in script which was passed from hand to hand. It attacked all the established facts of Turkish life. It was bitterly hostile to the old régime, the Sultan's inefficient officials, his tyranny and his suppression of all liberal ideas. It hated the priests. It cursed the clammy hand of Islam, which stopped all progress; the mosques and dervish monasteries which bled the people; the legal system, based on the Koran, which carried out the fantastic, antiquated laws.

Its members bound themselves by oaths to break the Sultan's despotism and replace it by the constitutional government of a popular parliament, to release the people from the priests and the women from the veil and the harem; Turkey was being throttled by the Sultan and his spies; unless the blood of new ideas was let into its veins, Turkey would die.

Mustafa Kemal joined the Vatan. For the broadsheet he wrote vehement articles and boiling poetry. He spoke at the debates with exceptional bitterness.

Of the workings of the society the Commandant of the College was well aware, but he looked the other way. The Sultan's spies also knew of its existence and reported to the Palace, The Sultan was disturbed. It might be only a society of undeveloped youths, but these youths would be the future staff officers and generals of the army. He ordered Ismail Haki Pasha, the Director-General of Military Training, to see that the Vatan came to an end. Ismail Haki roundly cursed the Commandant of the College, who took care that no more meetings wer...