İsmet İnönü

• 1. Introduction

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  İsmet İnönü stood inside a railroad car near Adana in January 1943, face to face with Winston Churchill. Turkey had spent years balancing between the Allies and the Axis, and Churchill had traveled to Ankara specifically to pull it off that fence. İnönü listened, nodded, and ultimately said no. That refusal to be pressured, by anyone, in any direction, would define a career that stretched from the dying gasps of the Ottoman Empire to the jet age of the Cold War.

  Born on the 24th of September 1884 in Smyrna, İsmet would serve as Turkey's prime minister three separate times, across four decades. He would command armies, negotiate treaties, survive assassination attempts, face lynch mobs, and lose his own infant son to illness during a war he was simultaneously trying to win. He would build a modern republic and then spend years fighting to preserve its democratic future. How does one man become so central to an entire nation's history? And what does it cost to hold that position for so long?

• 2. The Making of a Soldier

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  İnönü graduated from the Imperial School of Military Engineering in 1904 as a lieutenant gunnery officer. Two years later, on the 26th of September 1906, he earned the rank of first-rank staff captain from the Military Academy and began his duty in the Second Army at Adrianople on the 2nd of October 1906, assigned to the 3rd Battery Command of the 8th Field Artillery Regiment.

  His earliest years in uniform were spent navigating an empire already coming apart. In 1907, he briefly joined the Committee of Union and Progress, the reformist movement that wished to overthrow Sultan Abdul Hamid II. During the uprising known as the 31st of March Incident, he marched on Constantinople with the forces sent to depose Abdul Hamid II, then quietly left the committee the following summer.

  His first real test of command came in Yemen. Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamiddin had launched a revolt against Ottoman authority, and İnönü rose to become chief of staff of the suppression force. He personally negotiated with Imam Yahya at a place called Kaffet-ül-Uzer, and the outcome earned him promotion to major. Back in Constantinople by March 1913, he arrived just in time to help defend the capital during the First Balkan War and then served as a military adviser to the delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Constantinople with the Bulgarians.

  By the time World War I began, İnönü was climbing fast. He became lieutenant colonel on the 29th of November 1914, was appointed chief of staff of the Second Army in October 1915, and reached the rank of colonel by December of that year. It was on the Caucasian Front that he first began working alongside Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the man who would reshape both Turkey and İnönü's destiny.

• 3. War, Loss, and the Front

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  İnönü married Emine Mevhibe Hanim on the 13th of April 1917, three weeks before leaving for the front. He would not return home until the Armistice of Mudros concluded on the 30th of October 1918. The years between were relentless. He commanded the IV Corps from January 1917, moved to the Seventh Army, then took command of XX Corps on the Palestine Front, then III Corps.

  The heaviest blow came from British General Edmond Allenby's attack on Beersheba, which shattered the stalemate on the Sinai front. İnönü's forces absorbed much of that assault, and he was wounded in the subsequent Battle of Megiddo. He was sent back to Constantinople to recover, taking up administrative roles in the War Ministry while the armistice played out.

  While İnönü was fighting those campaigns, his infant son İzzet died at home. His wife Emine Mevhibe chose to hide both the death and the severity of the illness from him, judging that the weight of the news might break a man who was already carrying a front. İnönü would not learn of his son's death until the spring of 1922, long after the fact. That silence, sustained across years of separation, says something about the human cost buried inside the larger story of nation-building.

  Australian actor Gerard Kennedy later portrayed İnönü as Colonel Ismet Bey in the 1987 film The Lighthorsemen, while Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer played the same figure in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, giving the wartime colonel a second life on screen decades after the battles he fought had faded from living memory.

• 4. The Battles That Named Him

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  After the military occupation of Constantinople on the 16th of March 1920, İnönü escaped to Anatolia. He and his chief of staff, Major Saffet Arıkan, slipped out of Maltepe on the evening of the 19th of March and reached Ankara on the 9th of April. The Ottoman government sentenced him to death in absentia on the 6th of June 1920.

  In May 1920, İnönü was appointed chief of the general staff of the Grand National Assembly's army. The following year, commanding the Western Front, he won the First and Second Battles of İnönü against Greek forces in 1921. Those two victories gave him a name. When the 1934 Surname Law was adopted, Atatürk bestowed on İsmet Pasha the surname İnönü, the site of those battles.

  The path to that surname was not unbroken. After Turkish forces lost major battles in July 1921 and the cities of Afyonkarahisar, Kütahya, and Eskişehir were temporarily lost, İnönü was replaced as chief of staff by Mustafa Fevzi Pasha. He continued as a staff officer with the rank of Brigadier General and took part in later fighting, including the battle of Dumlupınar, which turned the tide of the war.

  When the War of Independence was won, İnönü was sent to negotiate its end. At the Armistice of Mudanya talks, he represented the Ankara government as an army general. Then came the Lausanne Conference in late 1922, where the goal was to replace the Treaty of Sèvres, imposed on the defeated Ottomans, with a new agreement that recognized Turkey's sovereignty. İnönü became known there for a tactic as memorable as any battle: after stating the Ankara government's position, he would switch off his hearing aid while the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon responded, then restate his position as though Curzon had never spoken. Bulgarian diplomat Nadejda Stancioff served as intermediary between the two men throughout the negotiations.

• 5. Building and Breaking the Republic

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  It was İnönü who suggested making Ankara the capital of Turkey, and parliament approved the idea. He played a direct role in the proclamation of the Republic, the abolition of the Caliphate, and the closure of the Evkaf Ministry. He resigned from the premiership for health reasons on the 22nd of November 1924, but returned when his successor Fethi Okyar lost a parliamentary vote of confidence following the Sheikh Said rebellion.

  Back in power, İnönü moved quickly. He banned all opposition parties, including the Progressive Republican Party, and reestablished Independence Tribunals to prosecute Kurdish rebels. In 1926, the alleged İzmir plot to assassinate Atatürk led to the execution of remaining Committee of Union and Progress leaders. İnönü retired his military command in 1927.

  The reforms accumulated steadily across his years as prime minister. The Hat Law and the closure of Dervish lodges came in 1925. In 1928, the Turkish alphabet shifted to Latin characters. In 1934, titles including Efendi, Bey, and Pasha were abolished, and certain religious clothing was banned, though İnönü himself remained widely known as İsmet Pasha. That same year, a new settlement law resettled Albanians, Abkhazians, Circassians, and Kurds to create a more homogeneous Turkish state.

  On the economic side, İnönü governed during the Great Depression with heavy state intervention modeled in part on the Soviet Union's Five Year Plan. He brought large amounts of private property under government control, a legacy that persists: more than seventy percent of land in Turkey remains state-owned to this day. Atatürk ultimately dissolved İnönü's government in 1937, appointing Celâl Bayar, the founder of Turkey's first commercial bank, Türkiye İş Bankası, as prime minister. That appointment set off a rivalry between Bayar and İnönü that would shape Turkish politics for another three decades.

  The Report for Reform in the East, prepared under İnönü's oversight, recommended forbidding non-Turkish languages and creating regional units governed by martial law. On the 12th and the 13th of July 1930, during the Ararat rebellion, thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed by Turkish Land Forces in the Zilan Valley of Van Province in what became known as the Zilan massacre.

• 6. Staying Out of World War II

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  Both sides wanted Turkey. Germany sent Franz von Papen to Ankara in April 1939; Britain sent Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen; France sent René Massigli. İnönü told Massigli in May 1939 that the best way to stop Germany was a combined alliance of Turkey, the Soviet Union, France, and Britain, and that Turkey would welcome Soviet forces onto its soil if such an alliance materialized.

  The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of the 23rd of August 1939 changed everything. Turkish security policy had always assumed the Soviet Union as a necessary partner against Germany; once Moscow and Berlin aligned, that assumption collapsed and İnönü chose neutrality. He signed a tripartite treaty with Britain and France on the 19th of October 1939 that obligated Turkish entry if fighting reached the Mediterranean, but France's defeat in June 1940 dissolved that arrangement.

  A significant embarrassment followed in July 1940 when Germany captured and published documents from Paris showing that Turkey had been aware of Operation Pike, the Anglo-French plan to bomb Soviet oil fields from Turkish territory. Berlin used those revelations to worsen Ankara-Moscow relations and push Turkey toward the Reich. İnönü responded by pulling out of the tripartite pact and signing both the German-Turkish Treaty of Friendship and the Clodius Agreement, placing Turkey within the German economic sphere, but he went no further.

  Churchill met İnönü secretly inside a railroad car at Yenice Station near Adana in January 1943, pressing for Turkish entry on the Allied side. By December 1943, İnönü met openly with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill at the Second Cairo Conference. Roosevelt and Churchill disagreed: Churchill wanted Turkey to open a Balkan front; Roosevelt considered a Turkish attack too risky. İnönü knew exactly what his country had suffered through the wars from 1908 to 1922 and was determined to avoid repeating them.

  German efforts to woo Turkey included returning Talaat Pasha's remains for a state burial in February 1943. Papen also offered İnönü parts of Greece if Turkey joined the Axis, an offer İnönü declined. Ultra-nationalist factions inside Turkey pushed for annexing Turkic-populated areas of the Soviet Union by allying with Germany; leading pan-Turkists including Alparslan Türkeş, Nihal Atsız, and Şaik Gökyay were arrested and imprisoned in the Racism-Turanism trials. İnönü broke off diplomatic relations with Germany in August 1944, severed relations with Japan on the 5th of January 1945, and finally declared war on both Germany and Japan on the 25th of February 1945, just months before the European war ended. That declaration made Turkey a founding member of the United Nations.

  At home, wartime neutrality imposed its own hardships. Rationing, curfews, and heavy taxes squeezed the population. One especially severe measure was the Wealth Tax, which imposed very high one-time payments specifically on Turkey's non-Muslim minorities and was only repealed in 1944 under American and British pressure. At a public meeting in Bursa during the 1969 general elections, a young man in the crowd shouted at İnönü that he had let the people go without food. İnönü replied: "Yes, I let you go without food, but I did not let you become fatherless."

• 7. Democracy's Difficult Birth

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  In an opening speech to the Grand National Assembly on the 1st of November 1945, İnönü publicly called for an opposition party. He welcomed Celâl Bayar's founding of the Democrat Party, which split from the CHP. The first multiparty elections followed in 1946, though they were not free or fair: voting happened in full view of onlookers who could see which party a voter chose, and the counting was kept secret.

  İnönü appointed CHP hardliner Recep Peker as prime minister, who immediately polarized the parliament. İnönü had to mediate repeatedly between Peker and Bayar, who threatened to pull the Democrat Party from parliament unless judicial review, secret ballots, and public counting were guaranteed. On the 12th of July 1947, İnönü gave a radio and newspaper broadcast announcing that he would stand equidistant from both the government and the opposition, which prompted Peker's resignation.

  Free and fair elections finally came in 1950. The Democrats campaigned with the slogan "Geldi İsmet, kesildi kısmet," which translates roughly as "İsmet arrived, our fortune left." The CHP received 41% of the vote against the Democrats' 55%, but the winner-takes-all system handed the Democrats 85% of parliamentary seats. İnönü oversaw the peaceful transfer of power to Bayar and Adnan Menderes, Turkey's first prime minister from outside the CHP.

  For the next ten years, İnönü led the opposition. During the lead-up to the 1960 elections, he faced regular harassment. In 1958, the Democrat mayor of Zile declared martial law to prevent İnönü from holding a rally there. In 1959, he retraced the route he had taken thirty years earlier as a Pasha from Uşak to İzmir; in Uşak, a crowd blocked him from his podium and he was struck in the head with a stone. He was later nearly lynched by a mob in Istanbul on the way to Topkapı Palace, and was banned from speaking in Kayseri and Yeşilhisar, and from twelve sessions of parliament.

• 8. The Final Chapter

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  The Turkish Armed Forces overthrew the Democrat government on the 27th of May 1960. After a year of junta rule, during which Democrat Party leaders were tried at Yassıada and executed, elections were held and İnönü returned as prime minister following the 1961 vote. He argued for pardoning the former prime minister Menderes, even as right-wing parties attacked the CHP for its perceived role in Menderes' hanging.

  İnönü's coalition governments brought their own crises. Colonel Talât Aydemir attempted to overthrow the government twice, in 1962 and 1963. During the 1962 attempt, İnönü, President Cemal Gürsel, and Chief of Staff Cevdet Sunay were held inside Çankaya Mansion by the coup's soldiers. Aydemir ultimately decided to release them, which ended the attempt. He was later executed for both coups.

  On Cyprus, İnönü faced pressure from Washington. American President Lyndon Johnson sent a memorandum effectively vetoing Turkish military intervention. İnönü met Johnson at the White House on the 22nd of June 1964, and Cyprus's status quo held for another decade. That same period saw the withdrawal of nuclear-armed PGM-19 Jupiter MRBMs that had been stationed in Turkey, a consequence of the Cuban Missile Crisis, though some B61 nuclear bombs remain at İncirlik Air Base.

  İnönü's governments established the National Security Council, the Turkish Statistical Institute, and TÜBİTAK, the country's leading research institution. Turkey signed the Ankara Agreement with the European Economic Community, its first treaty of cooperation with that body. İnönü also shaped his party's future by backing the young left-wing cadre led by his protégé Bülent Ecevit. He survived an assassination attempt from a Menderes supporter in 1964.

  He lost the 1965 and 1969 elections to Justice Party leader Süleyman Demirel. In 1972, at the 5th extraordinary CHP convention, İnönü's endorsement of the 1971 military memorandum split his own party, and Ecevit defeated him in the leadership vote. It was the first time in the Republic's history that a party leader had been removed through a convention contest. İnönü resigned from parliament afterward. On the 25th of December 1973, he died of a heart attack at the age of 89. He was buried at Anıtkabir on the 28th of December, in a tomb positioned directly opposite Atatürk's mausoleum, where İnönü University and Malatya İnönü Stadium now carry his name.