Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Mustafa Kemal was born in 1881 in Salonika, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now Thessaloniki in Greece. An army officer, he gained fame defending Gallipoli in 1915. From 1919 he led a nationalist movement in Anatolia that defeated Greek forces and won revision of the postwar settlement at Lausanne in 1923. That year Turkey became a republic with him as president. He led a single-party regime under the Republican People's Party until his death in 1938. In 1934 a surname law gave him the name Atatürk, 'Father of the Turks'.

Atatürk is honoured in Turkey as the founder of the republic, and his principles, known as Kemalism, shaped the Turkish constitution, army and education system for decades. Admirers credit him with building a modern, secular nation-state from the ruins of an empire and with advancing women's rights. Critics point to single-party rule, restrictions on religious expression, and the forced assimilation of minorities. Kurdish uprisings were suppressed by force, including in Dersim in 1936-1939, where the BBC reports more than 13,000 Kurds were killed; a Turkish prime minister apologised for those killings in 2011. Insulting his memory remains a crime in Turkey. His 1930s policy of statism created state banks and factories that shaped Turkish industry for decades.