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'Mustafa İsmet İnönü' (September 24 1884–December 25, 1973) was a Turkish soldier, statesman and the second President of Turkey.
He was born in İzmir to a mixed Turkish and Bulgarian-Turkish 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 did his primary studies in Sivas. His son, Erdal İnönü, is 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.

Contents

Early military career

Independence war

Political career

National Chief period

Multi party period

Legacy

Media

References

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 at 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.

Independence war

After World War I he went to Anatolia to join the Turkish nationalist movement and was appointed as the commander-in-chief of the Turkish Western Army, a position in which he remained throughout the rest of 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.
He made a career change when he was appointed as the chief negotiator of the Turkish delegation at the Treaty of Lausanne and 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 would simply turn off his hearing aid when the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, launched into lenghty speechs opposing the Turkish demands for recognition of the national pact, and then afterwards restate the Turkish position as if the British foreign secretary hadn't said a thing.

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 managed the economy successfully, especially after the 1929 economic crisis, by implementing an economic plan which was inspired by the ''Five Year Plan'' of the Soviet Union. He thus took over numerous private property under government control. Thanks to his efforts, to this date more than 70% of land in Turkey is still owned by the state, resembling now-defunct Soviet Union.

National Chief period

After the death of Atatürk, Inönü was seen as the most appropriate candidate to succeed him, and was elected as 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 started to put pressure on 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 case of a Soviet invasion of the Turkish Straits after the war. The fear of a 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.
Perhaps the biggest political achievement of Inönü 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.

Multi party period

Under international pressure he resided over the infamous 1946 elections, in which votes were cast in the open, with the onlookers (most probably secret police) able to observe to which party the voters had voted, while the countings were done behind closed doors. In 1950, his party lost the general elections 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, which are done after the military intervention in 1960. Inonu was strongly opposed to the military intervention but couldn't prevent it. His party won the elections held after the military went back to it's barracks but it is widely believed that his party could get much better results if there were no military intervention in 1960.
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 buried next to Atatürk's mausoleum at Anıtkabir in Ankara.

Legacy

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

Media

★ ''(The sound file of the message by President İsmet İnönü on Kemal Atatürk, November 10, 1963) ''

★ ''(The Text of the message by President İsmet İnönü on Atatürk)''

References

1. The Young Turks – Children of the Borderlands? - Erik Jan Zürcher (Universiteit Leiden)
2. Ismet Inonu: The Making of a Turkish Statesman - Metin Heper / Brill Academic Publishers
3. http://www.inonu.edu.tr/