Turkey
Mustafa Kemal
1881–1938 Leader of the Turkish national movement; first President of Turkey
Kemal made his name as a commander at Gallipoli in 1915. In 1919 he went to Anatolia as an Ottoman inspector and instead led a rebellion against the Allied occupation, the Greeks and the Sultan. He founded the Grand National Assembly at Ankara in 1920, fended off Greece at the Sakarya in 1921, and drove the Greek army from Anatolia in 1922. The Treaty of Lausanne recognized his Turkey, and in October 1923 he became president of the republic. After that he abolished the caliphate and began a program of secularization, Westernization and nationalism. He took the surname Atatürk ("father of the Turks") in 1934 and died in 1938. He is the only leader of the defeated powers who won a better peace than the victors had offered.