Mustafa Kemal Atatürk §

Born in Ottoman Salonica (modern Thessaloniki) around 1881; rose through the Ottoman officer corps and earned national prominence as the defender of Gallipoli in 1915. After the Mudros armistice he organised resistance from Samsun (May 1919), led the Turkish national movement to victory in the Greco-Turkish war (1919–22), abolished the sultanate (1922) and declared the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. The military campaigns of 1920–21 against the First Republic of Armenia produced the Treaty of Alexandropol and, together with Bolshevik recognition, the parallel Moscow and Kars treaties of 1921 that fixed the present Turkish-Armenian frontier. The Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), negotiated by his ally İsmet İnönü, voided the Sèvres provisions for an Armenian state and minority guarantees and confirmed the territorial fait accompli. As President from 1923 to his death in 1938 he imposed the Kemalist programme, secularism, Latin alphabet, Turkish-language reform, single-party rule under the CHP, and codified the official republican silence on 1915 that endured under his successors.