My dream for Turkey, by Boris’s great-grandfather
26 April 2008
Norman Stone on the dramatic life and death of Ali Kemal, one-time interior minister of Turkey and our mayoral candidate’s forebear
Boris Johnson is one eighth Turkish. His great-grandfather (there is, if you abstract the fez and the moustache, a family resemblance) was a well-known writer, Ali Kemal (1868–1922) who came, because of his politics, to a tragic end. He knew England very well, and when the British occupied Constantinople for four years at the end of the first world war, he collaborated with them. They had left the Sultan on his throne, and there was a puppet government which controlled a few back-streets. Poor Ali Kemal made the awful mistake of becoming its minister of the interior for some three months. As happens with collaborationist regimes, he quarrelled with his colleagues (there is a very funny scene of this sort, about Vichy France, in Céline’s D’un château l’autre, where Alphonse de Châteaubriant ends up throwing the crockery). Then he spent his time on journalism, and taught at the university: he knew a great deal about literature. But a nationalist resistance built up in the interior (based on Ankara) and when, late in 1922, it triumphed, Ali Kemal did not leave.
It was crazy: the Sultan himself was smuggled out in a British ambulance to Malta, and the Ottoman dynasty was thrown to the four winds. History does not reveal the reasons for Ali Kemal’s staying. At any rate he was picked up, while being shaved at the Grand Cercle d’Orient in the European city — it was the Levantines’ club, and only Turks of a high rank were admitted — and put on a train for trial in Ankara. His captor, Nurettin Pasha, had lost his two sons in the war, and had gone a little mad. Somehow, he allowed a mob to take Ali Kemal off the train at Izmit, the old Nicomedia, and they lynched him. The episode is written up in Louis de Bernières’s Birds Without Wings.
That book is a homage to the Turkey that might have been, with Greeks and Armenians taking their place. Ali Kemal thought that that should have happened. That was why he supported the British, in whom he put his faith. But at the time Lloyd George was really after the partition of Turkey: Greater Greece, Greater Armenia, even an Anglo-Kurdistan, with bits and pieces for the French and the Italians. There would have been a rump Turkey, run by a puppet Sultan. Ali Kemal was the puppet of a puppet. Everyone, including himself, let him down. The story ends, none the less, with some uplift. He had had two wives, one British — hence the Boris connection — and, after her death from childbirth, one Turkish. Boris (and his father, Stanley Johnson) has done him proud. On the Turkish side, there was a boy, Zeki Kuneralp, who was very bright and needed a state scholarship. Kemal Atatürk, the chief target of Ali Kemal’s journalistic attacks, was by then the Turkish equivalent of de Gaulle. He said: give that boy the money. Zeki’s son is now a chief negotiator on the subject Turkey-in-Europe. Another son is a leading publisher.
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Charles
April 24th, 2008 8:35am Report this commentJust a small point, but Ali Kemal was not lynched. He was, reportedly, killed by women armed with knives and stones en route to the lynching (see NYT online archives article dated 13th Nov 1922). His body was then dragged through the streets before being placed on the scaffold for public view. Gruesome, I know, but pretty much what one would expect of Turkey in its genocidal years.
Ed Hummer
April 24th, 2008 2:20pm Report this comment"And lo and behold". Although modern Turkey may be the land of milk and honey for Stone, I doubt that islamist state garbed in democratic feathers would have been Ali Kemal's dream.
Max
April 26th, 2008 2:23pm Report this commentCharles, that sounds rather like my idea of lynching. The (London) Times says he was hanged. His son's memoir of him says that he was deliberately put to death. And he was certainly no Islamist.
Charles
April 27th, 2008 11:47am Report this commentMax, sounds like you are better read on this subject than I am, so I shall defer to your opinion. I had only stumbled across the NYT article (about Ali Kemal Bey's demise) whilst investigating the fate of another Ali Kemal (a regional governor with a very unsavoury reputation).
According to the NYT piece, Boris's great-grandfather was indeed tried before one General Nureddin Pasha, the Military Governor of Smyrna. He pronounced a death sentence but then Ali Kemal was killed by the women on his way to the scaffold.
His crime was to be known as a prominent 'anti-nationalist'. His death, apparently, caused great concern in Constantinople where he was held in high regard.
M Clyde
April 28th, 2008 12:27pm Report this commentWhat a fascinating story. What a fascinating man. He sounds fundamentally decent; moderate, urbane, and loyal to the traditional rule and to the traditional foreign policy; loyal to both the British and the Sultan. Such men perish in radical times.
Boris has written a Telegraph article (Nov 07) on Turkey's accession to the EU, of which he remains heartily in favour. I respect his reasons, but like his grandfather I think he fails to read the runes. These are radical times. Traditional attitudes are shifting dramatically.
Turkey is headed in an Islamist nationalist direction. Such a Turkey would be a disaster for Europe.
vangos
May 8th, 2008 5:36pm Report this comment1.the author of the article has curiously omitted to mention that Turkey joined the I world war on the side of Germany.
2.In a distorted reporting he fails to make clear that the Turkish percentage died fighting the British & Greek armies, while the Greek & Armenian losses in Turkey were the result of genocide practised on the latter two populations by the Turks.
Mustafa Kemal
May 25th, 2008 1:53pm Report this commentHa ha ha ! so you won't put my views regarding this article up on your site, but you'll do it to those who praises this low life taraitor. I guess after all.. you westerners aren't democratic and has no respect for the ohter side's views. Why this does not surprize me? LOL!!!
God damn you people!!!.
Mustafa Kemal
May 26th, 2008 1:22pm Report this commentWell..let's see if you have enough guts to put my first two comments.
Typical English hypocracy...
Andrew
June 13th, 2008 9:32pm Report this commentmustafa kemal, newspapers in Turkey do the same, trust me I know. It is not an English characteristic. Be calm.
Muhsin Mustafa
June 17th, 2008 4:05pm Report this commentWhy is it that all British people are such gentleman and angels and a perfect example of humanity but others are always killing and doing all this horrible things to others. Have you looked at your history to see how many genocides, hanging and torturing is done by so called ' western' people.Not too long ago in British colonies, and in the name of peace in many countries countless atrocities have been done or allowed to be done because it suited your policies.
But you will argue that all your history is full of 'heroes', but the others are ' barbarians'.
It is matter of which side you are looking from.
Just as a final note even in Russian archives it is proved that Armenians practised genocide on Turks and for your information all the Greeks that died in Turkey were themselves invaders of Turkish land presented to them by the British and allied countries. they were killed during the Turkish Indepence war and as they left they burned and looted villages and raped women.
So as human being all through the history we have killed each other, it is we who decide which are genocide and which are for the country.
Glan
February 19th, 2009 5:46pm Report this commentIn my humble opinion, Ali Kemal was a triator. England has always had the best political advantages and ideas and lead the world and colonized many nations with is emperyalist apllications. Ali Kemal was just another English Spy but his tragic end is sad.
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