doğmunun 125. yılında mustafa kemal atatürk - Atatürk Araştırma ...

ATATÜRK’S LEGACY FOR TURKEY AND THE WORLD 509
governments insisted that only the Sultan’s Istanbul government could
represent the Turks, and that the Ankara government, which had
won the war, could come only as subordinate to the delegates sent
from Istanbul. This drove Atatürk to take a step that he had not intended
previously. He was forced to show that Ankara had the right
to represent the Turkish people since it alone had won the victory
for them. Since Britain and France had invited the Istanbul government
alone to Lausanne, this could be done only by abolishing the
Sultanate, and with it the entire state and administrative structure
that went with it, thus making it essential that a Turkish Republic be
established in its place.
5) The fifth principal is a natural corollary of the fourth. Atatürk
introduced these and many other reforms during and after the
War for Independence to solve problems that existed at that time. He
abandoned the old Ottoman ways because Turkey after 1923 needed
to repair what had been destroyed during the wars and to develop
new ways of doing things so that it could play an important role in
the modern world. He did not imitate the past when he introduced
new things. And so he left this lesson, that Turkey in the twenty first
century should most certainly accept the principles left by Atatürk,
but it should make whatever changes are needed at the present time
to solve present problems, not just to imitate the solutions that Atatürk
found to meet the problems that existed almost a century ago
when he was president. If Mustafa Kemal was Prime Minister of
Turkey today, he would not carry out the same policies he did in the
1920’s because the problems that he was solving then were not the
problems that he faced today. New problems require new solutions,
inspired by the pragmatic and progressive approaches which were
characteristic of the outstanding leadership provided to Turkey and
the Turks by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.