Turgut Ozal twenty years after: the man and the politician.

• Author: Candar, Cengiz
• Position: COMMENTARY - In memoriam

Among the numerous commentaries published following Turgut Ozal's death, it was the following remark that struck me the hardest: "Turgut Bey was not a good politician. For he was a good man."

This was the most striking assessment to me because it was his qualities as a good man that marked me in our frequent encounters over the final two years of his life. Turgut Ozal was an extremely courageous man, who did not seem to posess the supposedly indispensable qualities of any good politician: ruthlessness and the killing instinct.

He admired the Ottoman sultans of the Empire's classical period for their political skills. In particular, he held in high regard Sultan Abdulhamid II, an Ottoman sultan of the last period of the Empire of equally high caliber. I remember his expressed admiration for Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim I, Suleiman the Magnificient, Murad II and Bayezid II, whom he would refer to with a facial expression overshadowed by a sense of inadequacy and modesty: "What kind of men were they? How did they rule over such vast lands and such a diverse population? Look at us, and look at them!"

The people he talked about were rulers with absolute power, great might and enough fortitude to send their siblings and even sons to their deaths for "the well-being of the state," while Turgut Ozal felt he was the product of a country restricted by the nation-state ideology of the past century and a multi-party democracy. He had a different set of qualities. He could not resemble them. He was the kind of man who was compassionate toward people, devoid of wrath, quick to forget his rage, and good-hearted. Turgut Ozal was a good man.

I was glad to see that my impression of him was accurate when Husnu Dogan, Ozal's beloved cousin, who also served as a cabinet member in multiple governments, told me about the following instance:

At some point, Turgut Ozal and Husnu Dogan had a falling out. When the two supported opposite candidates for the Motherland Party's provincial offices in Istanbul during the split that eventually led Mesut Yilmaz to become Chairman and Prime Minister, Ozal had criticized Husnu Dogan in a rather harsh manner. Later developments proved Dogan right.

Following Ozal's death, Taha Akyol and I had hosted Husnu Dogan at a television show where he spoke very highly of the late President. When Taha Akyol referred to the aforementioned dispute and asked him specifically what he thought about the matter, Dogan looked down for a few seconds, and offered a brief response following a brief moment of silence: "Turgut Ozal was a good man!"

A Monumental Figure

Whether that good man was also a good politician remains up for debate. However, there is no question that he indeed was (and is) a significant historical persona. For me, Ozal was the most important figure in the Republic's history after (or along-side, for that matter) Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. I voiced this claim by defining Ozal as "the man who carried Turkey from the twentieth and into the twenty-first century" In that regard, he was, indeed, a monumental figure.

History's periodization in school textbooks differs from its compartmentalization by world-renowned and influential historians--one of whom was the late Eric Hobsbawm. For the textbooks the twentieth century starts by January 1st, 1900 and ends on midnight of December 31st, 1999. According to latter, however, it was the Great War in 1914 that closed the nineteenth century and started the twentieth century. Similarly, the twentieth century ended in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and thus bringing to an end the Cold War.

It was in this sense that Turgut Ozal guided his country into the twenty-first century. When he suddenly passed away in 1993, he had already led Turkey to the next century, even though the twenty-first century would technically begin only seven years later.

It was Ozal's strong foresight that established him as an extraordinary historic figure. Early in the 1980s, he was one of the rare people that could foresee the Soviet Union's approaching demise and began to forge a vision for the future based on that prediction. Ozal voiced this opinion in a careful yet comprehensive manner. Ozal's contemporaries, who were intent on viewing him as a classic right-wing politician, did not heed his words by attributed them to Ozal's anti-communist or anti-Soviet bias deeply rooted in his dislike of the Left. Turgut Ozal, however, was not a man to let himself be boxed into conventional categories and qualified as leftist or...