6 November 2006Stephen Kinzer
Bulent Ecevit, a resilient leader who served four terms as Turkey’s prime minister in a turbulent era, died yesterday in a hospital in Ankara, the Turkish capital. He was 81.
Mr. Ecevit, who suffered a stroke in May from which he never completely recovered, died of circulatory and respiratory failure, the Gulhane military hospital said.
For much of his political career — almost half a century — Mr. Ecevit was a leftist and a nationalist. An opponent of religious fundamentalism, he helped maintain Turkey’s position as the world’s most secular Muslim country.
During his final years in power, Mr. Ecevit turned away from the leftism that had shaped his career. He abandoned much of his hostility to private enterprise, and, after helping to keep Turkey out of the European Union in the 1970s, he came to believe that integration with the West was a good idea.
In his last term, beginning in 1999, Mr. Ecevit governed in a coalition with a right-wing party. He pursued pro-business policies and maintained Turkey’s status as a faithful NATO member and ally of the United States despite his lifelong skepticism about the sincerity of American commitments to democracy and human rights.
The hardships encountered when he finally embraced market economics to win the European Union’s confidence helped end his political career. With his health failing, his Democratic Left Party lost badly in the country’s 2002 elections, forcing him from office.
Mr. Ecevit was unusual among Turkish politicians in the simplicity of his lifestyle. He was never accused of participating in the corruption that plagues his country’s political and economic life. He was popularly known by the nickname Karaoglan, or Dark Boy, a reference to his black hair and mustache, which he continued to dye despite his advancing age.
After leaving office, he devoted himself to writing.
Bulent Ecevit (pronounced buh-LEHNT EH-jeh-vicht) was born in Istanbul on May 28, 1925. His father was a professor of medicine and his mother one of the first women in Turkey to become a professional painter. He was their only child. He graduated from Robert College in Istanbul, where much of the country’s English-speaking elite has been trained. He later took courses at foreign universities, including Harvard.
Interested in journalism, Mr. Ecevit worked as a press attaché at the Turkish Embassy in London. In the mid-1950s, on a State Department fellowship, he worked at The Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel in North Carolina. The racism he saw in the South deeply disturbed him.
In a front-page article on Jan. 9, 1955, his last day with the newspaper, he wrote that he had found it strange that the United States should fight oppression in the world while white Americans were “guilty of refusing to drink from the same fountain as the man who has fought on the same front for the same cause; guilty of refusing to travel on the same coach or seat as the man who has been working with equal ardor for a common community; guilty of refusing to pray to God side by side with the man who believes in the same prophet’s teaching.”
After returning to Turkey, he joined the Republican People’s Party, founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. He was elected to Parliament in 1957.
While establishing a reputation as a rising star on the non-Marxist left, he also worked as an art critic, columnist and newspaper editor. He published several volumes of poetry and translated the works of T. S. Eliot and Rabindranath Tagore.
Mr. Ecevit always considered himself a champion of the underdog, a view that linked his support for American blacks, Palestinians, Turkish workers and the Turkish minority on Cyprus.
His government maintained close ties with Israel, but he denounced Israel’s attacks on refugee camps in 2002 as “genocide.” Criticized for the remark, he said he had meant to accuse both sides.
He allowed American planes to use Turkish bases for their patrols over northern Iraq, but he sympathized with Iraqi civilians, who he said were suffering because of economic sanctions imposed by the United States.
Mr. Ecevit had no such sympathy for Kurds in Turkey, however. He insisted that they were not a minority and for most of his career opposed proposals to legalize education or television broadcasting in the Kurdish language, arguing that such steps would lead to separatism and strife. But in his final term, pressed by the European Union, he became less categorical.
From 1961 to 1965, Mr. Ecevit served as minister of labor, and in 1972 he deposed his mentor, Ismet Inonu, who had been Ataturk’s closest comrade, to take over leadership of the party. The next year he was elected prime minister.
In 1974, Mr. Ecevit ordered Turkish troops to land on Cyprus after the government there was overthrown by militants aligned with the Greek military dictatorship. The island has been divided between ethnically Greek and Turkish sectors ever since.
With the support of labor unions and some leftist groups, Mr. Ecevit served as prime minister twice more during the 1970s. He favored generous social programs, a large government role in the economy and protective tariffs to keep low-priced foreign goods out of Turkey.
Mr. Ecevit’s insular policies and those of his longtime rival, the more conservative Suleyman Demirel, had the effect of sealing Turkey off from many of the intellectual, political and economic trends surging elsewhere. Turkey remained stagnant while underdeveloped countries from Spain to South Korea became more democratic and prospered.
During Mr. Ecevit’s term as prime minister that began in 1978, hardly a day passed without political assassinations and bombings. After he and other political leaders proved unable to control the violence, military officers staged a coup on Sept. 12, 1980, and remained in power for nearly three years.
Mr. Ecevit and other political leaders were jailed after the coup. They were released after a few weeks but banned from politics. In 1981, he was imprisoned again for three months after publishing an article criticizing military rule.
During this period Mr. Ecevit’s wife, the former Rahsan Aral, his political partner and fierce defender over many decades, formed the Democratic Left Party on behalf of her husband. She survives him. They had no children.
After Mr. Ecevit was allowed to return to political life in 1987, he and his wife exercised total control over the party. No one could run for office on its ticket or even join it without their approval.
In 1995, he asked his supporters to “make me prime minister once more before I die,” but few believed he would realize that ambition. Scandals tarnished many of the country’s political leaders, however, and Mr. Ecevit emerged unexpectedly as prime minister in 1998.
He had the good fortune to be in office when Abdullah Ocalan, leader of a Kurdish rebellion that devastated southeastern provinces, was captured in February 1999, just before Mr. Ecevit’s interim government was to face the voters.
The prestige he gained from that arrest led him to victory in the April 1999 election. In his final term, he embraced many ideas he had once abhorred, like the value of free enterprise and close ties to the West. Many of his former supporters were alienated.
He also acknowledged that his earlier opposition to Turkey’s joining the European Union had been a historic error. “It is now understood,” he said, “that there can be no Europe without Turkey and no Turkey without Europe.”
