Every year on November 10th, the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is commemorated by the Turkish nation, in 2008 for the 70th anniversary. Ataturk was one of the most forward thinking politicians this world has seen.

Ataturk translates as Father of the Turks. He got this name late in life when he was President of modern Turkey. Mustafa Kemal started out as an officer in the Ottoman Empire where he was renowned for his extreme bravery throughout the Great War.

Because of this renown, it was possible for him to gather Turkish nationalist forces under his banner after the Ottoman Empire had been divided up with the treaties of Sevres in France. With his forces, he gained military control of what is modern Turkey. In the treaties of Lausanne in Switzerland, Turkey was internationally established as an independent nation.

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Other statesmen would now have started to cash in on the spoils handed out by a grateful nation. He saw that the work had not yet even begun. ‘Following the military triumph we accomplished by bayonets, weapons and blood, we shall strive to win victories in such fields as culture, scholarship, science, and economics,’ he stated. ‘Enduring benefits of victories depend only on the existence of an army of educated people.’

He had already deposed the Sultan, now he officially abolished the monarchy, and a few months later the Khalifat. The latter might, in hindsight, have been a major error, but at the time probably very necessary.

Importing Swiss legal experts together with the full law codex of Switzerland, he formed a Turkish Swiss body of law experts to hammer out the new constitution and laws of the country. As an outflow of this work, Sharia law was ended and a Swiss type code of laws was introduced. Polygamy was outlawed and civil marriage introduced. To this day, if you know the laws of either Switzerland or Turkey, you manage to read, understand, and interpret the laws of the other country.

As if that was not asking enough of his people, he didn’t stop where Switzerland was standing at that time. He went further, introducing the right of women to vote in 1934, where Switzerland managed to pass this last hurdle as late as 1974. He completely secularised the state by a strict division of state and church, or mosque, affairs. Turkey is probably the only nation in the world where the church has been put where it belongs.

Just in passing, he restructured the Turkish language, chugging out most Persian and Arabian words and supplanting them with Turkish terms, at the same time keeping the French terms in the language. He introduced the Roman alphabet, the Decimal system, the Metric system, the Gregorian calendar, abolished all titles, and introduced surnames.

In fact, he reinvented a whole nation in a period of 10 years, and succeeded.

Seeing the close ties between Switzerland and Turkey, it is no surprise that the Swiss President was staying in Turkey taking part in the commemorative proceedings for the 70th anniversary of Ataturk’s demise. Switzerland and Turkey fall out with each other from time to time, but they always remain friends, as they are both still taking part in that great experiment called modern Turkey.