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by Simply Joel » Wed Oct 27, 2004 6:52 am
MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK • Military and Political Leader
Name at birth: Mustafa Rizi
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the military and political leader who brought about the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of modern Turkey. As a student he was nicknamed Kemal for his excellence in mathematics (it means "perfection"), and he excelled early in his military career. In the Turkish defense of the Dardanelles in 1915 his military acumen and heroics made him a national icon. He was promoted to general at the age of 35 and given command of the army near the Black Sea port of Samsun. He defied the Sultan's orders to quash opposition and instead built an army of his own to fight for independence from European control. The Sultan ordered his arrest, but to no avail. Between 1919 and 1923 Kemal successfully fought off foreign armies as well as opposition forces from Turkey. On 23 October 1923 the national parliament declared the existence of the Republic of Turkey with Kemal as president. His fifteen years in office were turbulent -- he ruled as a dictator as he attempted political and social reforms -- but in 1934 the parliament officially dubbed him Atatürk, which means "father of the Turks."
Jawaharlal Nehru
AKA 'Pandit' (pundit or teacher).
Country: India.
Cause: Liberation of India from British colonial rule.
Background: British occupation of India begins at the start of the 17th Century, with the 'Raj' reaching its zenith at the end of the 19th Century. Indian opposition to colonial rule gains focus in the early 20th Century as the nation unites to expel the British. More background.
Mini biography: Born of 14 November 1889 at Allahabad in northern India, into a wealthy Kashmiri Brahman family.
1905 - Nehru studies at Harrow school in England, staying there for two years before entering Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he spends three years earning an honours degree in natural science. He qualifies as a barrister after two years at the Inner Temple, London.
1912 - Nehru returns to India and practices law in the Allahabad High Court.
1916 - He marries Kamala Kaul. Their only child, Indira Priyadarshini (Indira Gandhi), is also destined to serve as prime minister of India. Nehru meets Mahatma Gandhi for the first time at the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress Party in Lucknow.
1917 - The British Parliament announces that Indians will be allowed greater participation in the colonial administration and that self-governing institutions will be gradually developed.
1919 - The promise of self-governing institutions is realised with the passing of the Government of India Act by the British Parliament. The act introduces a dual administration in which both elected Indian legislators and appointed British officials share power, although the British retain control of critical portfolios like finance, taxation and law and order.
However, the goodwill created by the move is undermined in March by the passing of the Rowlatt Acts. These acts empower the Indian authorities to suppress sedition by censoring the press, detaining political activists without trial, and arresting suspects without a warrant. Nehru now becomes closely involved in the Congress Party.
Gandhi begins a campaign of passive resistance or 'satyagraha' (the devotion to truth, or truth force) against the Rowlatt Acts and British rule. The satyagraha movement spreads through India, gaining millions of followers. The movement is halted on 13 April when British troops fire at point-blank range into a crowd of 10,000 unarmed and unsuspecting Indians gathered at Amritsar in the Punjab to celebrate a Hindu festival. A total of 1,650 rounds are fired, killing 379 and wounding 1,137. The incident galvanises Nehru, who becomes a staunch nationalist.
1920 - Gandhi proclaims an organised campaign of noncooperation and advocates 'ahimsa' (nonviolence) and 'swaraj' (self-rule), particularly in the economic sphere. Nehru joins the campaign. During the year, Gandhi refashions the Congress Party from an elite organisation into an effective political instrument with widespread grassroots support. Nehru supports the reforms.
1921 - Nehru is arrested by the British and imprisoned for the first time. Over the next 24 years he will spend more than nine years in jail, with the longest of his nine detentions lasting for three years.
Nehru will occupy much of his time in prison writing. His major works will include 'Glimpses of World History' (1934), his 'Autobiography' (1936, and 'The Discovery of India' (1946).
Meanwhile, the Congress Party gives Gandhi complete executive authority. However, after a series of violent confrontations between Indian demonstrators and the British authorities, Gandhi ends the campaign of civil disobedience.
1923 - Nehru becomes general secretary of the Congress for a period of two years, attaining the position again in 1927 for another two years.
1926 - He tours Europe and the Soviet Union, where he develops an interest in Marxism.
1927 - The British establish a commission to recommend further constitutional steps towards greater self-rule but fail to appoint an Indian to the panel. In response, the Congress boycotts the commission throughout India and drafts its own constitution demanding full independence by 1930.
1929 - Under Gandhi's patronage, Nehru is elected president of the Congress at the party's Lahore session. Nehru is to serve as party president six times.
1930 - Nehru is arrested during a new campaign of civil disobedience orchestrated by Gandhi. The campaign calls upon the Indian population to refuse to pay taxes, particularly the tax on salt, and centres on a 400 km march to the sea between 12 March and 6 April.
Thousands follow Gandhi as he walks south from his commune at Ahmedabad (the capital of Gujarat) to Dandi (near Surat on the Gulf of Cambay). When they arrive they illegally make salt by evaporating seawater. In May, Gandhi is arrested and held in custody for the rest of the year. About 30,000 other members of the independence movement are also held in jail.
1931 - Gandhi accepts a truce with the British, calls off civil disobedience, and travels to London to attend a 'Round Table Conference'. On his return to India he finds that the situation has deteriorated.
1932 - Hopes that calm will prevail following the negotiations between the Indians and the British are dashed when Gandhi and Nehru are arrested. Nehru is sentenced to two years imprisonment.
1934 - When Gandhi formally resigns from politics, Nehru becomes leader of the Congress Party.
1935 - Limited self-rule is achieved when the British Parliament passes the Government of India Act. The act gives Indian provinces a system of democratic, autonomous government. However it is only implemented after Gandhi gives his approval.
1937 - In February, when the elections under the Government of India Act bring the Congress to power in a majority of the provinces, Nehru is faced with a dilemma. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the defeated Muslim League, asks for the formation of coalition Congress-Muslim League governments in some of the provinces. His request is denied.
The subsequent clash between the Congress and the Muslim League hardens into a conflict between Hindus and Muslims that will ultimately lead to the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan.
1939 - When the Second World War breaks out in September Britain unilaterally declares India's involvement on the side of the Allies. Nehru argues that India's place is alongside the democracies but insists that India can only fight as a free country. The Congress withdraws from government and decides it will not support the British war effort unless India is granted complete and immediate independence. The Muslim League, meanwhile, supports the British during the war.
1940 - Nehru is arrested and sentenced to four years imprisonment but is released after little more than a year, along with other Congress prisoners, three days before the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. Meanwhile, the Muslim League adopts the 'Pakistan Resolution' calling for the partition of India into two separate sovereign states, one Muslim, the other Hindu.
1942 - With Japanese forces reaching the eastern borders of India, the British attempt to negotiate with the Indians. However, Gandhi and Nehru will accept nothing less than independence and call on the British to leave the subcontinent.
When the Congress Party passes its 'Quit India' resolution in Bombay on 8 August the entire Congress Working Committee, including Gandhi and Nehru, is arrested and imprisoned. Nehru is not released from this, his ninth, last and longest period of detention, until 15 June 1945.
Also during 1942 Gandhi officially designates Nehru as his political heir.
1944 - The British Government agrees to independence for India on condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the Muslim League and the Congress Party, resolve their differences.
1946 - Nehru, with Gandhi's blessing, is invited by the British to form an interim government to organise the transition to independence. Fearing it will be excluded from power, the Muslim League declares 16 August 'Direct Action Day'. When communal rioting breaks out in the north, partition comes to be seen as a valid alternative to the possibility of civil war. Nehru attempts to prevent partition but is unsuccessful.
1947 - On 3 June the British announce plans for the partition of the British Indian Empire into the separate nations of India and Pakistan. Pakistan is further divided into east and west states on either side of India. At midnight on 15 August India and Pakistan formally achieve their sovereignty. Nehru delivers a famous speech on India's "tryst with destiny", but the initial jubilation is soon tempered by violence.
Sectarian riots erupt as Muslims in India flee to Pakistan while Hindus in Pakistan flee the other way. Hundreds of thousands die in north India, at least 12 million become refugees, and a limited war over the incorporation of Kashmir into India breaks out between the two nation states.
Nehru becomes the first prime minister of independent India and introduces a mix of socialist planning and free enterprise measures to repair and build the country's ravaged economy. He also takes the external affairs portfolio, serving as foreign minister throughout his tenure as prime minister.
1950 - India becomes a republic with Nehru as its prime minister. He is deeply involved in the development and implementation of the country's five-year plans that over the course of the 1950s and 1960s see India become one of the most industrialised nations in the world.
Industrial complexes are established around the country, while innovations are encouraged by an expansion of scientific research. In the decade between 1951 and 1961, the national income of India rises 42%.
Nehru also pursues reforms to improve the social condition of women and the poor. The minimum marriageable age is increased from 12 to 15, women are given the right to divorce their husbands and inherit property, and the dowry system is made illegal. Absentee landlords are stripped of their land, which is then transferred to tenant farmers who can document their right to occupancy.
In foreign affairs, Nehru advocates policies of nationalism, anticolonialism, internationalism, and nonalignment or "positive neutrality". He founds the nonaligned movement with Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito and Egypt's Gamal Abdel-Nasser and becomes one of the key spokesmen of the nonaligned nations of Asia and Africa.
Nehru argues for the admission of China to the United Nations (UN) and calls for détente between the United States and the Soviet Union. Acting as a mediator, he also helps to end the Korean War of 1950-53.
1956 - India under Nehru is the only nonaligned country in the UN to vote with the Soviet Union on the invasion of Hungary, calling into question the country's nonaligned status.
1961 - Indian troops occupy the Portuguese enclave at Goa on the west coast of the country in December, removing the last remaining colonial administration on the subcontinent and ending six years of unsuccessful negotiations.
1962 - A long-standing border dispute with China breaks out into war, despite Nehru's efforts to improve relations between the two countries. When the Chinese threaten to overrun the Brahmaputra River valley on India's northern border, Nehru calls for aid from the West. China withdraws but Nehru's nonalignment policy is further discredited.
1963 - He suffers a slight stroke, followed by a more debilitating attack in January 1964.
1964 - Nehru dies in office on 27 May in New Delhi from a third and fatal stroke.
Comment: The secular and practical balance to Gandhi's spiritual idealism, Nehru was no less passionate in his pursuit of independence for India. Though often overshadowed by the Mahatma, he was no less admired. He had the cultural and intellectual credibility necessary to first attract the younger intelligentsia to Gandhi's campaigns and then rally them after independence had been gained.
Nehru's tenure as prime minister has however come under critical analysis. Always a democratic socialist, his five-year plans helped to establish the economic independence that Gandhi had advocated. Nehru's domestic policies were centred on democracy, socialism, unity, and secularism. Today India is one of the strongest democracies in the world and is beginning to take off as an economic power. Nehru's only child, Indira Gandhi, served as India's prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 to 1984. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was prime minister from 1984 to 1989.
Konrad Adenauer
Biography
Konrad Adenauer was born on January 5, 1876, in Cologne. His father, Konrad sr., was a clerical civil servant, and his mother, née Helene Scharfenberg, had also been brought up in a civil servant's family. Together with three siblings, two elder brothers and one younger sister, Konrad Adenauer grew up in modest circumstances. At his grammar school, the Apostelgymnasium, he was thought a 'good, unspectacular, average pupil'. After his graduation in 1894, he began work as a bank apprentice but abandoned his apprenticeship when he was awarded a grant by the City of Cologne that enabled him to begin studying law at Freiburg University. Having spent two semesters at Munich, where he also attended classes in national economics, he moved to Bonn, where he passed his first state examination with fair success in 1897. The second state examination he passed with adequate marks in Berlin in 1901. Having spent his allotted time as a junior official at the office of the Public Prosecutor attached to the Cologne Regional Court, he joined in 1902 a law firm in Cologne headed by councillor Hermann Kausen who was Chairman of the Centre party group in the city council.
It was a foregone conclusion that Adenauer, a Catholic from the Rhineland, was predestined by both his origin and his upbringing to join the Centre Party, the party of political Catholicism. His political career began after he married in 1904 Emma Weyer, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a respectable, prosperous Cologne family. By virtue of this marriage, he was brought into contact with the societal and political trendsetters among the burghers of the Rhineland. In 1906, he applied successfully for the career city councillor post. Three years later, he was elected President of the council, which automatically made him deputy of Max Wallraff, the then Lord Mayor, who was an uncle of Adenauer's wife. It was particularly during the First World War that Konrad Adenauer's deftness and imagination stood him in good stead in organising the food supply of the City of Cologne. His professional success, however, was overshadowed by fateful events in his personal life. In 1916, he lost his wife, who had borne him three children. Adenauer himself was involved in a severe car crash in which he suffered facial injuries that held him captive for months in hospital and later in a health resort. When Wallraff left for Berlin in 1917 to become Under-Secretary of State for Interior Affairs, he left the office of Lord Mayor of Cologne vacant, and Adenauer was appointed his successor by the unanimous vote of all members of the City Council. This election made him the youngest mayor in Prussia.
In the time of the Weimar Republic, Adenauer was one of the most influential political personages in Germany. He made his name by progressively developing Cologne into a 'metropolis of the West'. During his term of office, Cologne University was founded in 1919, the city's former fortifications were converted into a green belt, the traditional industrial exhibition was revived, port facilities on the Rhine river were extended, another bridge across the Rhine was built, and industrial enterprises, the Ford Company among them, were induced to settle within the municipality. In 'big politics', Adenauer became one of the key figures dominating the Rhineland question. To prevent the outright annexation of the occupied area on the left bank, he advocated for a time the creation of a Rhenish Federal State so as to appease the French in their need for safety. That he cooperated with the so-called Rhineland Movement gave him the reputation of being a 'separatist', particularly during the Nazi period.
His influence spread beyond regional boundaries when he was made President of the Prussian State Council in 1921, an office which he held until 1933. Repeatedly, he was mentioned in government circles as one of the candidates for the office of Chancellor in the periodic crises of the Weimar Republic. In conjunction with his fundamental federalist, Christian, and social convictions, his republicanism made him an object of hate among the adversaries of the Weimar 'system'. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, therefore, he was immediately replaced as Lord Mayor of Cologne and banished from the city of his birth.
Adenauer lived through the years of war and National Socialist tyranny together with his family in the house on the Zennigsweg in Rhöndorf which he had built after the financial claims he had against the municipality of Cologne had been settled out of court. His situation became somewhat hazardous when, by the end of the war, he was held prisoner by the Gestapo for several months as an enemy of the regime after the assassination attempt on Hitler had failed.
He was returned to the office of Lord Mayor of Cologne by the victorious Americans. Aged 69, Adenauer was then at the head of a list of personally untainted politicians. With unbroken strength he faced up to the task of reviving a city that had been largely ruined. After a very few months, and after a switch of control, he was dismissed from office by the British military government then in charge after he had criticised its occupation policy. For the second time in his life, Adenauer found himself compelled to retire and expelled from Cologne. The ban on political activity, which had been imposed at the same time, had barely been lifted when Adenauer, who by then was 70, focussed all his energies on his activities within the CDU, which he had joined shortly after its foundation. A number of political concepts and programmatical ideas which he had developed after the First World War and submitted to the test of his experiences during the rule of the Nazis laid the foundations for a 'lightning career' in his party. As early as February 5, 1946, Adenauer was elected Chairman of the Rhineland CDU and - a scant month later - Chairman of the CDU of the British Zone. By october, he had added the office of Chairman of the CDU party group in the North Rhine-Westphalian Parliament to his list of offices. His rise as the charismatic Chancellor who was in office when the Federal Republic of Germany was founded and the respect he enjoyed as a statesman of the Western World are closely related to the origins of the conflict between East and West and the beginnings of the Cold War.
He took his most important step on his way to the top of the nascent West German governmental system when he was elected President of the Parliamentary Council created at the instruction of the three Western Allied Powers in 1948 to formulate the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was in this position that he became the 'spokesman of the budding Federal Republic' (Heuss) in its contacts with both the Land Minister Presidents and the military governors, which brought him increasing fame among the general public. At the age of 73, he was elected Federal Chancellor by the CDU/CSU party group in the first German Federal Diet on September 15, 1949, an office which he was destined to hold for 14 years.
The governments he led prepared the ground for the successful construction of a new democracy. Some epoch-making decisions will remain connected to the 'Adenauer era' forever. In foreign politics, these include the achievement of national sovereignty, the establishment of close ties with the free West, the reconciliation of France, and the unification of Europe; in domestic policy, they include the integration of refugees and displaced persons as well as the construction of social market economy, a novel economic order amalgamating the promotion of free competition with the responsibility of social government. The 'economic miracle' of Germany could not have been brought about without secure social peace in the country. Legislation establishing co-determination in the coal and steel industry, the system of employee property formation, the equalisation of burdens, the creation of subsidised housing, child benefits, the agricultural Green Plan, and the dynamisation of pensions became the cornerstones of the much-famed social network of the Federal Republic of Germany. For the first time, social policy in Germany acquired permanent and coherent structural overtones.
At the general elections of 1957, the CDU/CSU headed by Adenauer won an absolute majority of 50.2% of the votes cast - an achievement that is probably unique. When Adenauer's third period of office as Chancellor ended, however, uncertainties had become preponderant. The general picture of global politics had changed after the United States had modified its priorities, and this, in turn, caused the Soviets to bring more pressure to bear on Berlin (Berlin ultimatum; three-state theory). Domestic politics, in turn, succumbed to the struggle for the 'old man's' succession. One historical feat at the time was the establishment of close political ties between Germany and France on the strength of the friendship between Adenauer and de Gaulle, who had met for the first time in 1958. On the other hand, political relations between the two German entities reached an all-time low. The construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, just a few weeks before the fourth general elections, seemed to be cementing the separation of Germany. Having been elected Chancellor once again by a coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP in 1961, Adenauer stepped down at the half-way mark of the legislative period in conformance with a previous agreement.
Konrad Adenauer's attraction waned as the war generation was replaced by the children of the reconstruction period. In 1966, he resigned as Federal Chairman of the CDU. For the last time, he achieved political success in 1963 when the Franco-German Treaty was signed, a treaty which not only focussed on cooperation between the two neighbouring states but pointed the way to Europe, one of the overriding goals of Adenauer's policy.
When he died aged 91 on April 19, 1967, he received worldwide honours as a statesman who gave freedom, prosperity, and social security to the citizens of the Federal Republic. Konrad Adenauer lies buried in Rhöndorf. A foundation has directed the conversion of his house into a museum and research institution. His memoirs, the first volume of which appeared in 1965, and an edited version of his correspondence represent historical source materials of the first order.
