Former Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit (81), who died late on Sunday after five-and-a-half months in a coma, was a staunch nationalist and a symbol of probity in the country’s corruption-plagued politics.
Once a leader of the Turkish left, he was also in his younger years a well-known poet and a translator of TS Eliot and Rabindranath Tagore.
The centre-left politician dominated Turkish politics for nearly four decades, along with his conservative arch-rival Suleyman Demirel.
He retired in frail health after he lost the premiership and his Democratic Left Party (DSP) lost all its parliamentary seats in the November 2002 elections that swept the current Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power.
His five stints as prime minister were marked by landmark dates in recent Turkish history.
In 1974, he ordered Turkish troops into Cyprus in response to a coup engineered by Athens aimed at uniting the island with Greece. The military action led to the downfall of the Colonels’ Regime in Greece and earned him the sobriquet ”Conqueror of Cyprus”.
In 1999, he announced the arrest in Kenya of Turkey’s public enemy number one, Abdullah Ocalan, head of the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting Turkish troops in the mainly Kurdish south-east since 1984.
Ecevit also witnessed three military coups; the last, in 1980, resulted in his being imprisoned for three months.
Born in 1925 to a well-off Istanbul family — his father was a professor of medicine and an MP, his mother a well-known painter — Ecevit graduated from Istanbul’s prestigious Robert College high school.
Instead of going to university, he began a career as a journalist.
In 1959, he joined the Republican People’s Party (CHP), founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the creator of modern Turkey. Articulate, unfailingly courteous and a tireless worker, he worked his way up the ranks to become the CHP chairperson in 1972.
He won his first election in 1973 in an unlikely alliance with a now-banned Islamist party in which the AKP has its roots.
The government collapsed in November 1974 and his second administration, which took office in June 1977, lasted only a month.
He was back at the helm in January 1978, battling political chaos sparked by deep economic woes and nationwide violence between left- and right-wing militants, but resigned after only 21 months.
His career interrupted by a political ban after the 1980 coup, he re-emerged as chairperson of the DSP, set up in 1985 by his wife, Rahsan, in his absence.
In January 1999, he led a minority government with the sole task of taking Turkey to elections in April, from which his DSP emerged as the biggest party.
He forged a coalition with the centre-right Motherland Party and the far-right Nationalist Action Party, which brought to Turkey some much-needed political stability.
But the tide turned when financial turmoil struck in November 2000 and February 2001, dragging the country into a severe economic crisis. His party was all but wiped out in the November 2002 elections.
Ecevit, a small, sprightly man with a black moustache who sported metal-rimmed glasses and a Greek sailor’s cap, lived for years in a modest suburban Ankara flat with his wife, Rahsan, his childhood sweetheart.
Unlike other politicians, neither he nor his wife was ever involved in business and enjoyed a reputation of unblemished honesty in the corruption-plagued world of Turkish politics.
The childless couple were famous for the strong affection that bound them: they always walked hand in hand and Ecevit dedicated some of his best poems to Rahsan, the sweetheart he had met at a high-school drama club. — Sapa-AFP