Bülent Ecevit

Mustafa Bülent Ecevit (28 May 1925 – 5 November 2006) was a Turkish politician, statesman, poet, writer, scholar, and journalist, who served as the Prime Minister of Turkey four times between 1974 and 2002.

Mustafa Bülent was born 28 May 1925 in Istanbul to a middle-class family.

He was named after his paternal grandfather Mustafa Şükrü Efendi, who was an Islamic scholar of Kurdish origin with roots in the region of Tunceli but born in a village in Kastamonu.

Mustafa Şükrü's son and Bülent's father Fahri Ecevit was a professor of forensic medicine in Ankara University's Law School.

Fahri later entered politics and served as a Republican People's Party member of parliament for Kastamonu between 1943-1950.

His mother of Bosniak ancestry, Fatma Nazlı, was among the first women in Turkey to paint professionally.

Bülent Ecevit's maternal great-grandfather was the Meccan Sheikh-ul-Islam Hacı Emin Pasha, who served to protect the holy sights of Hejaz in the Ottoman Empire.

The inheritance of his estate, which consisted of approximately 110 decares of land and 99 acres of the Masjid an-Nabawi was left to him once Ecevit's mother died.

One lawyer valued the estate at almost $2 billion, while unofficial valuation made by a Medina Court put it at $11 billion.

In the end Ecevit donated the proceeds of the estate to the Directorate of Religious Affairs for the benefit of Turkish Hajjis, after his retirement from politics.

Ecevit had no siblings and would have no children.

In 1944, Ecevit graduated from Robert College in Istanbul.

He started work as a translator at the General Directorate for Press and Publication (Turkish: Basın Yayın Genel Müdürlüğü).

In 1946, shortly after marrying his classmate Zekiye Rahşan Aral, he moved to London to work in the Turkish embassy as a press attaché.

During his stay he studied Bengali, Sanskrit and Art History at the School of Oriental and African Studies but did not graduate.

He also indulged in composing Sufi poetry.

Bülent Ecevit was not only a politician but also a poet, journalist and a writer.

In the 1950s, he worked as an editor for Ulus, and then Yeni Ulus, Halkçı, and Forum.

He later reported that both Ulus and Forum were two significant parts of his intellection life of that period.

In 1955 Ecevit went to the United States for three months as a guest journalist for the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, and was disturbed by the racism he witnessed in the American South.

On his last day at the newspaper he wrote a front-page article about how strange it was that Americans took it upon themselves to 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.”"

Ecevit began his political career when he was elected a CHP MP from Ankara in the 1957 election and came to prominence as Minister of Labour in İsmet İnönü's cabinets, representing the rising left-wing faction of the party.

Ecevit was chairman of the Republican People's Party (CHP) between 1972 and 1980, and in 1987 he became chairman of the Democratic Left Party (DSP).

Ecevit eventually became leader of the CHP in 1972; his leadership rejuvenated the party by reaching out to working class voters and cementing the party as "Left of Center".

He served as prime minister in 1974, 1977, 1978–1979, and 1999–2002.

Ecevit became Prime Minister in 1974, during which he retracted the ban on cultivation of opium and invaded Cyprus.

He formed two more governments in 1977 and 1978–1979 which were marked by increasing polarization, deadlock, and political violence that ended with the 1980 coup.

Following the coup, Ecevit, along with most politicians, was banned from politics for ten years.

During the ban, the Democratic Left Party (DSP) was established under the chairmanship of his wife, Rahşan.

When the political ban was lifted in 1987, he became the head of the DSP.

While heading a caretaker government for the 1999 election, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured in Kenya, catapulting DSP into first place in the election.

The DSP-MHP-ANAP coalition (1999–2002) introduced important political and economic reforms, as well as beginning Turkey's accession into the European Union.

The MHP's withdrawal from the coalition led to the government's collapse, and in the subsequent 2002 snap election, the DSP was ejected from parliament after being unable to clear the electoral threshold.

Ecevit resigned the chairmanship of the party in 2004.

He died on Sunday, November 5, 2006, as a result of circulatory and respiratory failure.

Ecevit is known for being Turkey's only leftist prime minister.

His chairmanship resulted in the highest shares of votes CHP or any other left-wing party have ever gained in Turkish history.

He is credited for introducing social democratic politics to Turkey by synthesizing Kemalism with social democracy, thus making social democracy a core tenet in modern Kemalist ideology.

Ecevit is the last non-AKP Prime Minister of Turkey.