While Ataturk did shape Turkey into a secular Turkish state, as Turkey's first dictator he did so by committing widespread human rights violations against his own people and by implementing the large-scale massacre and ethnic cleansing of millions of Turkey's Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christian minorities. As a result of widespread atrocities and of decrees by Ataturk's new government expelling Asia Minor's indigenous Christian inhabitants, well over a million Greeks were ethnically cleansed from Turkey. Of those, the Greeks are no more than 7,000. Yet, in 1923 they were as many as 1.2 million. Many have argued that it was Ataturk that set the precedent for further ethnic cleansing campaigns in the Balkans after engineering what was arguably the region's most successful one.
Turkey has among the worst human rights records on earth.
Oz-like, behind a thin veneer of democracy. Likewise, a May 1999 report from Reporters Sans Frontieres called upon the Council of Europe to investigate and condemn Turkey for its imprisonment, torture, beatings and assaults of more than 70 journalists since 1998. Even Western journalists are censored, yet little mention is made in our press. NY Times Istanbul bureau chief Stephen Kinzer had his office ransacked by Turkish secret police and was detained and assaulted while on assignment in southeast Turkey. This shadow government of right-wing extremists and underworld assassins perpetrated thousands of murders, kidnappings and bombings of Islamic leaders, Kurds, businessmen, journalists, students and opposition leaders over the past ten years.