Turgut Özal
Turgut Özal was prime minister of Turkey from 1983 to 1989 and its president from 1989 to his death in 1993, the engineer and World Bank economist who had written the austerity programme of January 1980 for a civilian government, run the economy for the generals after their coup that September, and then founded the Motherland Party and beat the generals' preferred party in the election of 1983 that they had let him contest, and who in the next decade opened the economy Ataturk's republic had kept closed. The lira was made convertible, the import licences abolished, the exports tripled, the state monopolies sold, the motorways, the dams and the telephone exchanges built, Istanbul made a trading city again, and a class of Anatolian businessmen made who would vote for Erdogan. He also applied to the European Community in 1987, sent Turkey into the Gulf war coalition in 1990 by cutting the Iraqi pipeline before Washington asked, and said that the Kurds existed, which no Turkish leader had. He was born in Malatya in 1927 into a family of Kurdish descent, trained as an electrical engineer in Istanbul, ran the state planning organisation in the 1960s, spent two years at the World Bank, and was the undersecretary who wrote the 24 January decisions of 1980, the devaluation and liberalisation the IMF wanted. The generals of the 12 September coup kept him as deputy prime minister for the economy and dismissed him in 1982 over a bankers' scandal. The election of November 1983, in which the junta allowed three parties and expected its own to win, gave his forty-five per cent and a majority. He governed with his family, his brother Korkut and his wife Semra, and with a tolerance of corruption he called the price of growth. Inflation ran at sixty per cent and the Kurdish war in the south-east began in 1984 under him. He had himself elected president by the parliament in 1989 against a boycott, and used the office as no president had, running the foreign policy of the Gulf war and the opening to the Turkic republics of the collapsing Soviet Union from the palace while his prime ministers resigned. He died of a heart attack in April 1993 at sixty-five, after a tour of Central Asia, and his body was exhumed in 2012 on his family's suspicion of poisoning, which the inquiry could not confirm.
- Lived: 1927 CE – 1993 CE
- Nationality: Turkish
- Roles: prime minister, president, politician
