"Turkey in the shadow of Ataturk
By Gareth Harding
Nov 15, 2005, 19:00 GMT
ANKARA, Turkey (UPI) -- He may have been dead for 67 years, but Mustapha Kemal -- the founding father of the Turkish nation better known as Ataturk -- still has the ability to bring this proud, predominantly Muslim country of 70 million people to a complete standstill once a year.
At exactly 9.05 in the morning on Nov. 10, young and old, villagers and town-dwellers, Christians and Muslims, nationalist soldiers and leftist students silently paid homage to the man whose very name means \'father of the Turks\' -- as they do every year on the anniversary of Ataturk`s death.
In Ankara, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan laid a wreath at Ataturk`s imposing mausoleum -- a building equal in size and style to the Parthenon in Athens -- in front of a crowd of thousands of officers, diplomats and politicians."
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