Countdown to Gallipoli - Landing at Cape Helles 1925AD

[jhungary]

Why would Ataturk say such words about invaders ?

That was called Mutual Respect for the enemies.

In war, there are only one way you could go if you do not hold the highest regard to your enemy, that's will be you going out of the battlefield feet first.

Ataturk commanded and directed the 57th Regiment and he lost every last Officer in that regiment and most of his soldier, to a point Turkey stop using the number 57 out of respect. Commonwealth respect that.

And although war is meaningless, the battle and people who died in the process should be and will be respected, regardless if they died for the invader or died for the defender

Pragmatic people like Atatürk will always be a controversial issue in deeply conservative Muslim world.

indeed Atatürk is quite controversial, I would say if he was actually born about 100 years earlier, I don't think we would actually see the down fall of ottoman empire, he is deemed a revisionist, and revolutionist yet held his tradition Muslim value in High Regard, many people say he betrayed the Muslim world by reforming turkey and hence basically put the great ottoman empire to the grave, but look at turkey now, and we can ask, who's laughing now??