Alparslan Türkeş

Alparslan Türkeş (25 November 1917 – 4 April 1997) was a Turkish nationalist politician who was the founder and former president of the Nationalist Movement Party party. He represented the far right of the Turkish political spectrum, and was court-martialed on the charges of "fascist and racist activities" in 1945, with the charges being dismissed in 1947. He was called Başbuğ ("Leader") by his devotees.

Political career
He attained notoriety as the spokesman of the 27 May 1960 coup d'état against the government of then prime minister Adnan Menderes, who was later executed after a trial following this coup. However Colonel Türkeş was expelled by an internal coup within the junta. He later joined the Republican Villager Nation Party (Cumhuriyetçi Köylü Millet Partisi, CKMP) and was elected its chairman. In 1969 the CKMP was renamed the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP).

Türkeş served as Deputy Prime Minister in right-wing National Front (Milliyetçi Cephe) cabinets.

Ideology
Through the far-right MHP, Türkeş took the rightist views of his predecessors like Nihal Atsız, who is known for his explicitly racist views  and transformed them into a powerful political force. In 1965, Türkeş released a political pamphlet titled "Dokuz Işık Doktrini" (Nine Lights Doctrine). This text listed nine basic principles which formed the basis of the nationalist ideology. These were nationalism, idealism, moralism, societalism, scientism, independentism, ruralism, progressivism, populism, industrialism, and technologism.

Türkeş led the vanguard of anti-communism in Turkey; he was a founding member of the Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish Gladio.

He has been the spiritual leader of the Idealism Schools Foundation of Culture and Art (Ülkü Ocakları Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı). His followers consider him to be one of the leading icons of the Turkish nationalist movement.

International contacts
In 1992, Alparslan Türkeş visited Baku in 1992 to support Abulfaz Elchibey during the Azerbaijan presidential election. He also realised a meeting with Levon Ter-Petrosian the President of Armenia in the 1990s.

Legacy
When he died, it was revealed that he had embezzled 2 trillion lira from the European Turkish Federation. The pan-Turkist group had created a secret slush fund to support the Second Chechen War and Abulfaz Elchibey in Azerbaijan. The money was formerly administered by Enver Altaylı, who had been implicated in the Azerbaijan coup plot. His daughters, Ayzıt and Umay Günay, quarreled over who was the rightful owner (legally, neither of them). The two appeared before the Ankara 7th High Penal Court for fraud. The indictment said that Türkeş' account in a U.K. branch of the Deutsche Bank held 575,000 DM, 845,000 USD, and 367,000 GBP. The court concluded that Ayzıt had withdrawn 200,000 GBP while Umay Günay had withdrawn 42,000 GBP.

Ayzıt said that she had been living in the U.K. since 1975, and that her father opened the account in 1988, giving her complete access to it. She said that her father had instructed her to fulfill his financial obligations (in support of "the cause of Turkishness") upon his death by making certain payments. Türkeş' second wife, Seval, refuted Ayzıt's claim that she had not kept the money to herself. Seval claims that she and her sons' Ayyüce and Ahmet Kutalmış share of the withdrawn 242,000 GBP is 112,355 GBP.

The MHP's chairman, Devlet Bahçeli, instructed his deputies to keep mum, fearing that the scandal could lead to the dissolution of the party.

The case was closed due to the statute of limitations.