Turgut Özal

Halil Turgut Özal was a bureaucrat and engineer who led Turkey's main miners' union before joining Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel's government in 1979, where he architected the 24 January decisions that shifted the economy toward neoliberalism. After the 1980 military coup he stayed on as deputy prime minister under Bülend Ulusu, resigned in 1982 over policy clashes, then founded the Motherland Party in 1983 and won a parliamentary majority that made him prime minister. His tenure brought exchange-rate reforms and deregulation alongside rising inflation and escalating conflict with Kurdish separatists; he survived an assassination attempt at a party congress in 1988 and won re-election in 1987 despite a reduced vote share. Elected president in 1989, he kept meddling in government - intervening in the 1990 Zonguldak miners' strikes, launching the Southeastern Anatolia development project with the Atatürk Dam, hosting the first Turkic Republics summit in Ankara in 1992, and working closely with George H. W. Bush during the Gulf War. He died unexpectedly in office on 17 April 1993; an exhumation in 2012 found evidence of poisoning, though the cause of death remain