Background: Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 from the Anatolian remnants of the defeated
Ottoman Empire by national hero Mustafa KEMAL, who was later honored with the
title Ataturk, or "Father of the Turks." Under his authoritarian leadership, the
country adopted wide-ranging social, legal, and political reforms. After a
period of one-party rule, an experiment with multi-party politics led to the
1950 election victory of the opposition Democratic Party and the peaceful
transfer of power. Since then, Turkish political parties have multiplied, but
democracy has been fractured by periods of instability and intermittent military
coups (1960, 1971, 1980), which in each case eventually resulted in a return of
political power to civilians. In 1997, the military again helped engineer the
ouster - popularly dubbed a "post-modern coup" - of the then Islamic-oriented
government. Turkey intervened militarily on Cyprus in 1974 to prevent a Greek
takeover of the island and has since acted as patron state to the "Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus," which only Turkey recognizes. A separatist
insurgency begun in 1984 by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) - now known as
the People's Congress of Kurdistan or Kongra-Gel (KGK) - has dominated the
Turkish military's attention and claimed more than 30,000 lives, but after the
capture of the group's leader in 1999, the insurgents largely withdrew from
Turkey, mainly to northern Iraq. In 2004, KGK announced an end to its ceasefire
and attacks attributed to the KGK increased. Turkey joined the UN in 1945 and in
1952 it became a member of NATO. In 1964, Turkey became an associate member of
the European Community; over the past decade, it has undertaken many reforms to
strengthen its democracy and economy, enabling it to begin accession membership
talks with the European Union.
Location: southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia (that portion of Turkey west of the
Bosporus is geographically part of Europe), bordering the Black Sea, between
Bulgaria and Georgia, and bordering the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea,
between Greece and Syria
Population: 69,660,559 (July 2005 est.)
Age structure: 0-14 years: 26% (male 9,232,439/female 8,897,135)
15-64 years:
67.3% (male 23,806,367/female 23,053,536)
65 years and over: 6.7%
(male 2,140,242/female 2,530,840) (2005 est.)
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