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Turkiye Cumhuriyeti
Muslim 99.8% (mostly Sunni),
other 0.2% (mostly Christians
and Jews)
Controversial Turkish foreign
minister Gul relaunches
presidential bid
After his Islam-rooted Justice
and Development Party won July
elections, Abdullah Gul is
relaunching the presidential
bid that sparked a national
crisis in April.
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. 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.
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