Capital: Ankara
Ethinc Groups: Turk, Kurd, Circassian, Zaza, Armenian, Greek, Jew
Official Languages: Turkish
Government: Parliamentary Republic
The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This was largely the achievement of first republican leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an Ottoman army officer who led the 1919-22 war of national liberation against invading British, French and Greek troops. Atatürk copied laws from Europe, gave women vote rights and forcefully instituted a secular regime. His one-party regime lasted beyond his death in 1938 until the first multiparty elections of 1950. Since then democracy has gradually broadened and deepened, despite four military coups or military-forced changes of government in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997. Turkey is a long-standing member of almost every major European organisation and is negotiating for full membership in the European Union.
Domestic tensions have flared with Turkey's Kurdish population since the early days of the republic. Kurds now constitute 15 per cent of Turkey's 73 million people, with about half living in the big cities of western Turkey, and a half constituting a majority in the poor south east of the country. A Kurdish rebellion has fitfully continued in the south east since 1984, and is currently a major concern as weapons, explosives and instability flow from the increasingly lawless situation in neighbouring Iraq. At least 4,500 members of the Turkish security forces have been killed in the rebellion, along with an equal number f 'rebels'. The Turkish army invasion of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish villagers in the 1990s have turned the regional economy upside down and forced rural Kurds into urban peripheries.
A major locomotive for change in recent decades has been Turkey's ambition to join the European Union, a right foreseen since the Ankara Agreement in 1963. Turkey formally applied in 1987 and, after a series of setbacks, was granted 'candidate status' in 1999. Negotiations formally opened in October 2005 after a spate of legal reforms annulled the death penalty and liberalised many of Turkey's authoritarian laws. EU-Turkey talks are expected to continue for another decade, but the process, combined with adherence to an International Monetary Fund program, has already transformed the country. Some recent happenings in Istanbul and Ankara still show the ongoing tension and difficult coexistence among the two main ethnic groups.
