For more than five decades, the shape of Cyprus was inseparable from the life and career of one man. Rauf Raif Denktaş, born in Paphos on January 27, 1924, and dying in January 2012 at the age of 87, was the dominant political figure of the Turkish Cypriot community from the island's independence era through the early twenty-first century. No understanding of the Cyprus dispute is complete without understanding Denktaş.
His origins were firmly embedded in the island's professional class. His father, Raif Mehmet Bey, was a judge, and the household gave Denktaş an early exposure to law and governance. He attended The English School in Nicosia, and after graduation he worked briefly as a translator in Famagusta and then as a court clerk and a teacher. His path led him eventually to Istanbul and then London, where he trained at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1947. He returned to Cyprus to practice law, quickly establishing himself as an advocate skilled not only in courtrooms but in the increasingly tense political arena of a colonial society approaching a reckoning.
Cyprus in the late 1940s and 1950s was a place of mounting conflict. The Greek Cypriot movement known as EOKA was pushing for enosis — union with Greece — with growing violence and determination. Denktaş viewed this prospect with alarm and in 1957 played a leading role in founding the Turkish Resistance Organization, known by its Turkish acronym TMT, which was created specifically to oppose enosis and to press for the partition of the island. In 1958 he represented Turkish Cypriot interests at the United Nations General Assembly and served as an adviser to the Turkish government during the negotiations that produced the London and Zurich Agreements, signed in February 1959, which laid the framework for Cypriot independence.
When Cyprus became an independent republic in 1960, Denktaş was elected president of the Turkish Communal Chamber, the body representing Turkish Cypriot political interests within the constitutional framework. His prominence as a community leader was matched by his increasingly adversarial relationship with the Greek Cypriot leadership. When President Makarios in November 1963 proposed constitutional amendments that would have curtailed rights guaranteed to Turkish Cypriots, intercommunal violence broke out in December of that year. Turkish Cypriots withdrew from government institutions, and Denktaş traveled to Ankara for consultations. The Greek Cypriot leadership then barred him from returning to the island, and he remained in exile from 1964 to 1968 because of his association with TMT.
The crisis of 1974 transformed the situation entirely. A coup by Greek ultra-nationalist officers on July 15 of that year, aimed at forcing union with Greece, triggered a Turkish military intervention five days later. Turkish forces landed on the north coast of the island, and after a ceasefire that held only briefly, Turkey resumed its military advance in August 1974, ultimately taking control of approximately 37 percent of the island's territory. The line that divided Cyprus was now physical, enforced, and, as it turned out, permanent for decades. Denktaş emerged from that crisis as the uncontested leader of the Turkish Cypriot community in the north.
He was elected speaker of the legislature in 1975, president of the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus that same year, and won re-election in 1981. In 1983 he was the driving force behind the Unilateral Declaration of Independence that created the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a state recognized by no government in the world except Turkey. He was elected president of the TRNC in 1985 and won further terms in 1990, 1995, and 2000. Throughout this period he was also the chief negotiator for Turkish Cypriots in United Nations-sponsored reunification talks, a role he had held since 1968.
By the early 2000s the political ground was shifting. Cyprus's entry into the European Union in 2004 created new pressures, and large demonstrations in northern Cyprus in 2002 reflected genuine popular desire for reunification. Denktaş engaged in fresh UN-sponsored negotiations, though the talks ultimately did not produce a settlement he could accept. He lost the presidential election in 2005 and retired from the front line of politics, ending an era.
Denktaş was a figure who inspired loyalty and condemnation in equal measure, depending entirely on where one stood in the Cyprus dispute. His defenders saw him as the determined protector of a community that had been subjected to violence and constitutional betrayal. His critics viewed him as the principal obstacle to the island's reunification. Both assessments contained truth. He died on January 13, 2012, leaving behind a divided island and a divided legacy.
