In 1960 the Republic of Cyprus was created from a former British colony off the southern coast of Turkey in the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. The international agreements that created the nation attempted to guarantee the rights of the Turkish Cypriot minority (about 20 percent of a population that was otherwise almost entirely Greek Cypriot) in a fair allocation of governmental power and social privileges. In the years immediately following independence, however, the relative welfare and the interaction of the two ethnic groups in Cyprus became the object of constant quarrels, in which the nearby nations of Greece and Turkey naturally took great interest. A series of crises and armed conflicts, capped by the intervention of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping forces in mid-1964, forced the Turkish Cypriot population into enclaves that were circumscribed by the increasingly active Greek Cypriot National Guard. By 1964 the government devised by the 1960 agreements included only Greek Cypriots. In the years that followed, confrontations alternated with international mediation efforts; twice in that period, in 1964 and in 1967, Turkey made military preparations to invade the island and protect the Turkish Cypriot minority. At the same time, underground partisan groups, which had emerged in the early 1960s, gained much wider support in both communities. Such circumstances doomed the efforts of Cypriot President Archbishop Makarios III to preserve the island's independence. By the early 1970s, Cyprus was in fact a partitioned country, Makarios had lost all authority in the Turkish sector, and the government continued to function without its prescribed Turkish Cypriot contingent.

Makarios's position was further complicated by the support of the Greek ruling junta for Greek Cypriot backers of enosis (union with Greece). Finally, in July 1974 the junta backed the guerrilla organization EOKA B in a coup against Makarios, whose policies had blocked enosis. From the Turkish viewpoint, the attempt to join Cyprus to Greece was an unacceptable threat to the already isolated position of the Turkish Cypriot minority on the island. Acting officially as one of the three guarantors of Cypriot independence under the 1960 treaties (the others were Britain and Greece), Turkey responded to the coup with a swift and effective military occupation of northeastern Cyprus, which reinforced the de facto partition of the island into Greek and Turkish sectors.

Data as of December 1994

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