Mr. Denktash had maintained that the Turkish Cypriots needed a separate state to preserve peace and avoid a return to what he called massacres of Turkish Cypriots at the hands of the majority Greek Cypriots.
His dedication to the partitionist cause made him a hero to many Turkish Cypriots, just as Greek Cypriots saw him as their archvillain, the standard-bearer of all they opposed.
That image began to be molded in the late 1950s when Mr. Denktash helped found the Turkish Resistance Organization, or TMT, as a counterweight to EOKA, a Greek Cypriot group waging a guerrilla campaign against Britain, then the island’s colonial ruler, to achieve union with Greece.
Born in Paphos, Cyprus, the London-trained lawyer rose to prominence as a leading figure in the Turkish Cypriot community during the tumultuous period in the 1960s and 1970s when intercommunal conflict took hundreds of Cypriot lives.
He blocked efforts to reunite the island, asserting that unification would open the way for Greek Cypriot domination and raise the threat of renewed violence.
After the Turkish invasion, he was chosen as leader of what was then the self-declared Cyprus Turkish Federated State. He proclaimed the independence of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or TRNC, in 1983, but the breakaway state failed to gain recognition from any other country other than Turkey, which maintains some 35,000 troops there.
A series of United Nations-backed talks to end the island’s division through the 1980s and 1990s went nowhere.
Most of these negotiations pitted Mr. Denktash against a familiar adversary, Glafkos Clerides, who was Mr. Denktash’s Greek Cypriot counterpart for much of his time in power.
Clerides is a lawyer, like Mr. Denktash was, and the two knew each other from the 1950s.
Clerides and the Greek Cypriots sought to reunify Cyprus as a federated state, envisioning a power-sharing arrangement between Cypriots of Turkish and Greek origin.
