Committee of Union and Progress

Union and Progress Party
اتحاد و ترقى فرقه‌سی
İttihad ve Terakki Fırkası
LeaderTalaat Pasha (1908–1918)
Ahmet Rıza (1897–1908)
Secretary-GeneralMithat Şükrü Bleda (1917–1918)[1]
FoundersIbrahim Temo[2]
İshak Sükuti
Abdullah Cevdet
Kerim Sebatî
Mehmed Reshid
Founded1889 (as a committee)
September 1909 (as a party)
DissolvedNovember 1918; 106 years ago (November 1918)
Succeeded byCHF,[3] OHAF,[4] TF,[5] A-RMHC
HeadquartersPembe Konak [tr], Constantinople
NewspaperŞûrâ-yı Ümmet (magazine)
... and others
Paramilitary wingSpecial Organization[15]
MembershipIncrease 850,000 (1909 est.)
Ideologyİttihadism
Front groupNational Defense League
Colours  Red   White
SloganHürriyet, Müsavat, Adalet
(transl. 'Liberty, Equality, Justice')
Party flag

The Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, also translated as the Society of Union and Progress; Ottoman Turkish: اتحاد و ترقى جمعيتی, romanized: İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti) was a revolutionary group, secret society, and political party, active between 1889 and 1926 in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey. The foremost faction of the Young Turks, the CUP instigated the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, which ended absolute monarchy and began the Second Constitutional Era. After an ideological transformation, from 1913 to 1918, the CUP ruled the empire as a dictatorship[25][26] and committed genocides against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian peoples as part of a broader policy of ethnic erasure during the late Ottoman period.[27] The CUP and its members have often been referred to as "Young Turks", although the Young Turk movement produced other Ottoman political parties as well. Within the Ottoman Empire its members were known as İttihadcılar ('Unionists') or Komiteciler ('Committeemen').[28]

The organization began as a liberal reform movement, and the autocratic government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) persecuted it because of its calls for constitutional government and reform. Most of its members were exiled and arrested after a failed coup-attempt in 1896 which started a period infighting among émigré Young Turk communities in Europe. The CUP's cause revived by 1906 with a new "Macedonian" cadre of bureaucrats and Ottoman army contingents based in Ottoman Macedonia which were fighting ethnic insurgents in the Macedonian Struggle.[29] In 1908 the Unionists revolted in the Young Turk Revolution, and forced Abdul Hamid to re-instate the 1876 Constitution, ushering in an era of political plurality. During the Second Constitutional Era, the CUP at first influenced politics from behind the scenes, and introduced major reforms to continue the modernization of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP's main rival was the Freedom and Accord Party, a conservative party which called for the decentralization of the empire, in opposition to the CUP's desire for a centralized and unitary Turkish-dominated state.

The CUP consolidated its power at the expense of the Freedom and Accord Party in the 1912 "Election of Clubs" and in the 1913 Raid on the Sublime Porte, while also growing increasingly splintered, radical and nationalistic due to Turkey's defeat in the First Balkan War and attacks on Balkan Muslims. The CUP seized full power following Grand Vizier Mahmud Şevket Pasha's assassination in June 1913, with major decisions ultimately being decided by the party's Central Committee. A triumvirate of the CUP leader Talât Pasha with Enver Pasha and Cemal Pasha took control of the country, and sided with Germany in World War I. With the help of their paramilitary, the Special Organization, the Unionist régime enacted policies resulting in the destruction and expulsion of the empire's Armenian, Pontic Greek, and Assyrian citizens in order to Turkify Anatolia.

Following Ottoman defeat in World War I in October 1918, CUP leaders escaped into exile in Europe, where the Armenian Revolutionary Federation assassinated several of them (including Talât and Cemal) in Operation Nemesis in revenge for their genocidal policies. Many CUP members were court-martialed and imprisoned in war-crimes trials with support from the Allied powers. However, most former Unionists were able to join the burgeoning Turkish nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, ultimately continuing their political careers in the Republic of Turkey as members of Atatürk's Republican People's Party following the Turkish War of Independence. Atatürk and the Republican People's Party expanded on reforms introduced by Union and Progress and continued one-party rule in Turkey until 1946.[30][31]

  1. ^
    • Erik Jan Zürcher (1984). The Unionist Factor: The Rôle of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905-1926. E.J. Brill. ISBN 90-04-07262-4.
    • Erik Jan Zürcher (2017). Turkey: A Modern History. I.B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1-78453-187-4.
    • "Syllabus". www.sabanciuniv.edu. Archived from the original on 2020-08-10. Retrieved 2020-12-23.
  2. ^ Hanioğlu 2001, pp. 73, 152.
  3. ^
  4. ^
  5. ^ Zeki, Onur (4 July 2018). "Birinci Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi'nde Bağımsız Mebuslar ve Yasama Çalışmaları (1920-1923)" (PDF) (in Turkish). Hacettepe Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılâp Tarihi Enstitüsü Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılâp Tarihi Anabilim Dalı. p. 47. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 July 2019. Retrieved 6 March 2023. kaynağında belirtilen kaynak Kocaoğlu, Bünyamin. Mütarekede İttihatçılık (in Turkish). pp. 95–186.
  6. ^ Önder Mezili (2021). "Osmanlı Aydınlarından Ali Kemal'in Türk Gazetesi ve Gazetenin Yayın Anlayışına Dair Bir Değerlendirme". İçtimaiyat (in Turkish). 5 (2): 350. doi:10.33709/ictimaiyat.958739. S2CID 240527408.
  7. ^ M. Şükrü Hanioglu (2001). Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. p. 353. ISBN 978-0-19-977111-0.
  8. ^ Renée Worringer (2014). Ottomans Imagining Japan. East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 192–193. doi:10.1057/9781137384607. ISBN 978-1-137-38460-7.
  9. ^ Gawrych, George (27 October 2006). The Crescent and the Eagle: Ottoman Rule, Islam and the Albanians, 1874-1913. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 185. ISBN 9781845112875.
  10. ^ Mustafa Gündüz (2010). "Educational books published by young Turks in Egypt (1890-1908)". Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 9: 1091. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.12.291.
  11. ^ Mustafa Mercan (2003). Jön Türklerin Mısır'Daki Faaliyetleri ve Kanuni Esasi (1896-1899) (MA thesis) (in Turkish). Marmara University. pp. 6–10. ISBN 9798505594698. ProQuest 2553314232.
  12. ^ Aziz Tuncer (1997). The Roots of Turkish Liberalism (MA thesis). Bilkent University. pp. 43–44, 53. hdl:11693/17021.
  13. ^ Taha Niyazi Karaca (2011). "The Armenian Question According to Meşveret, The Publication Organ of The Committee of Union and Progress" (PDF). Bilig. 58: 212–213. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 December 2021.
  14. ^ "Young Turk Revolution". Encyclopedia Britannica.
  15. ^ Akçam, Taner (2019). "When Was the Decision to Annihilate the Armenians Taken?". Journal of Genocide Research. 21 (4): 457–480. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1630893. S2CID 199042672.
  16. ^
    • Rayner, Jeremy; Falls, Susan; Souvlis, George; Nelms, Taylor C. (2020). Back to the '30s?: Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy. Springer Nature. p. 161. ISBN 978-3-030-41586-0. In the prevailing literature, the term ultra-nationalism is often used to describe Turkish nationalism.
    • Akmeșe 2005, p. 34
  17. ^
  18. ^
  19. ^ Kieser 2018, p. 273.
  20. ^ Hanioğlu 2008, p. 186.
  21. ^ Karsh, Efraim (June 2001), "Review of The Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Military, and Ottoman Collapse by M. Naim Turfan", The International History Review, 23 (2): 440.
  22. ^ Princeton University professor of late Ottoman history, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, asserts that the CUP appealed to Islam when ever it was convenient.Hanioğlu 2008, p. 187Worringer 2014, pp. 41, 53, 69, 81–82, 188, 224–27, 260–61
  23. ^ Akçam 2007, p. 53.
  24. ^ "The Extermination of Ottoman Armenians by the Young Turk Regime (1915–1916) | Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance – Research Network". Extermination-ottoman-armenians-young-turk-regime-1915-1916.HTML. 25 January 2016. [...] the subscription of the Young Turks to Social Darwinism (the theory of the application to humans of the survival-of-the-fittest in the animal world) had convinced them that the construction of the Turkish nation would be realized through the elimination of the Armenians [...]
  25. ^ Zurcher, Eric Jan (1997)
  26. ^ The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905-1926.
  27. ^ Roshwald, Aviel (2013). "Part II. The Emergence of Nationalism: Politics and Power – Nationalism in the Middle East, 1876–1945". In Breuilly, John (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 220–241. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199209194.013.0011. ISBN 9780191750304.
  28. ^ Kieser 2018, p. 61.
  29. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  30. ^ Cite error: The named reference Ungor was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  31. ^ Zürcher, Erik Jan (2011). "Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide". In Suny, Ronald Grigor; Göçek, Fatma Müge; Naimark, Norman M. (eds.). A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press. p. 308. ISBN 978-0-19-979276-4. In ideological terms there is thus a great deal of continuity between the periods of 1912–1918 and 1918–1923. This should come as no surprise... the cadres of the national resistance movement almost without exception consisted of former Unionists, who had been shaped by their shared experience of the previous decade.