The term Young Turk is now used to describe an insurgent trying to take control of a situation or organization by force or political maneuver,[3] and various groups in different countries have been named Young Turks because of their rebellious or revolutionary nature.
Despite working with the Young Ottomans to promulgate a constitution, Abdulhamid II dissolved the parliament by 1878 and returned to an absolutist regime, marked by extensive use of secret police to silence dissent, and massacres against minorities. Constitutionalist opponents of his regime, came to be known as Young Turks.[6] The Young Turks were a heterodox group of secular liberal intellectuals and revolutionaries, united by their opposition to the absolutist regime of Abdulhamid and desire to reinstate the constitution.[7] Despite the name Young Turks, members were diverse in their religious and ethnic origins,[8][9][10] with many Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, Circassians, Greeks, Kurds, and Jews being members.[a][11][12][13][14]
To organize the opposition, forward-thinking medical students Ibrahim Temo, Abdullah Cevdet and others formed a secret organization named the Committee of Ottoman Union (later Committee of Union and Progress - CUP), which grew in size and included exiles, civil servants, and army officers.
Congress of Ottoman Opposition
The first congress of the Ottoman opposition (1902) in Paris
The First Congress of Ottoman Opposition was held on 4 February 1902, at 20:00, at the house of Germain Antoin Lefevre-Pontalis a member of the Institut de France. The opposition was performed in compliance with the French government. Closed to the public, there were 47 delegates present. The Armenians wanted to have the conversations held in French, but other delegates rejected this proposition.[15]
The Young Turks became a truly organized movement with the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as an organizational umbrella. They recruited individuals hoping for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in the Ottoman Empire. In 1906, the Ottoman Freedom Society[16] (OFS) was established in Thessalonica by Mehmed Talaat. The OFS actively recruited members from the Third Army base, among them Major Ismail Enver. In September 1907, OFS announced they would be working with other organizations under the umbrella of the CUP. In reality, the leadership of the OFS would exert significant control over the CUP.[citation needed] Finally, in 1908 in the Young Turk Revolution, pro-CUP officers marched on Istanbul, forcing Abdulhamid to restore the constitution. An attempted countercoup resulted in his deposition.
Young Turks flyer with the slogan Long live the fatherland, long live the nation, long live liberty written in Ottoman Turkish and French
In 1908, the Macedonian Question was facing the Ottoman Empire. Tsar Nicholas II and Franz Joseph, who were both interested in the Balkans, started implementing policies, beginning in 1897, which brought on the last stages of the Balkanization process. By 1903, there were discussions on establishing administrative control by Russian and Austrian advisory boards in the Macedonian provinces. Abdulhamid was forced to accept this idea, although for quite a while he was able to subvert its implementation.
However, eventually, signs were showing that this policy game was coming to an end. On May 13, 1908, the leadership of the CUP, with the newly gained power of its organization, was able to communicate to Sultan Abdulhamid II the unveiled threat that "the [Ottoman] dynasty would be in danger" if he were not to bring back the Ottoman constitution that he had previously suspended since 1878. On June 12, 1908, the Third Army, which was in Macedonia, began its march towards the Palace in Constantinople. Although initially resistant to the idea of giving up absolute power, Abdulhamid was forced on July 24, 1908, to restore the constitution, beginning the Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire.
Declaration of the Young Turk Revolution by the leaders of the Ottoman millets in 1908Young Turk (CUP) Committee in 1909
After the revolution, the Young Turks began to splinter and two main factions formed: more liberal and pro-decentralization Young Turks (including the CUP's original founders) formed the Private Enterprise and Decentralization League [tr], the Liberty Party and later the Freedom and Accord Party (also known as the Liberal Union or Liberal Entente).[17] The Turkish nationalist, pro-centralization and radical wing among the Young Turks remained in the CUP.[18] The groups' power struggle continued until 1913, when the CUP took over the Empire. They brought the Ottoman Empire into World War I on the side of the Central Powers during the war.
During the parliamentary recess of this era, the Young Turks held their first open Congress at Salonica, on September–October 1911. There, they proclaimed a series of policies involving the disarming of Christians and preventing them from buying property, Muslim settlements in Christian territories, and the complete Ottomanization of all Turkish subjects, either by persuasion or by the force of arms.[19] By 1913, the CUP banned all other political parties, creating a one party state. The Ottoman Parliament became a rubber stamp and real policy debate was held within the CUP's Central Committee.
On November 2, 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. The Middle Eastern theatre of World War I became the scene of action. The combatants were the Ottoman Empire, with some assistance from the other Central Powers, against primarily the British and the Russians among the Allies. Rebuffed elsewhere by the major European powers, the Young Turks, through highly secret diplomatic negotiations, led the Ottoman Empire to ally itself with Germany. The Young Turks needed to modernize the Empire's communications and transportation networks without putting themselves in the hands of European bankers. Europeans already owned much of the country's railroad system,[citation needed] and since 1881, the administration of the defaulted Ottoman foreign debt had been in European hands. During the War, the Young Turk empire was "virtually an economic colony on the verge of total collapse."[4]
At the end of the War, with the collapse of Bulgaria and Germany's capitulation, Talaat Pasha and the CUP ministry resigned on October 13, 1918, and the Armistice of Mudros was signed aboard a British battleship in the Aegean Sea.[20] On November 2, Enver, Talaat and Cemal, along with their German allies, fled from Istanbul into exile.[citation needed]
Jakob Künzler, head of a missionary hospital in Urfa, documented the large scale ethnic cleansing of both Armenians and Kurds under the Three Pashas during World War I.[21][better source needed] He gave a detailed account of deportation of Armenians from Erzurum and Bitlis in the winter of 1916. The Armenians were perceived to be subversive elements (a fifth column) that would take the Russian side in the war. In order to eliminate this threat, the Ottoman government embarked on a large-scale deportation of Armenians from the regions of Djabachdjur, Palu, Musch, Erzurum, and Bitlis. Around 300,000 Armenians were forced to move southwards to Urfa and then westwards to Aintab and Marash. In the summer of 1917, Armenians were moved to the Konya region in central Anatolia. Through these measures, the CUP leaders aimed to eliminate the ostensible Armenian threat by deporting them[citation needed] from their ancestral lands and by dispersing them in small pockets of exiled communities. By the end of World War I, up to 1,200,000[citation needed] Armenians were forcibly deported from their home vilayets. As a result, about half of the displaced died[citation needed] of exposure, hunger, and disease, or were victims of banditry and forced labor.[22]
Around this period, the CUP's relationship to the Armenian genocide shifted. Early on, Armenians had perceived the CUP as allies;[citation needed] and the beginnings of the genocide, in the 1909 Adana massacre,[citation needed] had been rooted in reactionary Ottoman backlash against the Young Turks' revolution. But during World War I, the CUP's increasing nationalism began to lead them to participate in the genocide.[citation needed] In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed[23][non-tertiary source needed] that scholarly evidence revealed[better source needed] the CUP "government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens and unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million[citation needed] Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches."
The genocide of Assyrian civilians began during the Ottoman occupation of Azerbaijan from January to May 1915, during which massacres were committed by Ottoman forces and pro-Ottoman Kurds.[24] Previously, many Assyrians were killed in the 1895 massacres of Diyarbekir.[25] However the violence worsened after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, despite Assyrian hopes that the new government would stop promoting anti-Christian Islamism.[26][27]
The Sayfo occurred concurrently with and was closely related to the Armenian genocide.[28] Motives for killing included a perceived lack of loyalty among some Assyrian communities to the Ottoman Empire and the desire to appropriate their land.[26][27][24][29][30] At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Assyro-Chaldean delegation said that its losses were 250,000 (about half the prewar population); they later revised their estimate to 275,000 dead at the Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923.[30]
Turkish War of Independence
Following the war, the Freedom and Accord Party regained control over the Ottoman government and conducting a purge of Unionists with assistance from the Allied powers. Freedom and Accord rule was short-lived, and with Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk)stirring up nationalist sentiment in Anatolia, the Empire soon collapsed.
A guiding principle for the Young Turks was the transformation of their society into one in which religion played no consequential role, a stark contrast from the theocracy that had ruled the Ottoman Empire since its inception. However, the Young Turks soon recognized the difficulty of spreading this idea among the deeply religious Ottoman peasantry and even much of the elite. The Young Turks thus began suggesting that Islam itself was materialistic. As compared with later efforts by Muslim intellectuals, such as the attempt to reconcile Islam and socialism, this was an extremely difficult endeavor. Although some former members of the CUP continued to make efforts in this field after the revolution of 1908, they were severely denounced by the Ulema, who accused them of "trying to change Islam into another form and create a new religion while calling it Islam".[31][page needed]
Positivism, with its claim of being a religion of science, deeply impressed the Young Turks, who believed it could be more easily reconciled with Islam than could popular materialistic theories. The name of the society, Committee of Union and Progress, is believed to be inspired by leading positivist Auguste Comte's motto Order and Progress. Positivism also served as a base for the desired strong government.[31]
Centralized government
After the Committee of Union and Progress took power through the 1913 coup and Mahmud Şevket Pasha's assassination, it embarked on a series of reforms in order to increase centralization in the Empire, an effort that had been ongoing since the last century's Tanzimat reforms under sultan Mahmud II.[32] Many of the original Young Turks rejected this idea, especially those that had formed the Freedom and Accord Party against the CUP.[18] Other opposition parties against the CUP like Prince Sabahaddin's Private Enterprise and Decentralization League [tr] and the Arab Ottoman Party for Administrative Decentralization, both of which made opposition to the CUP's centralization their main agenda.
Regarding nationalism, the Young Turks underwent a gradual transformation. Beginning with the Tanzimat with ethnically non-Turkish members participating at the outset, the Young Turks embraced the official state ideology: Ottomanism. However, Ottoman patriotism failed to strike root during the First Constitutional Era and the following years. Many ethnically non-Turkish Ottoman intellectuals rejected the idea because of its exclusive use of Turkish symbols. Turkish nationalists gradually gained the upper hand in politics, and following the 1902 Congress, a stronger focus on nationalism developed. It was at this time that Ahmed Rıza chose to replace the term "Ottoman" with "Turk," shifting the focus from Ottoman nationalism to Turkish nationalism.[citation needed]
Agah Efendi, founded the first Turkish newspaper and, as postmaster, brought the postage stamp to the Ottoman Empire (although he died in 1885, he was honored for founding the first Turkish newspaper).
The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is quoted on the front page of the 1 August 1926 The Los Angeles Examiner as denouncing the Young Turks and especially the CUP (the "Young Turk Party"):[34]
These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule. […] They have hitherto lived on plunder, robbery and bribery and become inimical to any idea, or suggestion to enlist in useful labor and earn their living by the honest sweat of their brow… Under the cloak of the opposition party, this element, who forced our country into the Great War against the will of the people, who caused the shedding of rivers of blood of the Turkish youth to satisfy the criminal ambition of Enver Pasha, has, in a cowardly fashion, intrigued against my life, as well as the lives of the members of my cabinet.
Historian Uğur Ümit Üngör, in his book The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, has claimed that the "Republican People's Party, which was founded by Mustafa Kemal, was the successor of CUP and continued ethnic cleansing policies of its predecessor in Eastern Anatolia until the year 1950. Thus, Turkey was transformed into an ethnically homogenous state."[35]: vii
As to the fate of the Three Pashas, two of them, Talaat Pasha and Cemal Pasha, were assassinated by Armenian nationals shortly after the end of World War I while in exile in Europe during Operation Nemesis, a revenge operation against perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. Soghomon Tehlirian, whose family was killed in the Armenian genocide, assassinated the exiled Talaat Pasha in Berlin and was subsequently acquitted on all charges by a German jury.[36]Cemal Pasha was similarly killed by Stepan Dzaghikian, Bedros Der Boghosian, and Ardashes Kevorkian for "crimes against humanity"[37] in Tbilisi, Georgia.[38] The third pasha, Enver Pasha, was killed in fighting against the Red Army unit under the command of Hakob Melkumian near Baldzhuan in Tajikistan (then Turkistan).[39]
Fisk, R (13 February 2007), The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Vintage, ISBN978-1-4000-7517-1.
Gaunt, David; Atto, Naures; Barthoma, Soner O. (2017). "Introduction: Contextualizing the Sayfo in the First World War". Let Them Not Return: Sayfo – The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Berghahn Books. ISBN978-1-78533-499-3.
Gaunt, David (2013). "Failed Identity and the Assyrian Genocide". Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (illustrated ed.). Indiana University Press. ISBN978-0-253-00631-8.
Gaunt, David (2017). "Sayfo Genocide: The Culmination of an Anatolian Culture of Violence". Let Them Not Return: Sayfo – The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Berghahn Books. ISBN978-1-78533-499-3.
Gaunt, David (2020). "The Long Assyrian Genocide". Collective and State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State. Berghahn Books. ISBN978-1-78920-451-3.
International Association of Genocide Scholars (June 13, 2005). "Letter to Prime Minister Erdogan". Genocide Watch. Archived from the original on June 4, 2007. Retrieved June 30, 2007.
Necati Alkan, "The Eternal Enemy of Islam: Abdullah Cevdet and the Baha'i Religion", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Volume 68/1, pp. 1–20; online at Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
