Young Turks

The Young Turks were a Turkish nationalist reform party, officially known as the Committee of Union and Progress (C.U.P.)—in Turkish the Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti—whose leaders led a rebellion against Sultan Abdul Hamid II (who was officially deposed and exiled in 1909). They ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1908 until the end of World War I in November 1918.

The Young Turks had their origins in secret societies of progressive university student and military cadets, driven underground along with all political dissent after the constitution was abrogated by the Sultan. Like their European forerunners, such as the carbonari of the Italian Risorgimento, they typically formed cells, of which only one member might be connected to another cell. From the spontaneous bloodless revolution in Saloniki that led to the old pasha's resignation, the C.U.P. was a force to be reckoned with.

In 1913, as the government was losing the Second Balkan War, the C.U.P. seized power. The C.U.P.-led government was headed by Minister of the Interior/Grand Vizier, Mehmed Talaat (Talaat Pasha) (1874 - 1921). Working with him were Minister of War Ismail Enver (Enver Pasha (1881 - 1922) and Minister of the Navy Ahmed Djemal (Dejmal Pasha) (1872 - 1922). Until German archives were opened, historians treated the C.U.P. government as a dictatorial triumvirate; now it appears that the party was riven by internal dissent and loosely guided by a large directorate of the party's Central Committee. Ottoman territory was splintering away at the edges: Bosnia-Herzegovina annexed by Austria-Hungary, 1908, Libya and the island of Rhodes by Italy, 1912, a rebellion in Albania, rumors of French designs on Syria. With the example of Egypt as a warning, the Young Turks needed to modernize Turkey's communications and transportation networks (which still relied on camel caravans), without putting themselves in the hands of European conglomerates and non-Muslim bankers. Europeans already owned the paltry railroad system (5991 km of single-track railroads in the whole of the Ottoman dominions in 1914) and since 1881 administration of the defaulted Ottoman foreign debt had been in European hands. Turkey was virtually an economic colony.

Rebuffed elsewhere by the major European powers, the Young Turks, through highly secret diplomatic negotiations, led Ottoman Turkey to ally herself with Berlin during World War I. Turkey's role as an ally of the Central Powers is part of the history of that war. With the collapse of Bulgaria and Germany's capitulation, Turkey was isolated. On October 13, 1918 Talaat and the C.U.P. ministry resigned, and an armistice was signed aboard a British battleship in the Aegean at the end of the month. On November 2, Enver, Talaat and Djemal, with their German allies, escaped from Constantinople into exile.

Public assurances of equal treatment for the Empire's non-Muslim minorities that had been given in 1908, had evaporated once the Young Turks were in power. Even among the Islamic majority, it was the Turkish-speaking segment of the Empire that was in control. In 1915 the Young Turks came down hard on Arabic secret societies in Damascus, as well as instigating the Armenian and Hellenic Holocausts, which eventually resulted in the murder of about 2.5 million Christians between 1915 and 1923. Soghomon Tehlirian, whose family was killed in the Armenian Genocide, assassinated the exiled Talaat in Berlin and was subsequently acquitted after a jury trial. Djemal met a similar fate in Tbilisi, Georgia. Enver was killed in combat against the Red Army in Central Asia.

From 1908, 'Young Turks' became a nickname for any brash group of young usurpers and subsequently passed into general usage: e.g. 'Ash were the Young Turks of the Britpop scene'. The term's association with the Armenian Genocide, as details of the massacres eventually surfaced, has caused it to fall out of favor.

External links and references

Reference

David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace,