Global InformationCommittee of Union and Progress information
Union and Progress Party اتحاد و ترقى فرقه سی İttihad ve Terakki Fırkası | |
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| Abbreviation | İ-T or İTC or İTF (in Turkish) CUP (in English) |
| Leader | Talaat Pasha (1908–1918) Ahmet Rıza (1897–1908) |
| Secretary-General | Mithat Şükrü Bleda (1911–1917)[1][2][3] |
| Founders | Ibrahim Temo[4] Mehmed Reshid Abdullah Cevdet İshak Sükuti Kerim Sebatî |
| Founded | 6 February 1889 (as an organization)[5] |
| Dissolved | 1 November 1918 |
| Succeeded by | CHF[6][7][8] A-RMHC OHAF[9][10] TF[11] |
| Headquarters | Pembe Konak, Nuruosmaniye, Constantinople, Ottoman Empire |
| Newspaper | Meşveret, Tanin[12] and others[13] |
| Paramilitary wing | Special Organization[14] |
| Membership (1909 est.) | 850,000 |
| Ideology | İttihadism Constitutionalism Centralization Secularism[15] Turkish nationalism[16] Progressivism[17] Scientific politics Ottomanism (until 1913)[18] Pan-Turkism (after 1909) Ultranationalism (after 1913) Statism (after 1913)[15] Pan-Islamism[19][20] (after 1914) |
| Political position | Syncretic |
| Slogan | "Liberty, Equality, Justice"[21] |
| Chamber of Deputies (1914) | 192 / 275
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The 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), refers to several revolutionary groups and a political party active between 1889 and 1926 in the Ottoman Empire and 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[22][23] and committed genocides against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian peoples as part of a broader policy of ethnic erasure during the late Ottoman period.[24] The CUP and its members have often been referred to as Young Turks, although the movement produced other political parties as well. Within the Ottoman Empire its members were known as İttihadcılar ('Unionists') or Komiteciler ('Committeemen').[25]
Beginning as a liberal reform movement, the organization was persecuted by Sultan Abdul Hamid II's autocratic government because of its calls for constitutional government and reform. Most of its members were exiled and arrested after a failed coup attempt in 1896, starting a period infighting among émigré Young Turk communities in Europe. The CUP's cause was 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.[26] In 1908, the Unionists revolted and forced Abdul Hamid to reinstate the Constitution in the Young Turk Revolution, ushering in an era of political plurality. Its main rival was the Freedom and Accord Party, which called for the federalization and 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 the 1913 Raid on the Sublime Porte, while also growing increasingly splintered, radical and nationalistic due to defeat in the Balkan Wars and attacks on Balkan Muslims. The CUP seized power following Grand Vizier Mahmud Şevket Pasha's assassination, 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 over the country, and sided with Germany in World War I. With the help of their paramilitary, the Special Organization, the İttihadist regime enacted policies resulting in the destruction and expulsion of the empire's Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian citizens in order to Turkify Anatolia.
Following Ottoman defeat in WWI, its leaders escaped into exile in Europe, where many were assassinated in Operation Nemesis in revenge for their genocidal policies, including Talât and Cemal Pasha. Many CUP members were court-martialed and imprisoned in war-crimes trials by a rehabilitated Freedom and Accord Party with support from Sultan Mehmed VI and 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 Turkey as members of Atatürk's Republican People's Party following the Turkish War of Independence. Reforms introduced by Union and Progress were expanded on by Atatürk's Republican People's Party, which continued one party rule in Turkey until 1946.[8][27]
- ^ 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.
- ^ Hanioğlu 2001, pp. 73, 152.
- ^ 22 September 1909
(as a political party) - ^ Yenen, Alp (2018). "Elusive forces in illusive eyes: British officialdom's perception of the Anatolian resistance movement". Middle Eastern Studies. 54 (5): 788–810. doi:10.1080/00263206.2018.1462161. hdl:1887/74261. S2CID 150032953.
- ^ Zürcher, Erik J. (1992). "The Ottoman Legacy of the Turkish Republic: An Attempt at a New Periodization". Die Welt des Islams. 32 (2): 237–253. doi:10.2307/1570835. ISSN 0043-2539. JSTOR 1570835.
- ^ a b Üngör, Uğur Ümit (2008). "Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk 'Social Engineering'". European Journal of Turkish Studies. Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey (7). doi:10.4000/ejts.2583. ISSN 1773-0546.
- ^ (in Turkish)
- ^ "Osmanlı Hürriyet Perver Avam Fırkası - Tarihsel Bilgi" (in Turkish). Archived from the original on 2020-09-18. Retrieved 2021-09-09.
- ^ Islam encyclopaedia (in Turkish)
- ^ Gawrych, George (27 October 2006). The Crescent and the Eagle: Ottoman Rule, Islam and the Albanians, 1874-1913. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 185. ISBN 9781845112875.
- ^ Şûrâ-yı Ümmet, Rumeli, İstikbal, Terraki
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b Hanioğlu 2008, p. 186.
- ^ Akmeșe 2005, p. 34.
- ^ ""Turkey in the First World War"". Archived from the original on 2018-05-24. Retrieved 2017-04-22.
- ^ Akçam 2007, p. 53.
- ^ Hanioğlu 2008, p. 187.
- ^ Worringer 2014, pp. 41, 53, 69, 81–82, 188, 224–27, 260–61.
- ^ Hürriyet, Müsavat, Adalet
- ^ Zurcher, Eric Jan (1997)
- ^ The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905-1926.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Kieser 2018, p. 61.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:1was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ 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.