Young Turks

The name comes from the French Jeunes Turcs, a label foreign observers gave to many Ottoman reformers of the 19th century. The historian Roderic Davison found no consistent use of it: a Young Turk party was spoken of wherever an amorphous “Old Turk” faction was being confronted. The Young Ottomans, the liberal and Islamist opposition to the government of Fuad and Aali Pasha, were also called Jeunes Turcs, though they called themselves the New Ottomans.

The movement known to history as the Young Turks was the opposition to Sultan Abdul Hamid II that surfaced after 1889. Abdul Hamid had worked with the Young Ottomans to promulgate the constitution of 1876, written by the reformist Midhat Pasha, but by 1878 he had dissolved the parliament and closed the First Constitutional Era after only two years. He returned to absolutism, silencing dissent through an extensive secret police, and his reign was marked by massacres of minorities.

Driven underground with all political dissent, his opponents gathered in secret societies of “progressive medical university students and military cadets”, inspired by the Young Italy movement. By the 1890s they were mainly a loose and contentious network of exiled intellectuals who made a living by selling their newspapers to secret subscribers.

By and large the Young Turks wanted to take power away from Yıldız Palace and restore constitutional government: the Ottoman Parliament and the constitution of 1876. They believed that a social contract in the form of a constitution would solve the empire’s problems with nationalist movements and foreign intervention by instilling Ottomanism, a multicultural Ottoman nationalism.

Positivism, with its claim to be a religion of science, deeply impressed them; they thought it easier to reconcile with Islam than popular materialist theories, and it served as a basis for the strong government they wanted. A guiding principle was a society in which religion played no consequential role, but since this was hard to spread among a deeply religious peasantry and elite, some argued that Islam itself was materialistic. The ulema accused them of “trying to change Islam into another form and create a new religion while calling it Islam”.

The movement held a mosaic of ideas, with three main currents for the state: multicultural Ottomanism, pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism. Ahmed Rıza wanted a centralized, Turkish-dominated empire free of European influence; Prince Sabahaddin a decentralized, federal state built on capitalism and liberalism. After the congress of 1902 Turkish nationalism gained ground, and Rıza replaced the word “Ottoman” with “Turk”.

In 1894 Ahmed Rıza joined the Committee of Ottoman Union, which took the name Union and Progress and was organized around his Paris paper Meşveret. In August 1896 a coup by cabinet ministers aligned with the CUP was leaked to the palace; a plot by Unionist cadets the next year brought the largest crackdown of the Hamidian era, with more than 630 arrests and exiles. France deported Rıza in 1896, and after the victory over Greece in 1897 the sultan won many exiles back with amnesties and buy-outs.

The First Congress of Ottoman Opposition, in Paris on 4 February 1902, split over foreign intervention: Sabahaddin’s followers and the Armenians were for it, Rıza’s Unionists against. In 1906 Mehmed Talaat founded the Ottoman Freedom Society in Thessalonica, which recruited officers of the Third Army and came to control the CUP. The Second Congress, in Paris on 22 December 1907, united the opposition behind deposing Abdul Hamid by any means necessary, without foreign interference. By June 1908 Unionist officers of the Third Army had mutinied, and on 24 July the sultan restored the constitution.

An attempted countercoup, the 31 March Incident of April 1909, ended in Abdul Hamid’s deposition. After the 1912 coup, the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and the 1913 Raid on the Sublime Porte, a radicalized CUP took over. Through secret negotiations it allied the empire with Germany, and on 2 November 1914 the empire entered the First World War.

The first organisers were the medical students Ibrahim Temo and Abdullah Cevdet, a Kurdish intellectual who supported biological materialism and secularism; their society grew to include exiles, civil servants and army officers. Ahmed Rıza, a positivist based in Paris, pressed a Turkish nationalist and secularist agenda but denounced revolution, facing both the conservative and Islamist Mehmet Murat Bey and the CUP’s “Activist” faction. Prince Sabahaddin, of the Ottoman dynasty, fled to Europe in 1899 and with Ismail Kemal founded the Ottoman Freedom Lovers’ Committee and later the Private Enterprise and Decentralization League.

Despite the name, members included many Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, Circassians, Greeks, Kurds and Jews. Among them were the Tatar journalist Yusuf Akçura, who opposed Ottomanism and supported the separation of church and state; Mehmet Cavit Bey, minister of finance, hanged for treason in 1926; Marcel Samuel Raphael Cohen (Tekin Alp), an ideologue of pan-Turkism; and the sociologist Ziya Gökalp, a Turkish nationalist from Diyarbakir.

Officers made the revolution of 1908: Ahmed Niyazi Bey was its initiator and a leader, with Enver Pasha and Eyüp Sabri. Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Bahaeddin Şakir were principal among those within the CUP who masterminded the genocides of 1915 to 1917. Opposition also ran through the ulama, Sufi lodges and Masonic lodges.

The revolution of 1908 achieved the movement’s first aim, bringing multi-party democracy for the first time in the country’s history. The Young Turks then formalized their differences: the liberal, decentralist wing formed the Liberty Party and later the Freedom and Accord Party, while the Turkish nationalist, centralist wing stayed in the CUP. In power the CUP carried out secularizing and centralizing reforms but was criticized for a pro-Turkish ideology, and many non-Turkish and non-Muslim Young Turks joined their own national movements.

At its first open congress, at Salonica in 1911, the CUP proclaimed policies of disarming Christians, barring them from buying property, settling Muslims in Christian territories and Ottomanizing all subjects by persuasion or by force of arms. By 1913 it had banned all other parties; parliament became a rubber stamp, and policy was made in the Central Committee.

Its rule ended in genocide. Scholars trace the Armenian genocide to long-standing discrimination and land conflicts in the Ottoman east, radicalized by the Balkan Wars, when CUP leaders embraced Turkification and came to see the Christians of Western Armenia as a threat. In the war, Young Turk leaders branded Armenians collectively guilty and ordered mass deportations and annihilation. Up to 1,200,000 Armenians were deported and about half of them died; the Sayfo, the genocide of the Assyrians, ran alongside it.

Defeat ended the CUP’s rule: its ministry resigned on 13 October 1918, and on 2 November Enver, Talaat and Cemal fled Istanbul. The Freedom and Accord Party purged the Unionists, and the empire soon collapsed. In 1926, after an assassination attempt by remaining Unionists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was quoted denouncing the “Young Turk Party”, men “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”.

In 2005 the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated that the CUP government had begun “a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens”, in which more than a million were exterminated. The historian Uğur Ümit Üngör has argued that the Republican People’s Party, founded by Mustafa Kemal, was the CUP’s successor and continued its ethnic cleansing in Eastern Anatolia until 1950. Talaat Pasha and Cemal Pasha were assassinated in exile during Operation Nemesis, an Armenian revenge operation: Soghomon Tehlirian, whose family had been killed in the genocide, shot Talaat in Berlin and was acquitted by a German jury. Enver Pasha was killed fighting the Red Army near Baldzhuan.

The CUP’s drive for centralization continued an effort begun with the Tanzimat reforms. Today “Young Turk” means an insurgent impatiently pressing for reform within an organization, and groups in many countries have been called Young Turks for their rebellious or revolutionary nature.