Young Turks

The Young Turks were a movement of Ottoman reformers, who over time became ever more clearly Turkish nationalists, and whose main organisation was the Committee of Union and Progress. Its members were called Unionists. In 1908 they forced the restoration of the constitution, from 1913 they ruled the Ottoman Empire, they took it into the war on Germany’s side, and they bear responsibility for the Armenian genocide.

From conspiracy to revolution

The movement began as a secret circle of students at the military medical school in Constantinople who wanted to overthrow the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Its founders were an Albanian, two Kurds and a Circassian. The sultan’s police broke up the circle, and after failed coup attempts in 1896 and 1897 its leaders at home were imprisoned. The movement survived among exiles in Europe, where it took the name Committee of Union and Progress. After 1906 its centre became Salonika, and officials and officers serving in Macedonia joined the Committee. Its leaders included Mehmed Talat, Enver and Djemal.

In July 1908 officers linked to the Committee led their units into the mountains of Macedonia and forced the sultan to restore the constitution. After a failed counter-coup in April 1909 the army deposed Abdülhamid, and his half-brother Mehmed V took the throne. The Unionists placed their men in key ministries, and their programme shifted from cooperation among all the nations of the empire towards Turkish nationalism.

The coup and the triumvirate

In 1912 the Committee lost power to men of the old regime. It regained it by force during the losing Balkan war: on 23 January 1913 Enver, at the head of a group of Unionists, burst into the seat of government and forced the Grand Vizier Kâmil Pasha to resign, while the war minister was shot in the confusion. When the new Grand Vizier, Mahmud Şevket Pasha, was assassinated in June, the Committee crushed the opposition and took full power. The war later made one-party rule easier for it.

From then on the state was in effect ruled by a triumvirate: the war minister Enver Pasha, the interior minister Talat and the navy minister Djemal Pasha. Formally the government was headed until February 1917 by Said Halim Pasha, who was succeeded by Talat.

War

On 2 August 1914 a few of the Committee’s leaders concluded a secret alliance with Germany, of which most ministers knew nothing. In September the government abolished the capitulations, and on 29 October the fleet shelled Russian ports and the empire found itself at war.

Enver himself led an army to Sarikamish, where it perished in the snow, and Djemal, as governor of Syria, twice sent troops against the Suez Canal. From the spring of 1915 the Committee’s government deported and murdered the Armenians. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it sought in this way to secure the dominance of Muslim Turks in central and eastern Anatolia.

Downfall

At the beginning of October 1918, after Bulgaria’s capitulation, Talat’s government resigned, and on 14 October Ahmed İzzet Pasha became Grand Vizier. His delegation signed the Mudros armistice. On 1 November the Committee, at its last congress, resolved to dissolve itself, and on the night of 1–2 November Talat, Enver and Djemal fled Constantinople aboard a German ship. In 1919 a court martial sentenced them to death in absentia. Talat was killed in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian assassin, Djemal and Enver died in 1922. Many former Unionists joined the national movement of Mustafa Kemal.