Young Turks
By the 1890s, the Young Turks were mainly a loose and contentious network of exiled intelligentsia who made a living by selling their newspapers to secret subscribers.
Included in the opposition movement was a mosaic of ideologies, represented by democrats, liberals, decentralists, secularists, social Darwinists, technocrats, constitutional monarchists, and nationalists, to name a few.
Many coup d'état attempts associated with Young Turk networks occurred during the Hamidian era, repeatedly ending in failure.
Historiographically, the group which became definitively known as the Young Turks was the opposition to Sultan Abdul Hamid II which surfaced after 1889, the Committee of Union and Progress being its standard bearer.
[5] The Young Turks favored a reinstatement of the Ottoman Parliament and the 1876 constitution,[5] written by the reformist Midhat Pasha.
[10] Despite working with the Young Ottomans to promulgate a constitution, Abdul Hamid 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.
Other CUP branches often acted autonomously with their own ideological currents, to the point where the committee resembled more of an umbrella organization.
[20] The CUP supported Kâmil Pasha's call for responsible government to return to the Sublime Porte during the diplomatic crisis caused by the Hamidian massacres.
[21] In August 1896, cabinet ministers aligned with the CUP conspired a coup d'état to overthrow the sultan, but the plot was leaked to the palace before its execution.
[23] After the Ottoman Empire's triumph over Greece in 1897 Sultan Abdul Hamid used the prestige he gained from the victory to coax the exiled Young Turks network back into his fold.
Though moral was low, Ahmet Rıza, who returned to Paris, was the sole leader of the exiled Young Turks network.
[19][24] In 1899, members of the Ottoman dynasty Damat Mahmud Pasha and his sons Sabahaddin and Lütfullah fled to Europe to join the Young Turks.
However, Prince Sabahaddin believed that embracing the Anglo-Saxon values of capitalism and liberalism would alleviate the Empire's problems such as separatism from non-Muslim minorities such as the Armenians, alienating himself from the CUP.
Opposition leaders including Ahmed Rıza, Sabahaddin Bey, and Khachatur Malumian of the Dashnak Committee were in attendance.
The goal was to unite all the Young Turks and minority nationalist movements, in order to bring about a revolution to reinstate the constitution.
They decided to put their differences aside and signed an alliance, declaring that Abdul Hamid had to be deposed and the regime replaced with a representative and constitutional government by any means necessary, without foreign interference.
[citation needed] Finally, in 1908 in the Young Turk Revolution, pro-CUP officers marched on Istanbul, forcing Abdulhamid to restore the constitution.
Rebuffed elsewhere by the major European powers, the CUP, through highly secret diplomatic negotiations, led the Ottoman Empire to ally itself with Germany.
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.
[30] Early on, the Dashnaks had perceived the CUP as allies;[citation needed] the 1909 Adana massacre had been rooted in reactionary backlash against the revolution.
[36] Motives for killing included a perceived lack of loyalty among some Assyrian communities to the Ottoman Empire and the desire to appropriate their land.
Following the war, the Freedom and Accord Party regained control over the Ottoman government and conducting a purge of Unionists.
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.
The Young Turks wished to modernize the Empire's communications and transportation networks without putting themselves in the hands of European bankers.
Beginning with the Tanzimat with ethnically non-Turkish members participating at the outset, the Young Turks embraced the official state ideology: Ottomanism.
Turkish nationalists gradually gained the upper hand in politics, and following the 1902 Congress, a stronger focus on nationalism developed.
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.
[46] Cemal Pasha was similarly killed by Stepan Dzaghikian, Bedros Der Boghosian, and Ardashes Kevorkian for "crimes against humanity"[47] in Tbilisi, Georgia.
[48] Enver Pasha, was killed in fighting against the Red Army unit under the command of Hakob Melkumian near Baldzhuan in Tajikistan (then Turkistan).
