Committee of Union and Progress

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 and committed genocides against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian peoples as part of a broader policy of ethnic erasure during the late Ottoman period. 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').

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 "Activist" cadre of bureaucrats and Ottoman army contingents based in Ottoman Macedonia which were fighting ethnic insurgents in the Macedonian Struggle. 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. Mehmed Talât established himself as the leader of the CUP after the revolution, and it developed into a political party following a Turkish nationalist ideology. Its main rival was the Freedom and Accord Party, another Young Turk 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. 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 CUP leader Talât Pasha, 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.