The Young Turks
Through my research, of the websites and book listed in the works cited section of my paper, I have found that the Young Turks have been an important part of Turkish and Armenian history. The young Turks were a coalition of reform groups that led a revolutionary movement against the Ottoman Empires Sultan Abdulhamid the Second. They opposed him because of the absolute power he had, and because they wanted to eliminate foreign influence, and to restore Turkish pride.
The Young Turks movement was started in the Imperial Medical college of Istanbul. In Istanbul it spread to other colleges including the military institutes. When Abdulhamid the Second, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, learned of their plot against him he exiled the students. The Young Turks fled to various cities in Europe. It was here that the preparations for their revolution took place.
An important Young Turk was Ahmed Riza, who was part of the Committee of Union and Progress, which was an influential Young Turk organization. He pushed for a strong central government and he was against all foreign influence. When the Young Turks came to power these ideas were important in their policies.
The revolution occurred when discontented members of the Ottomans Army, the Committee of Union and Progress, and another group called the League of Private Initiative and Decentralization all agreed to work together. The revolt took place in 1908. Ahmed Niyazi a member of the Third Army Corps led a small revolt against provincial authorities; other revolutionaries holding revolts that were inspired by Ahmed's followed this. Since the Sultan could not rely on his military to support him he recalled parliament and in 1913 the triumvirate of Talat Pasa, Ahmed Cemel Pasa, and Enver Pasa gained power. Under the triumvirate the Young Turks major reforms took place. Their reforms led to a more centralized government; they promoted industrialization, and improved education.
The Young Turks lost power in 1918. Hoping to gain political power they joined in on World War One on the side of the Germans, and the Central Powers. They did this thinking that Germany had a superior army. When the Young Turks realized defeat was coming they resigned their power and the Ottomans ended up signing the Armistice of Mudros ending Turkey's involvement in the war.
The Young Turks are important to Armenian history because of the treatment the Armenians received under their control. The Young Turks preached cooperation between themselves and the minority groups in Turkey before they gained power.
They invaded the city over and over again taking the young children and turning them into slaves and humiliating them in front of the entire city. They wanted to get rid of Christianity completely in a short amount of time. The turks felt victorious every time that they captured a new group. This shows how this time period was at a constant war. There was never peace among cities.
In Black Dog of Fate, Balakian illustrates how his Armenian background impacted him as being in the first generation of his family born and raised in America. In the beginning of his memoir, the young Balakian lacked interest in the “old country”. As a kid living in a heavily populated Jewish community, he was envious of his friends walking down the street with their parents to go to the synagogue. Through this feeling of jealousy, he felt as though his Armenian ancestry was stopping him from being like his peers. Because Peter’s grandmother and parents did not give him any information about his family’s past at that time, he did not get to know the similar history Jews and Armenians once shared. At the time of adolescence Armenia’s past put a strain in Peter’s relationship with his father after he wrote a paper on Turkey. “. . . the Turkish term paper marked a turning point; in its wake, my father became even more alien to me” (Balakian 95).
The men at the forefront of the Young Turk’s rebellion were Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver and Ahmed Djemal. Eventually, they came to have more of a dictatorial sort of rule on their people, with their own visions of what they wanted for the Turkic people. They all wanted to unite their people and expand ...
World War I began in nineteen fourteen and ended in nineteen eighteen. World War I was against the Central Powers and the Allied Powers. The Central Powers were made up of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and Ottoman Empire. The Allied Powers were made upp of Belgium, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania Russing, Serbia, and the United States. It began when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary is assassinated by a Black Hand Serbian terrorist group member. The war ended after armistice terms were accepted the central powers demanded by the allied powers (INSERT CITATION).
Throughout the next decades, the Armenian Question became a complicated subject between Ottoman government and European Powers and it
There was stirring animosity between the Armenians and the Turks prior to World War I, in 1894, thousands of Armenians were massacred by the Turkish due to their religious affiliation with Christianity, which juxtaposed the Islamic Turks with whom they lived with (Greene 125). The Armenians living in Turkey have been ostracized ever since, and increased tension between the Turks and Armenians was sparked by the beginning of World War I. On April 15th, 1914 the Armenians asked for German protection from the Turks, which the German government refused to avoid offending the Turkish Government (Gunter 46). The Germans began negotiations with Turkey about a week prior to the beginning to World War I on August 1st, 1914. 8 days after Germany declared war on Russia, the Turkish governm...
The earliest start to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 happened one hundred years earlier when two priests, Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Morelos, led a stand against the Spanish colonial officials who were controlling Mexico at the time. On September, 16 1810 Hidalgo led Mexico's Indians in a revolution directed against the Spanish plantation owners in northern Mexico. He was motivated by a need for a new government and a re-location of both the church's and plantation owner's lands. Hidalgo and the Indians, armed with only farm tools and weapons, marched towards Mexico City. While Hidalgo was marching into Mexico City, Jose Morelos organized an attack force and began raiding Spanish plantations and towns. Hidalgo’s army was defeated in 1811 and he was executed. Jose Morelos took control of the revolution and led attacks until the Spaniards captured and killed him in 1815. When Morelos died so did the revolution of 1810.( www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/mexicanrev.htm, Encarta 98)
Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata are the main revolutionaries remembered. These figures of the revolution took on the responsibility that came with the title. Their main goal was to regain the rights the people deserved. The peons believed that they deserved the land that they labored on. These workers rose up in a vehement conflict against those opposing and oppressing them.
The emergence of the Young Turk movement, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and its defeat in World War I, saw many changes in Asia Minor. The internal conflict with the Armenians during the war, and the flight of hundreds of thousands of Greeks, led to a dramatic change in the population of the emerging Republic of Turkey. The moving of the Turkish capital to Ankara in 1923 led to a shift from the previous capital, Constantinople.
Ethnic Armenians have resided in the Middle Eastern region of the world since approximately 3500 BC. Armenians lived and still live in many Middle Eastern countries such as Armenia, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, and the republic of Georgia. Armenians have their own language and alphabet and have a very unique culture, which has set them apart from other countries and ethnic groups. In 300 AD, there was not a single nation who had Christianity as their national religion. “Following the advent of Christianity, Armenia became the very first nation to accept it as the state religion.” Armenian pride in their culture and way of life never wavered, even throughout being conquered by different nations. Armenian lands were taken over by many different nations on several different occasions, but they finally ended up in the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s, when ...
Many small and large groups led by revolutionaries were involved. “The Mexican revolution was an outgrowth of the resentment that had built up during Diaz’s 34 year regime” (Overfelt, Robert). Porfirio Diaz was president at the time the Mexican revolution began. He had a rule of 34 years, from 1876- 1880 and from 1884- 1911.
At one time, the reforms made by the Young Turks worked well, but only for a short time. Overthrowing the tyranny of Hamid should have been enough to help establish a new government, but the triumvirate also became quite oppressive during their reign. Turkism established a new form of nationalism that left out various nationalities, races, and cultures, and this led to the decline of the empire. Following World War I, the empire was faced with so many conflicts, they were unable to remain strong. Even though the reformers set out to strengthen the empire, it is quite possible they are the reason for the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The Armenians had many barriers to overcome but shocked the community is how much the Armenians strived under Ottomans Empire. Many Christian Armenians tended to be much wealthier and have a stronger education than others. But what was most shocking to other was the fact that the Armenians were more loyal to Ottomans Empire government then the Russians were.
Studying the factors that went into the Armenian genocide not only gives us an understanding of a historical moment but also provides us with the knowledge for finding out if the mass murders actually occurred. Did the Armenian genocide really happen? Or is it all just a myth? The history that comes with the Armenian genocide is a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and deep divisions between the Armenians and the Turkish people (Mustafa 1). In 1915, it was said that leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. However, the Turkish government does not acknowledge these events, in fact it is still illegal in Turkey to discuss what happened to the Armenians (History.com Staff 1). The elimination of the Armenians was the model of modern genocide, the act in which a certain state adopts a scheme geared to the destruction of a group of its own citizens (Gust 1). In order to understand why the Turks continue the denial of being involved in the criminal act that was eliminating the Armenian people, we must first consider both the Armenian people and the Turkish peoples’ thoughts and knowledge of the events that took place, and only then, after extensive analysis of the evidence recovered, then we can come to a conclusion as to what really happened all those years ago.
What Prompted the Ottoman Empire to Join World War I? Plan of Investigation World War I, was a particularly decisive event in the history of the Ottoman Empire, as the decision to join the war, ultimately led to the Empire’s downfall, after more than 600 years of prosperity. The catastrophic implications of the decision, may thus lead one to ponder: What prompted the Ottoman Empire to join World War I in the first place? It is a question for which there is a lack of specificity in contemporary answers, as some claim that it was an imperialistic desire that prompted the Ottomans to join the war, while others believe that the decision was a result of international pressure.