Description

The Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress was a revolutionary group, secret society, and political party, active between 1889 and 1926 in the Ottoman Empire and in 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 Young Turk movement produced other Ottoman political parties as well. Within the Ottoman Empire its members were known as İttihadcılar ('Unionists') or Komiteciler ('Committeemen').