Committee of Union and Progress (CUP / İttihat ve Terakki) §

Revolutionary constitutionalists turned genocidal regime

The Committee of Union and Progress began as an Ottoman constitutionalist movement against Abdul Hamid II and became the ruling organisation after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and especially the 1913 coup. Under the wartime triumvirate of Talaat, Enver and Djemal, it directed the deportation and destruction of Ottoman Armenians.

The CUP's radicalisation linked empire-loss, Balkan Muslim refugee trauma, war, security paranoia and Turkist demographic engineering. The Tehcir Law was framed as wartime security but implemented primarily against Armenians and other Christian communities. Scholars such as Akcam, Kevorkian and Bloxham treat the CUP as the central state-party actor in the Armenian Genocide Akcam Kevorkian.

The party dissolved after Ottoman defeat, but its cadres, property transfers and denial frameworks shaped the early Turkish Republic. In the atlas, the CUP is the clearest case where a party is also a perpetrator institution. editorial