title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Despite all these setbacks for the CUP and Young Turks, the committee was effectively revived under a new cadre by 1907. In September 1906, the (OFC) was formed as another secret Young Turk organization based inside the Ottoman Empire in Salonica (modern Thessaloniki). The founders of the OFC were Mehmet Talât, regional director of Post and Telegraph services in Salonica; Dr. Midhat Şükrü (Bleda), director of a municipal hospital, Mustafa Rahmi (Arslan), a merchant from the well known Evranoszade family, and first lieutenants and . Most of the OFC founders also joined the Salonica Freemason lodge "Macedonia Risorta", as Freemason lodges proved to be safe havens from the secret police of Yıldız Palace. Initially the membership of the OFC was only accessible for Muslims, mostly Albanians and Turks, with some Kurds and Arabs also becoming members, but neither Greeks nor Serbs or Bulgarians were ever accepted or approached. Its first seventy members were exclusively Muslims. Army officers İsmail Enver and Kazım Karabekir would found the Monastir (modern Bitola) branch of the OFC, which turned out to be a potent source of recruits for the organization. Unlike the mostly bureaucrat recruits of the Salonica OFC branch, OFC Recruits from Monastir were officers of the Third Army. The Third Army was engaging Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian insurgent groups in the countryside in what was known as the Macedonian conflict, and its officers believed the state needed drastic reform in order to bring peace to the region that was in seemingly perpetual ethnic conflict. This made joining imperially biased revolutionary secret societies especially appealing to them. This widespread sentiment led the senior officers to turn a blind eye to the fact that many of their junior officers had joined secret societies. Under Talât's initiative, the OFC connected and then merged with Rıza's Paris-based CUP in September 1907, and the group became the internal center of the CUP in the Ottoman Empire. Talât became secretary-general of the internal CUP, while Bahattin Şakir became secretary general of the external CUP. After the Young Turk Revolution, the more revolutionary internal CUP cadre consisting of Talât, Şakir, Dr. Mehmet Nazım, Enver, Ahmed Cemal, Midhat Şükrü, and Mehmed Cavid supplanted Rıza's leadership of the exiled Old Unionists. For now this merger transformed the committee from an intellectual opposition group into a secret revolutionary organization.Intending to emulate other revolutionary nationalist organisations like the Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, an extensive cell based organisation was constructed. The CUP's "modus operandi" was "komitecilik", or rule by revolutionary conspiracy. Joining the revolutionary committee was by invitation only, and those who did join had to keep their membership secret. Recruits would undergo an initiation ceremony, where they swore a sacred oath with the Quran (or Bible or Torah if they were Christian or Jewish) in the right hand and a sword, dagger, or revolver in the left hand. They swore to unconditionally obey all orders from the Central Committee; to never reveal the CUP's secrets and to keep their own membership secret; to be willing to die for the fatherland and Islam at all times; and to follow orders from the Central Committee to kill anyone whom the Central Committee wanted to see killed, including one's own friends and family. The penalty for disobeying orders from the Central Committee or attempting to leave the CUP was death. To enforce its policy, the Unionists had a select group of especially devoted party members known as "fedâi", whose job was to assassinate those CUP members who disobeyed orders, disclosed its secrets, or were suspected of being police informers. The CUP professed to be fighting for the restoration of the Constitution, but its internal organisation and methods were intensely authoritarian, with its cadres expected to strictly follow orders from the "Sacred Committee".


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The committee had a secret presence in towns throughout European Turkey. By comparison, the organization was noticeably absent from intellectual circles and army units based in Anatolia and the Levant, Smyrna (İzmir) being an exception. Under this umbrella name, one could find ethnic Albanians, Bulgarians, Arabs, Serbians, Jews, Greeks, Turks, Kurds, and Armenians united by the common goal of overthrowing Abdul Hamid's despotic regime.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In the in 1907 Rıza and Sabahaddin were finally able 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 all means necessary. Since 1907, also non Muslims were able to become members of the OFC. Hence in this alliance was another faction, the Armenian nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun). The ARF signed the alliance with the hope that decentralizing reforms could be conceded to Ottoman Armenians once the Young Turks took power, even though the CUP's core mantra was centralization. Though Ahmet Rıza eventually pulled out of the tripartite agreement and this alliance played no critical role in the upcoming revolution, the CUP and Dashnak continued a close cooperation throughout the Second Constitutional Era up until 1914.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Sultan Abdul Hamid II persecuted the Young Turks in an attempt to hold on to absolute power, but was forced to reinstate the Ottoman constitution, which he had originally suspended in 1878, after threats to overthrow him by the CUP in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. The revolution was sparked by a summit in July 1908 in Reval, Russia (modern Tallinn, Estonia) between King Edward VII of the United Kingdom and the emperor Nicholas II of Russia. Popular rumour within the Ottoman Empire had it that during the summit a secret Anglo-Russian deal was signed to partition the Ottoman Empire. Though this story was not true, the rumour led the CUP's Monastir branch –which had recruited many army officers– to act. Enver and Ahmed Niyazi fled to the Albanian hinterlands to organise militias in support of a constitutionalist revolution. The Committee threatened Hayri Pasha, field marshal of the Third Army, into passive cooperation, while also assassinating Şemsi Pasha, whom Abdul Hamid had sent to suppress the revolt in Macedonia. At this point, the mutiny which originated in the Third Army in Salonica took hold of the Second Army based in Adrianople (modern Edirne) as well as Anatolian troops sent from İzmir. Under pressure of being deposed, on 24 July 1908 Abdul Hamid capitulated and reinstated the Constitution to great jubilation throughout the Empire.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: With the reestablishment of the constitution and parliament, a general election was called for December of that year, prompting most Young Turk organizations to turn into political parties, including the CUP. However, after meeting of the goal reinstating the constitution, in the absence of this uniting factor, the CUP and the revolution began to fracture and different factions began to emerge. Prince Sabahaddin founded the Liberty Party and later in 1911 the Freedom and Accord Party. Most of the Old Unionists soon distanced themselves from a CUP which was a very different organization than how it was originally. Ibrahim Temo and Abdullah Cevdet, two original founders of the CUP, founded the in February 1909. Ahmet Rıza returned to the capital from his exile in Paris to be unanimously elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, the parliament's lower house, but by 1910 renounced his membership from the CUP as it became more radical.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Much to the committee's dismay, the instability during the revolution resulted in more territorial loses for the Empire, which would not be reversed due to the European powers refusing to uphold the status quo set by the Treaty of Berlin. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia, Crete announced a union with Greece, and Bulgaria declared independence. As a result, the CUP organized a boycott against Austro-Hungarian made goods.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The CUP succeeded in reestablishing democracy and constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire but chose not to overthrow Abdul Hamid choosing instead to monitor situation from the sidelines. This was because most of its members were younger and held little to no skill in statecraft, while the organization itself held little power outside of Rumelia. Besides, only a small fraction of the army's lower ranking officer corps were loyal to the committee, and total membership numbered around approximately 2,250. The CUP decided to continue its clandestine nature by keeping its membership secret but sent to Constantinople a delegation of seven high-ranking Unionists known as the Committee of Seven, including Talât, Ahmet Cemal, and Mehmed Cavid to monitor the government. After the revolution, power was informally shared between the palace (Abdul Hamid), the Sublime Porte, and the CUP, whose Central Committee was still based in Salonica, and now represented a powerful deep state faction. The CUP's continued reliance on "komitecilik" quickly earned ire from genuine democrats and prompted accusations of authoritarianism.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: An early victory of the CUP over Abdul Hamid happened on 1 August, when Abdul Hamid was forced to assign ministries according to the Central Committee's will. Four days later, the CUP told the government that the current Grand Vizier (at this point a "de jure" prime ministerial title) Mehmed Said Pasha was unacceptable to them, and had Kâmil Pasha appointed Grand Vizier. Kâmil later proved to be too independent for the CUP. Facing a vote of no confidence, he was forced to resign. He was replaced by Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha who was more partial towards the committee.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Moral was high amongst Ottomans following revolution, but in the lead up to the election, dissatisfaction of the Young Turks' unfulfilled promises to improve worker's rights lead to the first major worker strikes in the Ottoman Empire. The CUP initially supported the strikes to gain more popular support, but soon assisted the government in controlling organized labor by supporting factory owners in their disputes with their workers and sending gendarme and soldiers to crack down on railroad strikes. By October the CUP passed a law that banned workers unions and labor injunctions.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In the Ottoman general election of 1908 the CUP captured only 60 of the 275 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, despite its leading role in the revolution. Other parties represented in parliament included the Armenian Dashnak and Hunchak parties (with four and two members respectively) and the main opposition, Prince Sabahaddin's Liberty Party.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: A sign of how the CUP power worked occurred in February 1909, when Ali Haydar who had just been appointed ambassador to Spain went to the Sublime Porte to discuss his new appointment with Hilmi Pasha, only be to be informed by the Grand Vizier he needed to confer with a man from the Central Committee who was due to arrive shortly.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The murder of the anti-Unionist journalist Hasan Fehmi on 6 April was widely seen as an assassination by the CUP. His funeral turned into a demonstration against the committee when a crowd of 50,000 assembled in Sultanahmet Square and eventually in front of the parliament. These events served to be the backdrop of the 31 March Crisis.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Days afterwords, discontent against the CUP and disappointment with renewed constitutionalism culminated in an uprising by reactionaries and liberals. A mob revolted in Constantinople that Abdul Hamid took advantage of, securing his absolutism once again. The members of the Liberty Party that took part in the uprising lost control of the situation when Abdul Hamid accepted the mob's demands, again suspending the constitution and shuttering the parliament in favor of sharia. The uprising was localised in the capital, so MPs and other Unionists were able to flee and organise. Talât was able to escape to Aya Stefanos (Yeşilköy) with 100 deputies to organise a counter government. In the military, Mahmud Şevket Pasha joined forces with Unionist and constitutionalist officers to form the "Action Army" () and began a march on Constantinople. Some lower ranking Unionist officers within the formation included Enver, Niyazi, and Cemal, as well as Mustafa İsmet (İnönü) and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). Upon the Army of Action arriving at Ayastefanos, it was secretly agreed there that Abdul Hamid would be deposed. Constantinople was taken back within a few days and order was restored through many courts marshals and executions, and the constitution was reinstated for the third and final time. Abdul Hamid II was deposed via a fatwa issued by the Shaykh-al-Islam and a unanimous vote of the Ottoman Parliament. Abdul Hamid's younger brother replaced him and took the name Mehmed V, committing to the role of a constitutional monarch and figurehead of the future CUP party-state.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: While the CUP survived the failed countercoup and saw their ultimate enemy dethroned, their influence was now checked by Mahmud Şevket Pasha, who became the most powerful person in the Ottoman Empire. Şevket Pasha, representing the military, started butting heads with the CUP as he represented the only opposition to them other than the small after the 31 March Incident. Prince Sabahaddin's Liberty Party's reluctant support for the counter revolution meant that his party was banned. The Unionists expected more influence in the government for their role in foiling the countercoup, and maneuvered Cavid into the Finance Ministry in June, becoming the first CUP affiliated minister in the government. Two months later, Talât was appointed minister of interior.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: CUP and the ARF held a strong alliance throughout the Second Constitutional Era, with their cooperation dating back to the Second Congress of Ottoman Opposition of 1907; as both were united in overthrowing the Hamidian regime for a constitutional one. During the countercoup, massacres against Ottoman Armenians in Adana occurred that was facilitated by members of the local CUP branch, straining the alliance between the CUP and Dashnak. The committee made up for this by nominating Ahmet Cemal as governor of Adana. Cemal restored order, providing compensation to victims and bringing justice to the perpetrators, thus mending the relations between the two committees.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In its 1909 congress in Salonica, the Committee of Union and Progress was formally transformed from a conspiracy group into a mass politics organization. A separate parliamentary group from the committee was created, known as the Union and Progress Party (), whose membership was open to the public. Though officially unrelated to the CUP, it was very much an instrument of the Central Committee, and the two organizations merged in 1913. Also at the congress Pan-Turkism was introduced in its party program in order to gain the Ottoman Turkic populations support to an eventual union with the other Turkic populations in the world. The committee pledged to discontinue "komitecilik" characteristics such as initiation ceremonies and other conspiratorial practices and vowed to be more transparent with the public. However, neither the pledge for more transparency nor the pledge to discontinue initiation ceremonies were fully achieved. The committee continued to influence politics in the backrooms and through the occasional assassination (See Ahmet Samim), inviting criticism from many politicians that the committee was opaque and authoritarian rather than a force of democracy. By the end of 1909, Union and Progress was both an organization and a party with 850,000 members and 360 branches spread across the country.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In February 1910 several parties splintered from the Union and Progress Party, including the People's Party, Ottoman Committee of Alliance, and the .


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In September 1911, Italy submitted an ultimatum containing terms clearly meant to provoke a rejection, and following the expected rejection, invaded Ottoman Tripolitania. The Unionist officers in the army were determined to resist the Italian aggression, and the parliament had succeeded in passing the "Law for the Prevention of Brigandage and Sedition", a measure ostensibly intended to prevent insurgency against the central government, which assigned that duty to newly created paramilitary formations. These later came under the control of the Special Organisation (), which was used to conduct guerrilla operations against the Italians in Libya. Those who once served as "fedâiin" assassins during the years of underground struggle were often assigned as leaders of the Special Organisation. The ultra-secretive Special Organisation answered to the Central Committee, and in the future worked closely with the Ministry of War and Ministry of Interior. A great many officers, most of whom Unionist, including Enver, his younger brother Nuri, Mustafa Kemal, Süleyman Askerî, and Ali Fethi (Okyar) all departed to Libya to fight the Italians.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: With many of the Unionist officers in Libya, this weakened the power of the CUP and the army at home. As a consequence of the Italian invasion, İbrahim Hakkı Pasha's Unionist government collapsed and two more parties splintered from the CUP: the right-wing , and the left-wing Progress Party. Union and Progress was forced into a coalition government with some minor parties under Mehmed Said Pasha. Another blow against the CUP came in mid-November, when all of the opposition parties coalesced around a new big tent party known as Freedom and Accord, which immediately attracted 70 deputies to its ranks.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: When it came time for general elections in 1912, held in the midst of the war with Italy and one of many Albanian revolts, the Union and Progress Party and Dashnak campaigned for the elections under an electoral alliance. Alarmed at the success of Freedom and Accord and increasingly radicalised, Union and Progress won 269 of the 275 seats in parliament through electoral fraud and violence, which led to the election being known as the "Election of Clubs" (), leaving the Freedom and Accord just six seats. Though they received ten seats from the Union and Progress's lists, Dashnak terminated the alliance as they expected more reforms from the CUP as well as more support for their candidates to be elected.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In May 1912, colonel Mehmed Sadık separated from the CUP and organized a group of pro-Freedom and Accord officers in the army calling themselves the Saviour Officers Group, which demanded the immediate dissolution of the Unionist dominated parliament on July 11. The fraudulent electoral result of the "Election of Clubs" had badly hurt the popular legitimacy of the CUP, and faced with widespread opposition and Mahmud Şevket Pasha's resignation as Minister of War in support of the officers, Said Pasha's Unionist government resigned on 9 July 1912. It was replaced by Ahmed Muhtar Pasha's "Great Cabinet" that deliberately excluded the CUP by being made up of older ministers, many of which were associated with the old Hamidian regime. On 5 August 1912, Muhtar Pasha's government shuttered the Unionist dominated parliament and called for snap elections which would never happen due to the outbreak of war in the Balkans. For the moment, the CUP had become isolated, driven from power, and risked being banned by the government.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: With the CUP out of power, in the lead up to the elections, the party challenged Muhtar Pasha's government to a jingoistic game of pro-war populism against the Balkan states by utilizing its still powerful propaganda network. Unbeknownst to the CUP, the Sublime Porte, and most international observers, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece were already preparing themselves for a war against the Empire in an alliance known as the Balkan League. On 28 September 1912, the Ottoman army conducted military maneuvers on the Bulgarian border, to which Bulgaria responded by mobilizing. On 4 October the Committee organized a pro-war rally in Sultanahmet Square. Finally on 8 October, Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire, starting the First Balkan War, with the rest of its allies joining in during the week. The Ottoman Empire and Italy concluded their war so that the Empire could focus on the Balkan states with the Treaty of Ouchy, in which Tripolitania was annexed and the Dodecanese were occupied by Italy. This proved too little and too late to salvage Rumelia; Albania, Macedonia, and western Thrace was lost, Edirne was put under siege, and Constantinople was in serious risk of being overrun by the Bulgarian army (see First Battle of Çatalca). Edirne was a symbolic city, as it was an important city in Ottoman history, serving as the Empire's third capital for nearly one hundred years, and together with Salonica represented Europe's Islamic heritage.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Muhtar Pasha's government resigned on the 29th of October following total military defeat in Rumelia for Kâmil Pasha's return, who was close to Freedom and Accord and keen on destroying the CUP once and for all. With the loss of Salonica to Greece the CUP was forced to relocate its Central Committee to Istanbul, but by mid-November the new headquarters was shut down by the government and its members were forced into hiding.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Grand Vizier Kâmil Pasha and his War Minister Nazım Pasha wished to ban the CUP, so the CUP launched a preemptive strike: a coup d'état known as the Raid on the Sublime Porte on 23 January 1913. During the coup Kâmil Pasha was forced to resign as Grand Vizier at gunpoint and a Unionist officer Yakub Cemil killed Nazım Pasha. The coup was justified under the grounds that Kâmil Pasha was about to "sell out the nation" by agreeing to a truce in the First Balkan War and giving up Edirne. The intention of the new leadership, dominated by Talât, Enver, Cemal, under Mahmud Şevket Pasha's premiership (who reluctantly accepted the role), was to break the truce and renew the war against Bulgaria.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The CUP once again did not take over the government, instead opting for the creation of a national unity government; only four Unionist ministers were appointed into the new government. The immediate aftermath of the coup resulted in a much more severe state of emergency than previous governments had ever implemented. Cemal in his new capacity as military commander of Constantinople was responsible for arresting many and heavily stifling opposition. At this point the Unionists were no longer concerned with their actions being considered constitutional.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The pro-war regime immediately withdrew the Empire's delegation from the London conference on the same day it took power. The first task of the new regime was to found the Committee for National Defence on 1 February 1913 which was intended to mobilize the resources of the empire for an all-out effort to turn the tide. On 3 February 1913 the war resumed. In the Battle of Şarköy, the new government staked a daring operation in which XX Army Corps was to make an amphibious landing at the rear of the Bulgarians at Şarköy while the Straits Composite Force was to break out of the Gallipoli peninsula. The operation failed due to a lack of co-ordination with heavy losses. Following reports that the Ottoman army had at most 165,000 troops to oppose the of the League army together with news that morale in the army was poor due to Edirne's surrender to Bulgaria on 26 March, the pro-war regime finally agreed to an armistice on 1 April 1913 and signed the Treaty of London on May 30, acknowledging the loss of all of Rumelia except for Constantinople.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: News of the failure to rescue Rumelia by the CUP prompted the organization of a countercoup by Kâmil Pasha that would overthrow the CUP and bring Freedom and Accord back into power. Kâmil Pasha was put under house arrest on May 28, but the conspiracy continued and aimed to assassinate Grand Vizier Mahmud Şevket Pasha and major Unionists. On June 11, only Mahmud Şevket Pasha was assassinated. Mahmud Şevket Pasha represented the last independent personality in the Empire; with his assassination, the CUP took full control over the country. The power vacuum in the army created by Şevket Pasha's death was filled by the Committee. Any remaining opposition to the CUP, especially Freedom and Accord, was suppressed and their leaders exiled. All provincial and local officials reported to "Responsible Secretaries" chosen by the party for each Vilayet. Mehmed V appointed Said Halim Pasha, an Egyptian royal who was loosely affiliated with the committee, to serve as Grand Vizier until Talât replaced him in 1917. A courts marshal sentenced to death 16 Freedom and Accord leaders, including Prince Sabahaddin who was sentenced in absentia, as he already fled to Geneva in exile.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: After surrendering in the First Balkan War, the CUP became fixated on retaking Edirne, while other important issues like economic collapse, reform in Eastern Anatolia, and infrastructure were largely ignored. On 20 July 1913, following the outbreak of the Second Balkan War, the Ottomans attacked Bulgaria and on 21 July 1913 Colonel Enver retook Edirne from Bulgaria, further increasing his status as a national hero. By the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest in September 1913, the Ottomans regained some of the land lost in Thrace during the First Balkan War.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The new regime was a dictatorship dominated by a triumvirate that turned the Ottoman Empire into a one party state of Union and Progress, known in history as the Three Pashas Triumvirate. Members of Said Halim Pasha's cabinet, the triumvirate consisted of Talât who returned to the Interior Ministry, Enver who became War Minister, and Cemal who became and "de facto" ruler of Syria, all of whom soon became Pashas. Some historians say Halil (Menteşe) was a fourth member of this clique. Scholar Hans-Lukas Kieser asserts that this state of rule by a triumvirate is only accurate for the year 1913–1914, and that Talât increasingly became a more central figure within the Union and Progress party state, especially once he also became Grand Vizier in 1917. Alternatively, it is also accurate to call the Unionist regime a clique or even an oligarchy, as many prominent Committeemen held some form of "de jure" or "de facto" power. Other than the Three Pashas and Halil, "éminence grises" such as Dr. Nazım, Bahattin Şakir, Ziya Gökalp, and the party's secretary general Midhat Şükrü at times also dominated the Central Committee without formal positions in the Ottoman government.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The CUP regime was less hierarchically totalitarian than future European dictatorships. Instead of relying on strict and rigid chains of command the regime functioned through the balancing of factions through massive corruption and kickbacks. Individual governors were allowed much autonomy, such as Cemal Pasha's reign of Syria and Mustafa Rahmi's governorship of the Aydin vilayet. Loyalty to the committee was seen more valuable than competence. This lack of rule of law, lack of respect to the constitution, and extreme corruption worsened as the regime aged. The Ottoman Empire's committee regime lasted from 1913 to the empire's surrender in World War I in October 1918.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The Macedonian Conflict and its conclusion in the Balkan Wars meant a more public display of Turkish nationalism for the CUP at the expense of Ottomanism. Muslim Albanians did not become any more loyal to the empire after the Young Turk Revolution, while defeat in the First Balkan War had showed that the empire's Christian population were potential fifth columns. In addition, lack of action by the European powers in upholding the integrity of the Empire and the status quo of the Berlin Treaty during the Balkan wars meant to the "sacred committee" that the Turks were on their own. However the CUP lost much respect for the European powers in the reconquest of Edirne considering the European powers demanded Edirne's surrender to Bulgaria in the First Balkan War. This abandonment of Ottomanism was much more feasible due to the new borders of the Empire after the Balkan Wars, inflating the proportion of Turks and especially Muslims in the empire at the expense of Christians.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: From its end, the triumvirate which dominated the CUP did not accept the outcome of the Balkan wars as final, and a major aim of the new regime was to take back all of the territory which had been lost. A school textbook from 1914 captured the burning desire for revenge:


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In the aftermath of the First Balkan War hundreds of thousands of refugees from Rumelia arrived with tales of atrocities committed by the Greek, Montenegrin, Serb and Bulgarian forces. A marked anti-Christian and xenophobic mood settled in amongst many Ottoman Muslims. The CUP encouraged boycotts against Austrian, Bulgarian, and Greek businesses, but after 1913 also against the empire's own Christian and Jewish citizens.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The new regime starting to glorify the "Turkish race" after abandoning the multi-culture ideal of Ottomanism. Particular attention was paid to Turan, the mythical homeland of the Turks that was located north of China. A much greater emphasis was put on Turkish nationalism with the Turks being glorified in endless poems, pamphlets, newspaper articles and speeches as a great warrior nation who needed to recapture their former glory. The chief ideologue of the CUP, Ziya Gökalp, complained in a 1913 essay that "the sword of the Turk and likewise his pen have exalted the Arabs, the Chinese and the Persians" rather than themselves and that the modern Turks "needed to turn back to their ancient past". Gökalp argued it was time for the Turks to start following such great "Turanian" heroes as Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane the Great and Hulagu Khan. As such, the Turks needed to become the dominant political and economic group within the Ottoman Empire while uniting with all of the other Turkic peoples in Russia and Persia to create a vast pan-Turkic state covering much of Asia and Europe. In his poem "Turan", Gökalp wrote: "The land of the Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan. Their country is the eternal land: Turan". The pan-Turanian propaganda was significant for not being based upon Islam, but was rather a call for the unity of the Turkic peoples based upon a shared history and supposed common racial origins together a pan-Asian message stressing the role of the Turkic peoples as the fiercest warriors in all of Asia. The CUP planned on taking back all of the territory that the Ottomans had lost during the course of the 19th century and under the banner of pan-Turkic nationalism to acquire new territory in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This was the motivation for the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I, the "pan-Turkic" ideology of the party which emphasized the Empire's manifest destiny of ruling over the Turkic people of central Asia once Russia was driven out of that region.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Right from the time of the 1913 coup d'état, the new government planned to wage a total war, and wished to indoctrinate the entire Turkish population, especially the young people, for it. In June 1913, the government founded the Turkish Strength Association, a paramilitary group run by former army officers which all young Turkish men were encouraged to join. The Turkish Strength Association featured much physical exercise and military training intended to let the Turks become the "warlike nation in arms" and ensure that the current generation of teenagers "who, in order to save the deteriorating Turkish race from extinction, would learn to be self-sufficient and ready to die for fatherland, honour and pride". In May 1914, the Turkish Strength Association was replaced with the , which were very similar except for the fact that the Ottoman Strength Clubs were run by the Ministry of War and membership was compulsory for Turkish males between the ages of 10–17. Even more so than the Turkish Strength Association, the Ottoman Strength Clubs were meant to train the nation for war with an ultra-nationalist propaganda and military training featuring live-fire exercises being an integral part of its activities. Along the same lines was a new emphasis on the role of women, who had the duty of bearing and raising the new generation of soldiers, who had to raise their sons to have "bodies of iron and nerves of steel".The CUP created a number of semi-official organisations such as the , the Ottoman Red Crescent Society and the Committee for National Defence that were intended to engage the Ottoman public with the entire modernisation project by promoting their nationalist and militaristic ways of thinking. Reflecting Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz Pasha's influence, especially his "nation in arms" theory, the purpose of the society under the new regime was to support the military.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In January 1914, Enver became a Pasha and was appointed Minister of War, supplanting the calmer Ahmet İzzet Pasha, which made Russia, especially its Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov, greatly suspicious. An extensive purge of the army was carried out, with about 1,100 officers including 2 field marshals, 3 generals, 30 lieutenant-generals, 95 major-generals and 184 colonels whom Enver had considered to be inept or disloyal forced to take early retirement.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Absent the wartime atmosphere, the Unionists did not yet purge minority religions from political life; at least 23 Christians joined it and were elected to the fifth parliament in 1914, in which the Union and Progress Party was the only contender. The CUP and Dashnak still maintained cordial relations, and in February 1914 concluded negotiations of the passage of a bipartisan reform package for the eastern provinces which would be administered in cooperation with European inspectorates. However relations with the Hunchaks came to an end when intelligence services revealed a plot by the Hunchakian party of assassinating key leaders of the CUP. Those involved were arrested in 1913, and hanged in June 1915. The reform package also turned out to be stillborn, being abandoned by October once the Ottoman Empire entered World War I.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Many Unionists were traumatized from the outcome of the Macedonian Question and the loss of most of Rumelia. The winners of the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war and the First Balkan War applied anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing measures against its citizens, which the CUP reacted with similar fever against the Empire's Christian minorities but on a much greater scale in the future. With the Macedonian Question's conclusion, attention was now given to Anatolia and the Armenian Question. Not wanting Anatolia to turn into another Macedonia, the CUP concluded that Anatolia would become the homeland of the Turks through policies of homogeneity in order to save both "Turkdom" and the empire. The CUP would engage in an "... increasingly radicalized demographic engineering program aimed at the ethno-religious homogenization of Anatolia from 1913 till the end of World War I". To that end, before the Committee's exterminatory anti-Armenian policies, anti-Greek policies were in order. Mahmut Celaleddin (Bayar), who was appointed local secretary of the Union and Progress Party branch of Smyrna (modern İzmir), as well as Talât and Enver Pasha, formulated a terror campaign against the Greek population in the İzmir vilayet with the aim of "cleansing" the area. The purpose of the campaign was described in a CUP document:


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The campaign did not proceed with the same level of brutality as did the Armenian genocide during 1915 as the Unionists were afraid of a hostile foreign reaction, but during the "cleansing" operations in the spring of 1914 carried out by the CUP's Special Organisation it is estimated at least 300,000 Greeks fled across the Aegean to Greece. In July 1914, the "cleansing operation" was stopped following protests from the ambassadors to the Porte with the French ambassador Maurice Bompard speaking especially strongly in defence of the Greeks, as well as the threat of war from Greece. In many ways, the operation against Ottoman Greeks in 1914 was a trial run for the operations that were launched against Armenians in 1915.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In September, irregular warfare against Russia on the Caucasian border commenced; the ARF was invited to collaborate in these operations but refused. Only in late September in response to cross-border raids would Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov permit the organisation of Ottoman Armenian irregular volunteer regiments (many Ottoman Armenians fled to Russian Tbilisi at this point).


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Following the 1913 coup, the CUP initiated a massive arms-buying spree, buying as many weapons from Germany as possible while asking for a new German military mission to be sent to the empire, which would not only train the Ottoman army, but also command Ottoman troops in the field. In December 1913, the new German military mission under the command of General Otto Liman von Sanders arrived to take command of the Ottoman army. Enver, who was determined to uphold his own power, did not allow the German officers the sort of wide-ranging authority over the Ottoman army that the German-Ottoman agreement of October 1913 had envisioned. At the same time, the Unionist government was seeking allies for the war of revenge it planned to launch as soon as possible. Ahmet İzzet Pasha, Chief of the General Staff recalled: "... what I expected from an alliance based on defence and security, while others' expectations depended upon total attack and assault. Without doubt, the leaders of the CUP were anxiously looking for ways to compensate for the pain of the defeats, which the population blamed on them."


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Tensions in Europe rapidly increased as the events of the July Crisis unfolded. The CUP saw the July Crisis as the perfect chance to revise the outcome of the loss of Rumelia in the Balkan wars and the loss of the six vilayets in the Berlin Treaty through an alliance with a European power. With the fall of the Anglophile Kâmil Pasha and Freedom and Accord, Germany took advantage of the situation by reestablishing its friendship with the Ottoman Empire that dated back to the Hamidian Era. It was a small faction within the government and the CUP, first and foremost headed by Talât, Enver, and Halil, that solidified an alliance with Germany with an equally small faction within the German government in the form of Freiherr von Wangenheim that brought the Empire into the First World War.After much politicking by Wangenheim, German influence in the Empire noticeably increased through media acquisitions and increasing presence of the German military mission in the capital. On 1 August 1914, the Empire ordered a partial mobilization. Two days later it ordered a general mobilization. On 2 August, the Ottoman and German governments signed a secret alliance. The purpose of this alliance was to bring the Empire into World War I. On 19 August, another secret alliance with Bulgaria negotiated by Talât and Halil and Bulgarian Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov was signed. On 2 August Wangenheim informed the Ottoman cabinet that the German Mediterranean squadron under Admiral Wilhelm Souchon was steaming towards Constantinople, known as the famous pursuit of the "Goeben" and "Breslau", and requested that the Ottomans grant the squadron sanctuary once it arrived (which the government gladly obliged to). On 16 August, a phony deal was signed with the Ottoman government supposedly buying the "Goeben" and "Breslau" for US$86 million, but with the German officers and crews remaining aboard.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: On 21 October, Enver Pasha informed the Germans that his plans for the war were now complete and he was already moving his troops towards eastern Anatolia to invade the Russian Caucasus and to Palestine to attack the British in Egypt. To provide a pretext for the war, Enver and Cemal Pasha (at this point Minister of the Navy) ordered Admiral Souchon to attack the Russian Black Sea ports with the newly christened "Yavuz" and "Midilli" and other Ottoman gunboats in the expectation that Russia would declare war in response; the attack was carried out on the 29th. After the act of aggression against his country, Sazonov submitted an ultimatum to the Sublime Porte demanding that the Empire intern all of the German military and naval officers in their service; after its rejection Russia declared war on 2 November 1914. The triumvirate called a special session of the Central Committee to explain that the time for the empire to enter the war had now come, and defined the war aim as: "the destruction of our Muscovite enemy [Russia] in order to obtain thereby a natural frontier to our empire, which should include and unite all the branches of our race". This meeting prompted the Minister of Finance Cavid to resign (though he still retained his seat in the Central Committee and returned to his post in 1917) and greatly infuriated the Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha. On 5 November, Britain and France declared war on the Empire. On 11 November 1914, Mehmed V, declared war on Russia, Britain, and France. Later that month, in his capacity as Caliph of all Muslims, he issued a declaration of "jihad" against the Entente ordering all Muslims everywhere in the world to fight for the destruction of those nations.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: With the expectation that the new war would free the Empire of its constraints on its sovereignty by the great powers, Talât went ahead with accomplishing major goals of the CUP; unilaterally abolishing the centuries-old Capitulations, prohibiting foreign postal services, terminating Lebanon's autonomy, and suspending the reform package for the Eastern Anatolian provinces that was in effect for just seven months. This unilateral action prompted a joyous rally in Sultanahmet Square.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Although the CUP had worked with the ARF during the Second Constitutional Era, factions in the CUP began to view Armenians as a fifth column that would betray the Ottoman cause after war with nearby Russia broke out in 1914; these factions gained more power after the 1913 coup d'état. After the Ottoman Empire entered the war, most Ottoman Armenians sought to proclaim their loyalty to the empire with prayers being said in Armenian churches for a swift Ottoman victory; only a minority worked for a Russian victory. In the early months of 1915, the Unionist-controlled press still emphasized the importance of the Armenian nation to the Ottoman war effort. A report presented to Talât and Cevdet (governor of Van Vilayet) by ARF members Arshak Vramian and Vahan Papazian on atrocities committed by the Special Organisation against Armenians in Van created more friction between the two organisations. However, the Unionists were still not yet confident enough to purge Armenians from politics or pursue policies of ethnic engineering.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The CUP pushed the country into the war with the expectation that "jihad" would spell the collapse of the colonial empires of the Entente, and that the Muslim Turkic peoples of Central Asia would assist the Ottomans with an invasion of the Caucasus and Central Asia. For the most part "jihad" did not create significant uprisings against the Allied powers. In fact, World War I began badly for the Ottomans. British troops seized Basra and began to advance up the Tigris river, Cemal Pasha's invasion of British Egypt failed, and Enver Pasha's Third Army was annihilated by the Russians in the Battle of Sarikamish. These defeats greatly depressed the committee and ended their pan-Turanist dreams. However, Allied attempts to force the Bosphorus in a naval breakthrough failed on 18 March, improving the confidence of the Unionists. The March 18 started the machinations for plans of a purge of Armenians from Ottoman politics and the economy and ethnic engineering in eastern Anatolia that would be executed in April. The goal of these plans was to realize "Türk Yurdu": the Turkification of Anatolia and transforming the Ottoman Empire into a homogeneous Turkish nation state.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: After the failure of the Sarikamish expedition, the Three Pashas were involved in ordering the deportations and massacres of about 1 million Armenians and other Christian groups between 1915 and 1918, known to history as the Armenian genocide or the Late Ottoman Genocides. Talât's position as the Interior Minister was key in organising the endeavour. The government would have liked to resume the "cleansing operations" against the Greek minority in western Anatolia, but this was vetoed under pressure from Germany, the Empire's only source of military equipment, as Germany wished for a neutral Greece in the war.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The Special Organisation played a key role in the Late Ottoman Genocides. The Special Organisation, which was made of especially fanatical Unionist cadres, was expanded from August 1914 onward. Talât gave orders that all of the prisoners convicted of the worse crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, etc. could have their freedom if they agreed to join the Special Organisation to kill Armenians and loot their property. Besides the hardened career criminals who joined in large numbers to have their freedom, the rank and file of Special Organisation killing units included Kurdish tribesmen attracted by the prospect of plunder and refugees from Rumelia, who were thirsting for the prospect of revenge against Christians after having been forced to flee from the Balkans in 1912.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In late 1914, Enver Pasha ordered that all Armenians serving in the Ottoman Army be disarmed and sent to labour battalions. In early 1915, Enver ordered the killing of all 200,000 Ottoman Armenian soldiers, who were now disarmed in the labour battalions. On 24 April 1915, Talât sent a telegram to Cemal Pasha (who was governor of Syria) instructing him to deport rebellious Armenians not to Central Anatolia (Konya), as had been done to a previous group which rose up in Zeytun (modern Süleymanlı), but instead to the much more inhospitable deserts of northern Syria. The Syrian deserts end up being the destination of future Armenian deportees. Talât also sent a circular to the governors to execute the arrests of important Dashnak and Hunchak members as well as "important and harmful Armenians known by the government." That night, many of Constantinople's prominent Armenian elites were rounded up, arrested, and killed soon after, including Vramian. Military, provincial, and Unionist commissaries were then dispatched to spread stab-in-the-back myths about Armenians to feed into the spirit of "jihad". On 27 May, the legal basis for demographic engineering was enacted in the form of a provisional law that allowed for the government the powers of mass repression and deportation if national security was at risk (Tehcir Law).


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Deported Armenians had their property confiscated by the state and redistributed to Muslims or simply snatched by local provincial authorities (such as Central Committee member Mehmet Reşid's governorship in Diyarbekir). Return of property to the deportees was "de facto" forbidden. By late 1916 most Armenians outside of cities like Constantinople and Izmir lost their private property. In areas where Christian minorities were deported from, the government settled Balkan Muslim refugees to take their place and property. Some local governors stood up to the Central Committee's orders of deportations against Christians such as in Kütahya, İzmir, and Dersim (modern Tunceli), but most resistors were simply replaced by Talât. This program of redistribution of Armenian property, "Millî İktisat" (national economy)"," was a core tenet of the CUP's "Türk Yurdu" project. The deportations, massacres, and confiscation of property that were performed against Armenians and other Christian groups were on a larger scale than ever, but this was not the first of such occurrences. Talât and the CUP hypocritically portrayed their actions in a Hamidian context; just like how Abdul Hamid's pretext for massacres against his own (Armenian) subjects was justified through legal means.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In December 1914, Cemal Pasha, encouraged by Şakir, ordered the deportation of all the Jews living in the southern part of Ottoman Syria known as the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem (roughly what is now Israel) on grounds that most of the Jews came from the Russian Empire, but in reality because the CUP considered the Zionist movement as a threat to the Ottoman state. The deportation order was vetoed by Wangenheim and other members of the Central Committee; Germany's leaders believed that the Jews had vast secret powers, and if the "Reich" were to assist the Jews in the war, the Jews in their turn would assist the "Reich". Within the Central Committee, many had personal Judeophilic sentiments. The CUP had its origins in Salonica, at the time the center of the Jewish world with a Jewish plurality. Some in the committee were even Dönmeh, that is, Muslims with Jewish ancestry, including Cavid and Dr. Nazım, and most in the committee enjoyed cordial relations with contemporary Zionists. In general, most Jews were sympathetic with the Unionist regime, especially those concentrated in urban areas and those outside the empire, and sentiments of an Islamic-Jewish alliance were common. However while the Jews of the Yishuv were not deported, the Ottoman authorities made sure to harass the Jews in various other ways, prompting the creation of the pro-entente NILI resistance network centered around Ottoman Palestine.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: As the Allied armies started advancing into Palestine in March 1917, Cemal Pasha ordered the deportation of the Jews of Jaffa, and after the discovery of NILI headed by the agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn who spied for the British out of the fear that Unionists would inflict the same fate on Jews as they did upon Armenians, ordered the deportation of all the Jews. However, the British victories over the Ottomans in the autumn of 1917 with Field Marshal Allenby taking Jerusalem on 9 December 1917 saved the Jews of Palestine from being deported.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The Assyrian Christian community was also targeted by the Unionist government in what is now known as the Seyfo. Talât ordered the governor of Van to remove the Assyrian population in Hakkâri, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, however this anti-Assyrian policy couldn't be implemented nationally.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Even though many Kurdish tribes played an important role in the Special Organisation's exterminatory operations against Christian minorities, Kurds also found themselves victims of deportation of the government, though not of massacre. Talât outlined that nowhere in the Empire's vilayets should the Kurdish population be more than 5%. To that end, Balkan Muslim and Turkish refugees were prioritised to be resettled in Urfa, Maraş, and Antep, while some Kurds were be deported to Central Anatolia. Kurds were supposed to be resettled in abandoned Armenian property, however negligence by resettlement authorities still resulted in the deaths of many Kurds by famine.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The CUP was against all groups which could potentially demand independence. Cemal Pasha's governance in the multicultural provinces of Greater Syria saw many groups, not just Armenians, be effected by Committee rule (See Seferberlik). During the war, Cemal Pasha famously hung local Syrian notables for treason, which helped facilitate the Arab Revolt against the empire. He also made more judicious use of the Tehcir law (compared to Talât) to selectively and temporarily deport certain Arab families he considered suspicious. Due to the Allied blockade of the region and a lack of supplies for the civilian population, certain parts of Ottoman Syria experienced desperate famine.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The deportations of the Rûm were put on hold as Germany wished for a Greek ally or neutrality, however for the sake of their aliance, German reaction to the deportations of Armenians was muted. The participation of the Ottoman Empire as an ally against the Entente powers was crucial to German grand strategy in the war, and good relations were needed. Following Russian breakthrough in the Caucasus and signs that Greece would side with the Allied powers after all, the CUP was finally able to resume operations against the Greeks of the empire, and Talât ordered the deportation of the Pontus Greeks of the Black Sea coast. Acts of plunder by the Special Organisation and regional authorities occurred in the region around Trabzon, with Topal Osman being an especially infamous figure.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: On 24 May 1915, after learning of the "Great Crime", the British, French and Russian governments issued a joint statement accusing the Ottoman government of "crimes against humanity", the first time in history that this term had been used. The British, French and Russians further promised that once the war was won they would put the Ottoman leaders responsible for the Armenian genocide on trial for crimes against humanity. However with the Anglo-Australian-New Zealand-Indian-French forces stalemated in Gallipoli and another Anglo-Indian expedition slowly advancing on Baghdad, the CUP's leaders were not threatened by the Allied threat to bring them to trial. On 22–23 November 1915, General Sir Charles Townshend was defeated in the Battle of Ctesiphon by Nureddin Pasha and Goltz Pasha, thus ending the British advance on Baghdad. On 3 December 1915, what was left of Townshend's force was besieged in Kut al-Amara (his forces surrendered to Halil Pasha five months later). In January 1916, Gallipoli ended in an Ottoman victory with the withdrawal of the Allied forces; this victory did much to boost the prestige of the CUP regime. After Gallipoli, Enver Pasha proudly announced in a speech that the empire had been saved while the mighty British empire had just been humiliated in an unprecedented defeat.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: During World War I, while the alliance between the Ottoman Empire and Germany was crucial to the goals of both empires, it stood constantly on tense ground. Both the Unionists and the Wilhelminian elites of Germany shared chauvinistic attitudes against Anglo-Saxon values of democracy and pluralism, as well as more general Anglophobic and Russophobic sentiments. However, the enactment of the "Türk Yurdu" project through the deportation and extermination of Christian minorities deeply disturbed politicians back in Berlin (though not so much the German military elites).


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: On 4 February 1917, Said Halim Pasha was finally outmaneuvered from his premiership, and Talât was appointed Grand Vizier, bringing the radical faction of the CUP directly to power, though Said Halim was always a puppet of the Central Committee. When it came to policy, the Union and Progress regime introduced many reforms which peaked in Talât Pasha's administration. Reforms in women's rights and matrimony law, secularization, and education were undertaken, that set the groundwork for the more extensive reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's regime. When it came to the military, though the withdrawal of Russia from the war and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, negotiated and signed by Talât Pasha, was not only a massive success for the CUP but also for the Ottoman-German alliance, it simply delayed conflict. The Ottoman Empire regained the Caucasian provinces (Batumi, Kars, Ardahan) lost in the war against Russia forty years ago, but nothing was guaranteed for the CUP's Turanist ambitions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Committee decided to take matters into their own hands. Enver Pasha established the Army of Islam to conquer Baku and its oil fields and potentially fulfill Pan-Turkist dreams in Central Asia. German officers were deliberately excluded from the army group, as the Ottomans were suspicious (correctly) of similar German intentions to occupy Baku. This tension reached a boiling point in the spring of 1918, in an incident where Ottoman and German forces clashed in the area. The Ottomans won the race to Baku when the Army of Islam arrived in September, but by then the Central Powers were losing on all fronts. Both countries capitulated to the Allied powers before relations could deteriorate any further.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: As the military position of the Central Powers disintegrated, on 13 October 1918 Talât Pasha's government resigned. On October 30 Marshal Ahmet İzzet Pasha, as the new Grand Vizier, negotiated the Armistice of Mudros. The position of the CUP was now untenable, and its top leaders fled to Sevastopol and scattered from there. During the party's last congress held on 1–5 November 1918, the remaining party members decided to abolish the party, which was severely criticized by the public because of the Empire's defeat. However just a week later the Renewal Party was created, with Unionist assets and infrastructure being transferred over to the new party. It was in turn abolished by the Ottoman government in May 1919.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: After the war the Allied powers assisted Ottoman officials in purging of the Unionists from the government and army, while the Allies continued advancing into Ottoman territory and occupying land, breaking armistice terms. British forces occupied Constantinople and various points throughout the Empire, and through their High Commissioner Somerset Calthorpe, demanded that those members of the CUP leadership who had not fled be put on trial, a policy also demanded by Part VII of the Treaty of Sèvres formally ending hostilities between the Allies and the Empire. The British carried off 60 high ranking Unionists thought to be responsible for atrocities to Malta, (see Malta exiles), where trials were planned. The new government in the Ottoman Empire, led by a rehabilitated Freedom and Accord Party under Damat Ferid Pasha's premiership and Mehmed VI Vahidettin as Sultan, obligingly arrested over 100 Unionist party and military officials by April 1919 and began a series of trials. The effectiveness of these trials was initially promising, with one district governor, Mehmed Kemal, being hanged on April 10. Two additional Unionists were convicted of crimes against humanity and were hanged, but while a few others were convicted, none completed their prison terms.Much of the Unionist leadership that fled was assassinated between 1920 and 1922 in Operation Nemesis. The ARF sent out assassins to hunt down and kill the Unionists responsible for the Armenian genocide. Minister of the Interior and later Grand Vizier Talât Pasha was gunned down in Berlin by a Dashnak on 15 March 1921. Said Halim Pasha, Talât's predecessor who signed the deportation orders in 1915 was killed in Rome by a Dashnak on 5 December 1921. The commander of the Special Organisation Bahattin Şakir was killed in Berlin on 17 April 1922 by a Dashnak gunman. Another member of the ruling triumvirate, Cemal Pasha was killed on 21 July 1922 in Tbilisi by Dashnaks. The final member of the Three Pashas, Enver Pasha was killed in Central Asia while leading the Basmachi Revolt against the Bolsheviks under the command of ethnic Armenian.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Though most Unionists chose to rally around Mustafa Kemal and his Turkish national movement against the pro-Allies Freedom and Accord government in Constantinople, some Unionists were dissatisfied and briefly revived the CUP in January 1922. Unionist journalist Hüseyin Cahit declared Union and Progress would not contest the 1923 general election for the Ankara based parliament against Atatürk's People's Party. However, dissatisfied with the secularist policies the Republicans were pushing through, such as the abolition of the Caliphate, Kara Kemal's CUP supported the creation of the Progressive Republican Party, which splintered from the People's Party (which renamed itself to the Republican People's Party). The Progressive Republican Party and the remaining nonconforming Unionists were purged for good following the İzmir Affair, an alleged assassination attempt against Mustafa Kemal. Dr. Nazım, Mehmed Cavid, and met their ends in the subsiquent Independence Tribunals with Kara Kemal committing suicide before his execution. With opposition quashed, Atatürk consolidated his power and continued ruling Turkey until his death in 1938.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Most leaders of the Turkish National Movement and to that extent, individuals associated with Atatürk's Republican People's Party (CHP) (which continued one-party-rule) were former Unionists. Presidents of the Republic of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, İsmet İnönü, and Celal Bayar, were members of Union and Progress. CUP Central Committee members Ziya Gökalp, Halil Menteşe, Midhat Şükrü Bleda, and Rahmi Arslan managed to integrate themselves within the new post-Ottoman regime. Other important Republican Turkish figures formerly associated with the CUP included Rauf Orbay, Fethi Okyar, Kâzım Karabekir, Adnan Adıvar, Şükrü Kaya, Çerkez Ethem, Bekir Sami, Yusuf Kemal, Celaleddin Arif, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Recep Peker, Şemsettin Günaltay, Hüseyin Avni, Mehmet Emin Yurdakul, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Celal Nuri İleri, Ali Münif Yeğenağa, Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu, Falih Rıfkı Atay, and others. When Bülent Ecevit became leader of CHP in 1972, he was first general secretary of the party not previously affiliated with the CUP (and born in the Republic of Turkey). His leadership transformed the party into a social democratic force in Turkish politics, which the party stays faithful to, to this day.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Most historians from Turkey write of the period Union and Progress was in power using the lens of Kemalist historiography, which asserts that the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey are two distinct countries, and that the Committee of Union and Progress and the Republican People's Party feature no relation to each other. However due to the commonalities of various personnel and governing ideologies, opponents of Kemalist Historiography assert that a continuity does exist between the Unionists which took power in the 1913 coup d'état and the Republicans which lost power in Turkey's first multi-party election in 1950; therefore Turkey, as both a constitutional monarchy and as a republic, was in a state of continuous one-party dictatorship between those years.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: In addition to Atatürk's Republican People's Party, Union and Progress also has at times been identified with the two opposition parties that Atatürk attempted to introduce into Turkish politics against his own party in order to help jump-start multiparty democracy in Turkey, namely the Progressive Republican Party and the Liberal Republican Party. While neither of these parties was primarily made up of persons indicted for genocidal activities, they were eventually taken over (or at least exploited) by persons who wished to restore the Ottoman caliphate. Consequently, both parties were required to be outlawed, although Kazim Karabekir, founder of the PRP, was eventually rehabilitated after the death of Atatürk by İnönü and even served as speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: It was Karabekir who crystallised the modern Turkish position on the Armenian genocide, telling Soviet peace commissioners that the return of any Armenians to territory controlled by Turks was out of the question, as the Armenians had perished in a rebellion of their own making. Historian Taner Akçam has identified four definitions of Turkey which have been handed down by the first Republican generation to modern Turks, of which the second is "Turkey is a society without ethnic minorities or cultures." While the postwar reconstruction of eastern Europe was generally dominated by Wilsonian ideas of national self-determination, Turkey probably came closer than most of the new countries to ethnic homogeneity due to the subsequent population exchanges with neighbouring countries (e.g. population exchange between Greece and Turkey).


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Atatürk was particularly eager that Islamism be marginalised, leading to the tradition of secularism in Turkey. This idea was culminated by the CUP in its more liberal heyday, as it was one of the first mass movements in Turkish history that abandoned political Islam.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: The Young Turk Revolution and CUP's work had a great impact on Muslims in other countries. The Persian community in Istanbul founded the Iranian Union and Progress Party. Indian Muslims imitated the CUP oath administered to recruits of the organisation.


title: Committee of Union and Progress

text: Considered the world's first one-party state, the CUP regime set an example for future one party regimes, especially in interwar Europe.


title: Detective

text: A detective is an investigator, usually a member of a law enforcement agency. They often collect information to solve crimes by talking to witnesses and informants, collecting physical evidence, or searching records in databases. This leads them to arrest criminals and enable them to be convicted in court. A detective may work for the police or privately.


title: Detective

text: Informally, and primarily in fiction, a detective is a licensed or unlicensed person who solves crimes, including historical crimes, by examining and evaluating clues and personal records in order to uncover the identity and/or whereabouts of criminals.


title: Detective

text: In some police departments, a detective position is achieved by passing a written test after a person completes the requirements for being a police officer. In many other police systems, detectives are college graduates who join directly from civilian life without first serving as uniformed officers. Some argue that detectives do a completely different job and therefore require completely different training, qualifications, qualities and abilities than uniformed officers. The opposing argument is that without previous service as a uniformed patrol officer, a detective cannot have a great enough command of standard police procedures and problems and will find it difficult to work with uniformed colleagues.


title: Detective

text: Some are not public officials, and may be known as a private investigator, colloquially referred to, especially in fiction, as a "PI" or "private eye", "private dick" or "shamus".


title: Detective

text: The detective branch in most large police agencies is organized into several squads and departments, each of which specializes in investigation into a particular type of crime or a particular type of undercover operation, which may include: homicide, robbery, spot burglary, auto theft, organized crimes, missing persons, juvenile crime, fraud, narcotics, vice, criminal intelligence, aggravated assault/battery, sexual assault, computer crime, domestic violence, surveillance, and arson, among others.


title: Detective

text: In police departments of the United States, a regular detective typically holds the rank of "Detective". The rank structure of the officers who supervise them (who may or may not be detectives themselves) varies considerably by department. In Commonwealth police forces, detectives have equivalent ranks to uniformed officers but with the word "Detective" prepended to it (e.g. "Detective Constable").


title: Detective

text: In some countries, courts and judicial processes have yet to recognize the practice of private detectives. In Portugal, presented proof loses significance when private detectives collect it. Even under this circumstance, the practice is in demand and ruled by a code of conduct.


title: Detective

text: A citizen detective, also known as an amateur detective, is an individual who devotes his or her time and expertise to aid in the solving of crime, without compensation or expectation of reward. Citizen detectives are private citizens that have no real professional relationship with law enforcement and lack any rational-legal authority whatsoever. The reasons why a private citizen might try to solve a crime vary from trying to ensure justice for a friend or relative, a strong dislike for crime and support for law and order, or just recreational enjoyment.


title: Detective

text: As with other kinds of detectives, citizen detectives try to solve crimes in multiple ways such as searching a crime scene, interviewing and/or interrogating suspects and witnesses, doing surveillance on persons of interest, collecting evidence, acting as sources for local news, giving anonymous tips to the police and at times even making citizens’ arrests while a crime is being committed. Citizen detectives can also help law enforcement by becoming witnesses for prosecutors, participating in local neighborhood watch groups, acting as citizen observers for law enforcement, or even aiding the police in searching for and arresting suspects as a posse. However, there have been cases of citizen detectives unintentionally compromising investigations if they lack real crime solving skills or even committing acts against suspected criminals that could be deemed vigilantism in nature.


title: Detective

text: Before the 19th century, there were few municipal police departments, though the first had been created in Paris in 1667. As police activities moved from appointees helped by volunteers to professionals, the idea of dedicated detectives did not immediately arise. The first private detective agency was founded in Paris in 1833 by Eugène François Vidocq, who had also headed a police agency in addition to being a criminal himself. Police detective activities were pioneered in England by the Bow Street Runners and later the Metropolitan Police Service in Greater London. The first police detective unit in the United States was formed in 1846 in Boston.


title: Detective

text: Detectives have a wide variety of techniques available in conducting investigations. However, the majority of cases are solved by the interrogation of suspects and the interviewing of witnesses, which takes time. Besides interrogations, detectives may rely on a network of informants they have cultivated over the years. Informants often have connections with persons a detective would not be able to approach formally. Evidence collection and preservation can also help in identifying a potential suspect(s).


title: Detective

text: The investigation of criminal activity is conducted by the police. Criminal activity can relate to road use such as speeding, drunk driving, or to matters such as theft, drug distribution, assault, fraud, etc. When the police have concluded their investigation, a decision on whether to charge somebody with a criminal offense will often be made by prosecuting counsel having considered the evidence produced by the police.


title: Detective

text: In criminal investigations, once a detective has suspects in mind, the next step is to produce evidence that will stand up in a court of law. The best way is to obtain a confession from the suspect; usually, this is done by developing rapport and at times by seeking information in exchange for potential perks available through the attorney's office, such as entering for a lesser sentence in exchange for usable information. In some countries, detectives may lie, mislead and psychologically pressure a suspect into an admission or confession as long as they do this within procedural boundaries and without the threat of violence or promises outside their control. This is not permitted in England and Wales, where the interview of suspects and witnesses is governed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.


title: Detective

text: Physical forensic evidence in an investigation may provide leads to closing a case. Forensic science (often shortened to forensics) is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to the legal system. This may be in relation to a crime or to a civil action. Many major police stations in a city, county, or state, maintain their own forensic laboratories while others contract out the services.


title: Detective

text: Detectives may use public and private records to provide background information on a subject. Police detectives can search through files of fingerprint records. Police maintain records of people who have committed felonies and some misdemeanors. Detectives may search through records of criminal arrests and convictions, photographs or "mug shots", of persons arrested, ands, hotel registration information, credit reports, answering machine messages, phone conversations, surveillance camera footage, and technology used for communication.


title: Detective

text: Before 2017, prospective British police detectives must have completed at least two years as a uniformed officer before applying to join the Criminal Investigation Department. Since 2017, applicants from outside the police force may join directly as trainee detectives. UK Police must also pass the National Investigators' Examination in order to progress to subsequent stages of the Initial Crime Investigators Development Programme in order to qualify as a detective.


title: Detective

text: Before becoming a police detective, one must attend a law enforcement academy, providing the officer with a foundation of education with 16 to 24 college units. After graduation from the law enforcement academy, the officer undergoes job training with a field training officer for a period specified by the law enforcement agency and continues to work while on a probationary period, ranging from one to two years.


title: Detective

text: During the probationary period, the officer is assigned to look for evidence. During this time, the officer is supervised and mentored by a sergeant with years of experience. Some officers further their college education by attending a two- or four-year college or university, attaining a degree in criminal justice or administration of criminal justice. Colleges have options for a concentration or certificate in a specialized field of criminal investigation.


title: Detective

text: Through years of on-the-job training or college education, officers may participate in a competitive examination, testing their knowledge, skills and abilities regarding criminal investigation, criminal procedure, interview and interrogation, search and seizure, collection and preservation of evidence, investigative report writing, criminal law, court procedure and providing testimony in court. Competitive examinations are conducted by selected senior law enforcement officials. Following testing, a list of results is provided by the department. At the department's discretion, some or all of the officers on the list are promoted to the rank of detective. Some departments have classes of detectives which increase the detective's rank after successful experience.


title: Detective

text: Private investigators are licensed by the state in which they work (some states do not require licensing, but most do). In addition to the state examination, applicants testing for a private investigation license must also meet stringent requirements, which include college education, a range of two to four years of full-time investigation experience and the successful adjudication of a criminal and civil background check conducted by state investigators. Private investigators are licensed to conduct civil and criminal investigations in the state in which they are licensed, and are protected by statutes of that state. In states requiring licensure, statutes make it unlawful for any person to conduct a criminal investigation without a license, unless exempted by the statute (i.e., law enforcement officers or agents, attorneys, paralegals, claims adjusters).


title: Detective fiction

text: Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.


title: Detective fiction

text: Some scholars, such as R. H. Pfeiffer, have suggested that certain ancient and religious texts bear similarities to what would later be called detective fiction. In the Old Testament story of (the Protestant Bible locates this story within the apocrypha), the account told by two witnesses broke down when Daniel cross-examines them. In response, author Julian Symons has argued that "those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles" and that these puzzles are not detective stories. In the play "Oedipus Rex" by Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, Oedipus investigates the unsolved murder of King Laius and discovers the truth after questioning various witnesses that he himself is the culprit. Although "Oedipus's enquiry is based on supernatural, pre-rational methods that are evident in most narratives of crime until the development of Enlightenment thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries", this narrative has "all of the central characteristics and formal elements of the detective story, including a mystery surrounding a murder, a closed circle of suspects, and the gradual uncovering of a hidden past."


title: Detective fiction

text: The "One Thousand and One Nights" contains several of the earliest detective stories, anticipating modern detective fiction. The oldest known example of a detective story was "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the "One Thousand and One Nights" ("Arabian Nights"). In this story, a fisherman discovers a heavy, locked chest along the Tigris river, which he then sells to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid. When Harun breaks open the chest, he discovers the body of a young woman who has been cut into pieces. Harun then orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and to find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails in his assignment. Suspense is generated through multiple plot twists that occur as the story progressed. With these characteristics this may be considered an archetype for detective fiction. It anticipates the use of reverse chronology in modern detective fiction, where the story begins with a crime before presenting a gradual reconstruction of the past.


title: Detective fiction

text: The main difference between Ja'far ("The Three Apples") and later fictional detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, is that Ja'far has no actual desire to solve the case. The whodunit mystery is solved when the murderer himself confessed his crime. This in turn leads to another assignment in which Ja'far has to find the culprit who instigated the murder within three days or else be executed. Ja'far again fails to find the culprit before the deadline, but owing to chance, he discovers a key item. In the end, he manages to solve the case through reasoning in order to prevent his own execution.


title: Detective fiction

text: On the other hand, two other "Arabian Nights" stories, "The Merchant and the Thief" and "Ali Khwaja", contain two of the earliest fictional detectives, who uncover clues and present evidence to catch or convict a criminal known to the audience, with the story unfolding in normal chronology and the criminal already known to the audience. The latter involves a climax where the titular detective protagonist Ali Khwaja presents evidence from expert witnesses in a court.


title: Detective fiction

text: Gong'an fiction (, literally："case records of a public law court") is the earliest known genre of Chinese detective fiction.


title: Detective fiction

text: Some well-known stories include the Yuan dynasty story "Circle of Chalk" (Chinese: 灰闌記), the Ming dynasty story collection "Bao Gong An" (Chinese: 包公案) and the 18th century "Di Gong An" (Chinese: 狄公案) story collection. The latter was translated into English as "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee" by Dutch sinologist Robert Van Gulik, who then used the style and characters to write the original Judge Dee series.


title: Detective fiction

text: The hero/detective of these novels was typically a traditional judge or similar official based on historical personages such as Judge Bao (Bao Qingtian) or Judge Dee (Di Renjie). Although the historical characters may have lived in an earlier period (such as the Song or Tang dynasty) most stories are written in the later Ming or Qing dynasty period.


title: Detective fiction

text: Van Gulik chose "Di Gong An" to translate because in his view it was closer to the Western literary style and more likely to appeal to non-Chinese readers.


title: Detective fiction

text: A number of Gong An works may have been lost or destroyed during the Literary Inquisitions and the wars in ancient China. In the traditional Chinese culture, this genre was low-prestige, and therefore was less worthy of preservation than works such as philosophy or poetry. Only little or incomplete case volumes can be found; for example, the only copy of Di Gong An was found at a second-hand book store in Tokyo, Japan.


title: Detective fiction

text: One of the earliest examples of detective fiction in Western Literature is Voltaire's "Zadig" (1748), which features a main character who performs feats of analysis. "Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams" (1794) by William Godwin portrays the law as protecting the murderer and destroying the innocent. Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous "Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street officer" was published in London in 1827; the Danish crime story "The Rector of Veilbye" by Steen Steensen Blicher was written in 1829; and the Norwegian crime novel "Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen" ("The Murder of Engine Maker Roolfsen") by Maurits Hansen was published in December 1839.


title: Detective fiction

text: "Das Fräulein von Scuderi" is an 1819 short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which Mlle de Scudery establishes the innocence of the police's favorite suspect in the murder of a jeweller. This story is sometimes cited as the first detective story and as a direct influence on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). Also suggested as a possible influence on Poe is ‘The Secret Cell’, a short story published in September 1837 by William Evans Burton. It has been suggested that this story may have been known to Poe, who in 1839 worked for Burton. The story was about a London policeman who solves the mystery of a kidnapped girl. Burton's fictional detective relied on practical methods such as dogged legwork, knowledge of the underworld and undercover surveillance, rather than brilliance of imagination or intellect.


title: Detective fiction

text: Detective fiction in the English-speaking world is considered to have begun in 1841 with the publication of Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", featuring "the first fictional detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin". When the character first appeared, the word "detective" had not yet been used in English; however, the character's name, "Dupin", originated from the English word dupe or deception. Poe devised a "plot formula that's been successful ever since, give or take a few shifting variables." Poe followed with further Auguste Dupin tales: "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" in 1842 and "The Purloined Letter" in 1844.


title: Detective fiction

text: Poe referred to his stories as "tales of ratiocination". In stories such as these, the primary concern of the plot is ascertaining truth, and the usual means of obtaining the truth is a complex and mysterious process combining intuitive logic, astute observation, and perspicacious inference. "Early detective stories tended to follow an investigating protagonist from the first scene to the last, making the unravelling a practical rather than emotional matter." "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" is particularly interesting because it is a barely fictionalized account based on Poe's theory of what happened to the real-life Mary Cecilia Rogers.


title: Detective fiction

text: William Russell (1806–1876) was among the first English authors to write fictitious 'police memoirs', contributing an irregular series of stories (under the pseudonym 'Waters') to "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal" between 1849 and 1852. Unauthorised collections of his stories were published in New York City in 1852 and 1853, entitled "The Recollections of a Policeman". Twelve stories were then collated into a volume entitled "Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer", published in London in 1856.


title: Detective fiction

text: Literary critic Catherine Ross Nickerson credits Louisa May Alcott with creating the second-oldest work of modern detective fiction, after only Poe's Dupin stories themselves, with the 1865 thriller "V.V., or Plots and Counterplots." A short story published anonymously by Alcott, the story concerns a Scottish aristocrat who tries to prove that a mysterious woman has killed his fiancée and cousin. The detective on the case, Antoine Dupres, is a parody of Auguste Dupin who is less concerned with solving the crime as he is in setting up a way to reveal the solution with a dramatic flourish. Ross Nickerson notes that many of the American writers who experimented with Poe's established rules of the genre were women, inventing a subgenre of domestic detective fiction that flourished in its own right for several generations. These included Metta Fuller Victor's two detective novels "The Dead Letter" (1867) and "The Figure Eight" (1869). "The Dead Letter" is noteworthy as the first full-length work of American crime fiction.


title: Detective fiction

text: Émile Gaboriau was a pioneer of the detective fiction genre in France. In "Monsieur Lecoq" (1868), the title character is adept at disguise, a key characteristic of detectives. Gaboriau's writing is also considered to contain the first example of a detective minutely examining a crime scene for clues.


title: Detective fiction

text: Another early example of a whodunit is a subplot in the novel "Bleak House" (1853) by Charles Dickens. The conniving lawyer Tulkinghorn is killed in his office late one night, and the crime is investigated by Inspector Bucket of the Metropolitan police force. Numerous characters appeared on the staircase leading to Tulkinghorn's office that night, some of them in disguise, and Inspector Bucket must penetrate these mysteries to identify the murderer. Dickens also left a novel unfinished at his death, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood".


title: Detective fiction

text: Dickens's protégé, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)—sometimes called the "grandfather of English detective fiction"—is credited with the first great mystery novel, "The Woman in White". T. S. Eliot called Collins's novel "The Moonstone" (1868) "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe", and Dorothy L. Sayers called it "probably the very finest detective story ever written". "The Moonstone" contains a number of ideas that have established in the genre several classic features of the 20th century detective story:


title: Detective fiction

text: Although "The Moonstone" is usually seen as the first detective novel, there are other contenders for the honor. A number of critics suggest that the lesser known "Notting Hill Mystery" (1862–63), written by the pseudonymous "Charles Felix" (later identified as Charles Warren Adams), preceded it by a number of years and first used techniques that would come to define the genre.


title: Detective fiction

text: Literary critics Chris Willis and Kate Watson consider Mary Elizabeth Braddon's first book, the even earlier "The Trail of the Serpent" (1861), the first British detective novel. The novel "features an unusual and innovative detective figure, Mr. Peters, who is lower class and mute, and who is initially dismissed both by the text and its characters." Braddon's later and better-remembered work, "Aurora Floyd" (printed in 1863 novel form, but serialized in 1862–63), also features a compelling detective in the person of Detective Grimstone of Scotland Yard.


title: Detective fiction

text: Tom Taylor's melodrama "The Ticket-of-Leave Man", an adaptation of "Léonard" by Édouard Brisbarre and Eugène Nus, appeared in 1863, introducing Hawkshaw the Detective. In short, it is difficult to establish who was the first to write the English-language detective novel, as various authors were exploring the theme simultaneously.


title: Detective fiction

text: Anna Katharine Green, in her 1878 debut "The Leavenworth Case" and other works, popularized the genre among middle-class readers and helped to shape the genre into its classic form as well as developed the concept of the series detective.


title: Detective fiction

text: In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, arguably the most famous of all fictional detectives. Although Sherlock Holmes is not the original fictional detective (he was influenced by Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq), his name has become a byword for the part. Conan Doyle stated that the character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing large conclusions from the smallest observations. A brilliant London-based "consulting detective" residing at 221B Baker Street, Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess and is renowned for his skillful use of astute observation, deductive reasoning, and forensic skills to solve difficult cases. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, and all but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson.


title: Detective fiction

text: The period between World War I and World War II (the 1920s and 1930s) is generally referred to as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. During this period, a number of very popular writers emerged, including mostly British but also a notable subset of American and New Zealand writers. Female writers constituted a major portion of notable Golden Age writers. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh were particularly famous female writers of this time. Apart from Ngaio Marsh (a New Zealander), they were all British.


title: Detective fiction

text: Various conventions of the detective genre were standardized during the Golden Age, and in 1929, some of them were codified by the English Catholic priest and author of detective stories Ronald Knox in his 'Decalogue' of rules for detective fiction. One of his rules was to avoid supernatural elements so that the focus remained on the mystery itself. Knox has contended that a detective story "must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end." Another common convention in Golden Age detective stories involved an outsider–sometimes a salaried investigator or a police officer, but often a gifted amateur—investigating a murder committed in a closed environment by one of a limited number of suspects.


title: Detective fiction

text: The most widespread subgenre of the detective novel became the whodunit (or whodunnit, short for "who done it?"). In this subgenre, great ingenuity may be exercised in narrating the crime, usually a homicide, and the subsequent investigation. This objective was to conceal the identity of the criminal from the reader until the end of the book, when the method and culprit are both revealed. According to scholars Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman, "The golden age of detective fiction began with high-class amateur detectives sniffing out murderers lurking in rose gardens, down country lanes, and in picturesque villages. Many conventions of the detective-fiction genre evolved in this era, as numerous writers—from populist entertainers to respected poets—tried their hands at mystery stories."


title: Detective fiction

text: John Dickson Carr—who also wrote as Carter Dickson—used the “puzzle” approach in his writing which was characterized by including a complex puzzle for the reader to try to unravel. He created ingenious and seemingly impossible plots and is regarded as the master of the "locked room mystery". Two of Carr's most famous works are "The Case of Constant Suicides" (1941) and "The Hollow Man" (1935). Another author, Cecil Street—who also wrote as John Rhode—wrote of a detective, Dr. Priestley, who specialised in elaborate technical devices. In the United States, the whodunit subgenre was adopted and extended by Rex Stout and Ellery Queen, along with others. The emphasis on formal rules during the Golden Age produced great works, albeit with highly standardized form. The most successful novels of this time included “an original and exciting plot; distinction in the writing, a vivid sense of place, a memorable and compelling hero and the ability to draw the reader into their comforting and highly individual world.”


title: Detective fiction

text: A whodunit or whodunnit (a colloquial elision of "Who [has] done it?" or "Who did it?") is a complex, plot-driven variety of the detective story in which the audience is given the opportunity to engage in the same process of deduction as the protagonist throughout the investigation of a crime. The reader or viewer is provided with the clues from which the identity of the perpetrator may be deduced before the story provides the revelation itself at its climax. The "whodunit" flourished during the so-called "Golden Age" of detective fiction, between 1920 and 1950, when it was the predominant mode of crime writing.


title: Detective fiction

text: Agatha Christie is not only the most famous Golden Age writer, but also considered one of the most famous authors of all genres of all time. At the time of her death in 1976, “she was the best-selling novelist in history.”


title: Detective fiction

text: Many of the most popular books of the Golden Age were written by Agatha Christie. She produced long series of books featuring detective characters like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, amongst others. Her use of basing her stories on complex puzzles, “combined with her stereotyped characters and picturesque middle-class settings”, is credited for her success. Christie's works include "Murder on the Orient Express" (1934), "Death on the Nile" (1937), "Three Blind Mice" (1950) and "And Then There Were None" (1939).


title: Detective fiction

text: Through China's Golden Age of crime fiction (1900–1949), translations of Western classics, and native Chinese detective fictions circulated within the country.


title: Detective fiction

text: Cheng Xiaoqing had first encountered Conan Doyle's highly popular stories as an adolescent. In the ensuing years, he played a major role in rendering them first into classical and later into vernacular Chinese. Cheng Xiaoqing's translated works from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced China to a new type of narrative style. Western detective fiction that was translated often emphasized “individuality, equality, and the importance of knowledge”, appealing to China that it was the time for opening their eyes to the rest of the world.


title: Detective fiction

text: This style began China's interest in popular crime fiction, and is what drove Cheng Xiaoqing to write his own crime fiction novel, "Sherlock in Shanghai". In the late 1910s, Cheng began writing detective fiction very much in Conan Doyle's style, with Bao as the Watson-like narrator; a rare instance of such a direct appropriation from foreign fiction. Famed as the “Oriental Sherlock Holmes”, the duo Huo Sang and Bao Lang become counterparts to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson characters.