conflated with the ‘civilising mission’

The programme of Turkification was indeed a novelty that can be attributed to the Young Turks. But the confluence of the centralisation policies with a colonialist attitude towards peripheral subjects was not.

The official ideology of Ottomanism, which emerged as the child of Tanzimat reforms (1839) and which was intermingled with an Islamic discourse during the reign of Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), became the ideological justification regarding the civilising mission of the Ottoman reformers

if there was one shift in the implementation of the centralisation policies between 1908 and 1913, it stemmed from this understanding of Ottomanism.

This demonstrates that assimilation was not the primary objective. Rather, the integration of the society into the imperial administrative and social system remained the primary purpose.

For instance, the non-Muslim communities were warned not to use Greek or Armenian in their official correspondence.

Second Balkan War - 1913 - 48k muslims came Anatolia

Although the actual content of this law did not directly target the Armenians, they were the first group to be expelled (Du ̈ ndar 2001: 64). This was perhaps one of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century because the Armenian deportation practically resulted in the massacre of thousands of people. Greeks were the other group to be relocated. The government did not issue any special instruction for their relocation. A number of them were transferred to the inner regions of Anatolia and some of them were driven out to Greece. According to the estimation of Stephen Ladas, in 1914, 115,000 Greeks were driven out of Eastern Thrace and sought refuge in Greece; 85,000 Greeks from the same region were deported to the interior of Anatolia; and 150,000 of them were ejected from the coastal region of Western Anatolia and fled to the shores of Greece (Ladas 1932: 16).

First of all, it is important to distinguish wartime measures from the deliberate policy of nation-building in Anatolia. The deported Greeks and Armenians had inhabited very sensitive regions. Eastern Anatolia where the Armenians lived was crucial in the face of the Russian expansion during the war. Likewise, the expelled Greeks resided mainly in the western coasts of Anatolia, which were ominously close to Greece’s sphere of influence. Seen from this aspect, the relocation of these two communities had strategic importance for Ottoman military goals. Therefore, it is not easy to distinguish whether their deportation was motivated by the nationalist objective of homogenising Anatolia or whether they were purely strategic military acts.

Different linguistic and ethnic groups were subject to different settlement policies.

The Young Turks also desired to homogenise Kurds, Arabs and other subjects of the empire on the basis of Turkishness. Nevertheless, only those who immigrated to or resided in the blurred boundaries of Anatolia were targeted by the Young Turks’ Turkifying device.

State is eager to get conscription by recommending tribe leaders to make them made a volunteer units, in return political and material gains will be supplied to those leaders.

Ottoman conscription served the re-Islamization of Ottoman identity rather than creating a secular Ottoman citizenry

Was there an ethnic dimension in Ottoman conscription in the sense of being based on a certain ethnicity and excluding others?

Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), a secret paramilitary intelligence organization founded by Enver Pasha soon before the war on the model of Balkan paramilitary groups (especially the Bulgarian IMRO).57 The Special Organization not only undertook a major role in carrying out propaganda activities to attain support from Muslim populations in India, Russia, Iran, and Egypt for the Ottoman holy war (cihad), but also engaged in guerrilla warfare on major fronts throughout the war. The Special Organization also carried out operations to intimidate the local non-Muslim Ottoman population in Anatolia, particularly the Armenians, on the pretext that the organization acted as a counterinsurgency force against disloyal elements of the Armenian population, some of whom, after evading the draft or deserting the army, formed their own armed bands and voluntarily joined the Russian army. But this mission of the Special Organization took the form of direct abuses of, attacks on, and massacres of civilian Armenians during their forced migration in 1915.