Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
43 
opponents of the CUP, from whom much was heard between the suppression of the 
“counter-revolution” and the coup of January 1913
46
, was insignificant. While 
political divisions were to reemerge after defeat, the dominance and reach of the 
CUP were to become the foundations of resistance to Allied plans for Turkey
47
. 
As is very well known, the brutality of inter-ethnic conflict during the war plumbed 
previously unexampled depths. The Armenian massacres, which began in April 
1915, stood out by scale and system and from what became known of them at the 
time were quickly recognised as a fearful innovation
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. Less remarked was the 
violence wreaked in eastern Anatolia on Muslim civilians
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, which, even if it lacked 
the system and did not achieve the scale, was no less inexcusable. The sufferings of 
the Anatolian Greeks, which included deportations and the assignment of able 
bodied males to punishing work battalions
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, horrible as they were, could not 
compare. The prospect of multicommunal existence under Ottoman sovereignty was 
ruined irreparably while the alternative prospect of living under a Christian 
government was equally repellent to Muslims.
The western allies had approached the Ottoman Empire, in contrast to the German or 
the Austro-Hungarian, as a tract of land to be carved up between the victors in the 
manner of their practice in Africa
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. But an ethnic dimension came belatedly to be 
added to the existing territorial confusion of Allied war aims. The moral of the 
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Zürcher 2004, 99-103 
47
Zürcher 2010, 105 
48
Toynbee, viii-ix; Zürcher 2004, 114-117; McMeekin 235-242 
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McCarthy 107-108, 109-110 
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Ploumidis, 159-164 
51
McMeekin, 284-288; Zürcher 2004, 143-144 

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