FETÖ's new tune taught from the US: the "democracy project"

It is inevitable and normal for those who have problems in their own countries concerning human rights, freedom of expression or democratic organization to look for and find other platforms in order to express themselves and make their voices heard. Highly democratic countries also display a distinct quality through the asylum they grant to those fleeing human rights violations and oppression in their countries, and even through the opportunities for freedom of expression they give to dissidents at a more advanced level. This does not always mean interference in other countries' internal affairs. If there is a persecution that cannot be ignored, that pains the conscience and for which there is no other remedy, it is not supporting it but remaining silent that becomes something to be blamed.

Turkey has now increasingly become a serious platform for persecutions of this kind taking place in many parts of the Islamic world. With nearly 5 million refugees it hosts from many points of the world, it stands out as the country that has opened its doors to the most asylum seekers in the world. How these asylum seekers conduct their relations with their own countries, and the opposition they find themselves obliged to express and display on behalf of the situation in their countries, can in itself turn into an international relations problem. But highly democratic countries always have a rightful and legitimate ground to take refuge in: if human rights and freedoms are restricted somewhere, it will certainly find a platform of expression.

You have probably seen it: some time ago in the US, the "Turkish Democracy Project Association" was founded, with the participation of names such as John Bolton, Trump's former National Security Advisor, and Jeb Bush, brother of former US president George W. Bush’n and former governor of the state of Florida. In the association, whose founders also include Italy's former Foreign Minister Sant’Agata, these names are of course entirely showpiece names. They have no business of their own; are they really going to chase the problems concerning the development of democracy in Turkey? The real names who put these names in the shop window have, after all, put themselves among the founders. One is Süleyman Özeren, known for his closeness to Fethullah Gülen and his organization, and the other is Aykan Erdemir, a former CHP Member of Parliament against whom there is an arrest warrant within the scope of the investigation conducted by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office into the Fetullahist Terror Organization.

Thus the association's grounds for founding in the US rest on exploiting, with a FETÖ-style appetite, while also rendering meaningless the ground we described above.

Or is Turkey a country for which a project activity can be run from outside for its democratization? Have the domestic political avenues for democracy in Turkey been exhausted, that help is sought from an association to be founded in the US? While Turkey is a country in which every kind of opposition can organize and become a party and can even stand as a candidate for power, the only meaning of reciting a ghazal from the US, or having one recited, is a mandate-ism that will come by way of a coup but whose name will be shamelessly read as "democracy."

The way the association was founded and the formation of its list of founding board is an example of typical FETÖ-style NGO activity. In the past, for some associations and foundations they set up in Turkey, they put on the lists names that had no connection with the organization at all, solely in order to exploit their fame, legitimacy and respectability to the utmost. Because of this they subsequently ruined many names. We know that because they were never transparent in their work and were constantly pulling tricky deals, they are in fact not very comfortable in the lobbying activities they enter in the US. And we know that many of their schools and associations were repeatedly the subject of FBI investigations because of this and were subjected to heavy penalties because of it.

Let us see what fate awaits Bolton, Bush and Sant’Agata. For what political bribes, I wonder, did they enter a subject that has nothing to do with their own agendas? Is Turkey the place in the world, let alone the Islamic world, where democracy is most backward? There are a series of countries governed by coups supported by the US itself, where tons of human rights violations are committed every day. While the blindness and deafness displayed toward them grins as an example of disgusting hypocrisy, how did the concern for Turkey, whose democracy, like it or not, is at the best level in the Islamic world, fall into your hearts?

At present, in some countries of the Islamic world with whose regimes the US has not a drop of water between them, people are held in masses in dungeons under the most severe conditions of torture, without question, without trial, without defense. Politicians are executed en masse solely because of their political views. In the meantime, in the name of democratic sensibility, one would want to hear first of all a word about this from someone doing politics in the US.

The policy the US has displayed so far regarding the development of democracy in the Middle East has had no function other than leading the Middle East to deeper chaos, wars, coups, occupations, massacres and the further consolidation of autocratic regimes. There is no one who could point to a positive role of the US in this. Indeed, "bringing democracy"

has in fact turned into a slogan that cleared the way for the US's occupations in the region. That is why, in the gathering of people whose names and organizational structures were identified with a coup in the very recent past under a heading such as the "democracy project" in Turkey, there is not even an ironic side left. It has neither a side to laugh at nor a feature to be taken seriously.

Even so, if this structure's cunning activities have truly left any trace of democratic sensibility, let it be our duty to remind the US names who jumped like suckers into the list on its behalf: those who put the democracy project in Turkey before you are names famous for attempting a coup by means of a junta they organized in treacherous and insidious ways against the democratic process that is advancing, for better or worse, in Turkey, and against the government elected through democratic processes. That is, they are the most savage murderers of democracy itself, of the will of the people, of the understanding of transparent government. All of the campaigns they have run lately over the detainees, freedom of expression and the examples relating to these that they have thoroughly dramatized concern the most rightful legal response that a democratic state could give to the coup they attempted. There are of course mistakes in these legal responses. To correct these mistakes, and to hold to account if it gives rise to a responsibility, Turkey's political and legal avenues are fully open.