THE TURKISH DEMOCRACY PROJECT, a political advocacy group launched this summer with the stated goal of promoting democracy in Turkey, has the surprising characteristic of having no Turkish members on its leadership board. In a press release announcing its creation, the organization said that it was \u201ccommitted to encouraging Turkey to adopt more democratic policies.\u201d The two Turkish people publicly involved with the project \u2014 former Turkish politician Aykan Erdemir and academic Suleyman Ozeren \u2014 were removed from its website\u2019s list of advisory council members not long after its launch.
Despite having no actual Turks publicly affiliated with the group, the Turkish Democracy Project boasts a roster heavy with hawkish former U.S. public officials and diplomats with close ties to Israel and the Gulf Arab states, including former Bush administration counterterrorism official Frances Townsend, former U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and former President Donald Trump\u2019s famously aggressive national security adviser John Bolton. \u201cIt\u2019s time to sound the alarm on Turkey,\u201d Bolton, best known for his advocacy of U.S. confrontation with Iran, said on Twitter at the time of the Turkey Democracy Project\u2019s launch.
Under its heavy-handed ruling AK Party, democracy in Turkey has faced serious setbacks in recent years, but what the Turkish Democracy Project specifically does to address that problem is unclear. The organization does, however, have links to a network of well-funded dark-money groups promoting U.S. foreign policy positions in the Middle East that dovetail with Saudi, Emirati, and Israeli security interests.
At the center of it all is Mark Wallace, a former George W. Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations. Wallace is presently the head not just of the Turkish Democracy Project, but also the anti-Iran organization United Against Nuclear Iran, or UANI; the counterterrorism advocacy group Counter Extremism Project, or CEP; and even an arts-based nonprofit focused on human rights in Iran called PaykanArtCar. Eight out of\u00a011 of the Turkish Democracy Project\u2019s senior leadership and advisory board members hold positions with UANI, CEP, or both.
UANI and CEP have had\u00a0questions\u00a0raised\u00a0about their aims and sources of funding,\u00a0including whether they receive financial support from foreign governments and political figures. The Turkish Democracy Project did not respond to a request for comment about its own funding and sources of support.
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THE TURKISH DEMOCRACY PROJECT, a political advocacy group launched this summer with the stated goal of promoting democracy in Turkey, has the surprising characteristic of having no Turkish members on its leadership board. In a press release announcing its creation, the organization said that it was \u201ccommitted to encouraging Turkey to adopt more democratic policies.\u201d …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[183,184],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asian-issues","category-international-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3758"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3766,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758\/revisions\/3766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}