The organization said it was no longer possible to work in Turkey after it became the target of “baseless claims” in the media and a renewed investigation by Turkish authorities into mass protests against Erdogan’s government five years ago.
It said the Turkish Interior Ministry was renewing attempts to prove that the Soros foundation was behind the 2013 Gezi Park protests, one of the biggest political challenges to Erdogan’s 15-year rule. The foundation denied any link to the protests.
Erdogan denounced Soros last week while speaking of the detention of 13 activists and academics accused of supporting attempts by jailed businessman and rights advocate Osman Kavala to revive the Gezi protests.
“The person (Kavala) who financed terrorists during the Gezi incidents is already in prison,” Erdogan told a meeting of local administrators on Wednesday.
“And who is behind him? The famous Hungarian Jew Soros. This is a man who assigns people to divide nations and shatter them. He has so much money and he spends it this way.”
One of the 13 people detained on Nov. 16 was Hakin Altinay, who helped establish the Open Society Foundation in Turkey. Others were staff members of Kavala’s Anadolu Kultur center, which campaigns for human rights and cultural diversity.
All but one of the detainees were later released, but not before the European Union and United States expressed concern about their cases.
Ankara’s Western allies have repeatedly criticized the arrest of tens of thousands of people since a failed military coup in Turkey in July 2016.
MONEY TRANSFERS
Kavala, in detention for more than a year, said on Monday in a statement posted on his website that he was still waiting for an indictment to be prepared so that he could prove that the claims he had helped to direct and finance the Gezi protests and wanted to overthrow the government were “unfounded”.
The pro-government Sabah newspaper, citing reports from financial crime investigators, said on Monday the Open Society Foundation had made financial transfers to Kavala’s organization to support the spread of the Gezi protests nationwide.
It said nearly 1.9 million lira had been transferred between August 2011 and April 2017.
At this point knowing Erdogan is a globalist and the alleged coup has been analyzed to be a false flag as the pretext for passing legislation to rule by decree, we should strongly suspect this narrative involving Soros is a head fake, more Kabuki theater. Not unlike Viktor Orbán who attended university on a Soros scholarship, his academic mentor was an expert in the dialectic, and he is on record stating China is the ideal model nation – China a totalitarian Technocracy.