As DEİK, we say, “Business Diplomacy”. As the World Turkish Business Council (DTİK), operating with 6 Regional Committees and newly established Country Representatives Boards, our aim is to establish a coordination and network among Türkiye-friendly businesspeople and businesspeople of Turkic origin, who are economically developed and integrated into the system of the country they live in, such as Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, and so on. I am proud to state that the only Business Council I am the president of is DTİK, apart from my DEİK Presidency.

As DTİK, so many activities in the last two years. We hosted our Ambassadors in Beijing, Doha, Islamabad, Phnom Pen, Bangkok, Jakarta, Kiev, Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Luxembourg, Vatican, Oslo, Bucharest, and Budapest online by organizing the regular meetings of our 6 Regional Committees covering Eurasia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, Middle East-Gulf, Americas, and the Balkans, and we held physical meetings with Ambassadors in Beirut, Kiev, Maputo, Algeria, Luanda, Baku, Mexico, Abidjan, Tehran, and Paris. In addition, we hosted Ersin Tatar, President of the TRNC, at the online holiday meeting.

Our “Coronavirus and Its Impacts on the Global Economy” webinar, where we hosted Daron Acemoğlu and Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, which we organized in the first days of the pandemic, became a source of pride and trust for our citizens in our homeland and abroad.
In our webinar “Turkish Diaspora in the Struggle for Democracy”, we organized for July 15, which we refer to as a struggle for democracy, Yavuz Selim Kıran, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Umut Acar, Assistant General Manager for Foreign Promotion at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Zafer Meşe, SETA Berlin Coordinator, discussed the sensitivity of our compatriots, especially in the USA and Europe, for Türkiye in the eyes of the public opinion of the countries they are in.

As DTİK, we attach importance to friendly diasporas and gladly make use of the opportunities for cooperation with them. Based on the motto “One Nation Cannot Have Two Diasporas”, we, as DTİK, brought Ryszard Czarnecki, the head of the EU-Türkiye Friendship Group, and the famous pianist Turan Manafzade together with all our members at our online concert event after the victory of our brother Azerbaijan in Karabakh.
As USIP (United States Institute of Peace) and DTİK, we hosted Armenian Patriarch Mashalyan and Washington Ambassador in the iftar program we held online for Muslim communities in the USA.

We listened to Dr. Samia Pirachi, Dr. Esam Omeish, NYC Health Director Dr. Sine Akten in our webinar “Medical Care and Equipment Support in the Covid-19 Process”, which we carried out jointly with the Pakistani diaspora in the USA, where the efforts of the healthcare professionals to meet the medical needs of the people in Türkiye and the USA.
As DTİK, we focus on Country/Provincial Representation structuring. As a result of our meetings, we appointed DTİK Country Representatives in 28 countries. We keep working to establish Representatives Boards in Mexico, Algeria, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Iran, Lebanon, Mozambique, Niger, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Russia, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, Greece, Norway, France, and the Netherlands. In terms of the USA, we appointed State Representatives to Colorado and Florida.

Our Business Council also participated in meetings with the Directorate of Communications, YTB, the Organization of Turkic States and Darüşşafaka, and assumed the task of coordination between the citizens abroad and the said organizations.

I hope that the diaspora acting as a bridge to solve the problems of our business world will be better understood and that the Turkish diaspora will increasingly keep contributing to the vision of a strong Türkiye in the international economy.