Sweden’s bid for NATO membership is facing a dead end because Ankara’s demands to Stockholm to hand over Kurdish activists and prevent rallies attacking Turkey’s leadership have strained ties.
The chances of this changing after Turkey’s parliamentary and presidential elections, which must be held by June 18, are uncertain, said Paul Levin, director of Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies.
“We can now probably forget Turkish ratification before the elections,” Levin told reporters. “What happens after that depends in part on who wins.”
Photo: AFP
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s objections to Sweden’s NATO membership rest largely on Stockholm’s refusal to extradite Turkish nationals Ankara wants to prosecute for “terrorism.”
Erdogan is running for re-election.
Last month, Sweden extradited a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to Turkey. He had been convicted in a Turkish court and denied asylum in Sweden.
Erdogan wants more action from Stockholm against the PKK, listed as a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies.
“On one hand, there is a Turkish president who has jailed thousands over alleged insults and who wants to divert attention from a poor economy in the months before an election,” Levin said.
“On the other hand, there are groups in Sweden who are against NATO membership and PKK supporters worried about the government’s pledges to go after” them, he said.
Levin said these PKK supporters had realized they could provoke Erdogan “by insulting him and thereby stall the accession process.”
A protest by a far-right politician in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm on Saturday — authorized by the police — has further strained relations.
Rasmus Paludan is a Swedish-Danish activist who has already been convicted for racist abuse.
He provoked rioting in Sweden last year when he went on a tour of the country and publicly burned copies of the Koran. On Saturday, he burned another copy of the Muslim holy book after a speech of almost an hour denouncing Islam.
Police based their decision to authorize the protest on the basis of Sweden’s liberal constitution, which protects the right to demonstrate.
Ankara summoned Sweden’s ambassador to register its outrage, then canceled a visit of Swedish Minister of Defense Pal Jonson that had been scheduled for Friday next week in Ankara — a rare high-level meeting.
Earlier this month, Ankara called in Sweden’s ambassador after pro-Kurdish advocates hung an effigy of Erdogan from its feet, explicitly comparing him to Benito Mussolini. Italy’s Fascist dictator was left hanging upside down after his execution in the closing days of World War II.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson denounced it as an attempt to sabotage the country’s NATO membership bid — but that sparked a backlash from some inside Sweden defending the right to freedom of expression.
Then last week, the leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Akesson, whose party props up the Swedish government, denounced Erdogan as an “Islamist dictator.”
He urged Kristersson not to appease Turkey, “because it is ultimately an anti-democratic system and a dictator we are dealing with,” Akesson told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.
Turkey is seeking the extradition of more Kurdish “terrorists” based in Sweden. Erdogan recently said there were as many as 130 there.
Stockholm has made it clear that the courts have the final say, but that does not appear to have satisfied Ankara.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who last spring was talking of a fast-track membership process of just a few weeks, told reporters this month that he still thought it would happen this year, even if he could not guarantee it.
Turkey and Hungary were still to ratify the bid, he said.
Both countries have maintained links with Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, with Ankara in particular adopting the role of mediator between the two sides.
One spark of hope for Sweden is that Finland, which also launched its bid to join NATO following the Russian invasion, has made it clear that it does not want to enter the alliance without its “big brother.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS