Turkey’s continued postponement of Finland and Sweden’s joint admission to NATO raises the threat of a confrontation with Russia, the transatlantic alliance’s most sensible official has warned.
“It is therefore time to welcome Finland and Sweden as full members of NATO,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday. “Your club will be our alliance and will make our people safer. end his club, avoid misunderstandings or miscalculations in Moscow and send a transparent message to Russia that NATO’s door remains open.
The call fell on deaf ears in Ankara, where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has issued a series of preconditions for its admission, the debatable maxim of which he considers the Swedish Kurdish diaspora, which Erdogan has denounced as a hotbed of terrorism. the public division with Stoltenberg over Sweden and Finland fulfilled the terms of a memorandum aimed at appeasing Erdogan.
“We want to see its implementation, and we have a timeline and a series of meetings to plan,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said at a news conference with Stoltenberg. “We expect the new Swedish government to take action, even more concrete measures. We are pleased with the steps they have already taken, but we would like to see their final steps in the memorandum. “
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Stoltenberg intervened to question Cavusoglu’s assessment. ” They respect the joint memorandum and also see the price of running heavily with Turkey to fight terrorism,” the former Norwegian prime minister said, Turkey’s pronunciation of Erdogan’s preferred country call. “So Finland and Sweden complied. “
Finland and Sweden had hoped for an accelerated NATO application process, but Erdogan halted their admission by protesting his refusal to sell arms to Turkey and accusing Nordic states of harboring anti-Turkish terrorists. Sweden announced in September that it would lift the embargo, but Cavusoglu under pressure that Turkey was seeking irreversible guarantees.
“It’s that once those countries come together, no action is taken,” he said. “It’s that we showed the other Turks that concrete measures have been taken. “
The thorniest dispute concerns Sweden’s accession to the Turkish Kurds. Erdogan complains that the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden is full of ties to the PKK, a Kurdish militant organization designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
“As long as terrorist organizations demonstrate on the streets of Sweden, and as long as terrorists are the Swedish parliament, there will be no positive technique from Turkey towards Sweden,” Erdogan said last month.
This comment was an obvious reference to Swedish lawmaker Amineh Kakabaveh, an ethnic Iranian Kurd who was a member of a Kurdish defense force as a teenager in the Iran-Iraq war and was eventually elected to the Swedish parliament after fleeing to Europe. More broadly, Turkey needs the extradition of dozens of Kurds to Sweden.
“Sweden is committed to dealing and very well . . . pending extradition requests of suspected terrorists,” Swedish officials wrote in an October letter received via Reuters.
Erdogan drew a difference between Sweden and Finland, saying that “Finland is not a country where terrorists roam freely. “Finnish and Swedish officials must sign up for NATO, a strong maneuver that reflects the classic unity of their strategic cultures.
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“The moment, the moment, belongs to any of the countries and the steps they will take,” Cavusoglu said. “Relatively speaking, we have no challenge with Finland’s position. . . We know that those two countries need to unite. . . . . . We’d like to see it too. “