The president of Turkey has aired this Thursday a refusal to the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO even more resounding than the previous ones. "Sweden is a nest of terrorists," exclaims Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a video released today on his twitter account and which includes his responses to young people in the Ankara Presidential Library. "There is no room for terrorists in a security organization," he said, referring to the militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the fugitives from the Fethullah Gülen brotherhood who have taken refuge in both Nordic countries.
Erdogan has said that Turkey will not repeat the mistake of the 1980s, when they did not veto Greece's return to NATO's integrated military structure. "Now Greece is ceding a military base to the US in Alexandroupolis (25 kilometers from Turkey), as well as being the escape point for the Gülenists." In view of this, Erdogan confesses: "We have already explained our 'no' to Finland and Sweden to our friends and we will continue to do so."
Erdogan has also added that he is not willing to break his relations "neither with Putin nor with Zelensky", thus underlining Turkey's willingness to mediate with its two Black Sea neighbors. His intention, he says, is to avoid a world war that would be "catastrophic for our region and for the world."
Erdogan's statements are known on the Day of Youth and Sports, a holiday that marks the start of the Turkish war of independence, in 1919, so they must be taken with a pinch of salt. The fact is that, just yesterday, its Foreign Minister, Mevlüt Çavusoglu, was meeting in New York with the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, presumably to explore ways of solving the blockade imposed by Turkey on NATO on this issue.
This is not the first time that Turkey has wielded its blockade capacity, in an alliance to which it has belonged since 1952, as a reward for its armed intervention in Korea. In 2009, Ankara also tried to prevent the Danish Anders Fogh Rasmussen from becoming head of the organization, on account of the controversy over the Muhammad cartoons.
In that case, it was Barack Obama who had to overcome resistance by promising a Turkish deputy for the new secretary general. The following year, in addition, the legal harassment of the Roj TV channel began, which broadcast from Denmark the point of view of the PKK.
On this occasion, no one believes that Recep Tayyip Erdogan will maintain a fight against the entire Alliance until the end, although he will hardly let his objections fall on deaf ears.
Although envoys from Finland and Sweden would have everything ready to go to Turkey to smooth things over, the Turkish president told them on Monday to save the trip and the speeches.
Ankara's misgivings not only have to do with the granting of asylum to alleged members of the PKK, but also of the Fethullah Gülen brotherhood, convicted for their involvement in the 2016 coup attempt.
In the first case, Turkey has unsuccessfully requested the extradition of eleven PKK militants to Stockholm and six to Helsinki. In the past, other petitions have been rejected.
The population of Kurdish origin has been large in Sweden since the 1970s, although Kurdish exiles from Iraq and Iran outnumber those from Turkey. Until a few years ago, it was easier to learn Kurdish in a Swedish school than in a school in southeastern Turkey.
Several descendants of this group – almost always women – have made a political career, something that has led Erdogan to exclaim that “they even have terrorists in Parliament”.
The two Nordic countries have also vetoed the sale of weapons to Ankara since 2019, when the Turkish army launched its third intervention in northern Syria, to abort the consolidation of Royava, a territorial entity attached to its border and dominated by the YPG, the Syrian branch of the PKK. Yesterday, an adviser to Erdogan considered said veto "unacceptable" and opposed it to the seizure of "Swedish anti-tank projectiles" from the YPG.
No less difficult to digest in Ankara have been the receptions by the Swedish Foreign Minister, Ann Linde, to the first political leader of Royava, Elham Ahmad.
However, no matter how much Sweden has just broken with its tradition of neutrality, it is unlikely that it will also squander its prestige as a refuge for political exiles, against countries whose judicial system it doubts.
The Turks know this, but they trust that, like Barack Obama in his day, Joe Biden will intervene in favor of Ankara in other matters of interest to him and unblock the situation before the NATO summit in Madrid. The President of the United States receives today the President of Finland and the Prime Minister of Sweden, in a show of support for their entry into the Atlantic Alliance. Asked about the current blockade, Biden said that "I'm not going to Turkey, but I think everything will be fine."
Among Washington's tricks is to modulate its support for the Kurdish militias in northeastern Syria. Or expedite the sale of F-16 fighters to Turkey, not yet approved by Congress. Especially when, the day before yesterday, the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, tied up in the White House the acquisition of the most advanced F-35, from whose program Ankara was expelled for the purchase of Russian anti-aircraft batteries.
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