Sweden and Finland formally presented yesterday in Brussels the application for access to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels. And moments later, Turkey officially made it known that it was not willing to accept the entry of the Nordic countries if its concerns were not "heard". It is not the first time that Istanbul has placed conditions on the entry of Sweden and Finland into the Alliance. In particular, that they put an end to their asylum policy for militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organization by the EU.
What is new is that it has formulated its refusal within NATO, so that the ambassadors of the member countries have not been able to reach an agreement to start the accession discussions.
Specifically, the representative of Turkey would have presented a series of demands that must be addressed. Until today, the organization of which the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg is secretary general, hoped to quickly resolve the differences between the Nordic countries and Turkey. But now it is feared that the blockade will continue and derail the emergency procedure that the United States in particular had planned for these new partners.
Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952. And like the rest of the thirty countries that make it up, it has the power to veto new incorporations. It would not be the first time that Turkey has wielded that veto power. In the 1990s, it tried to block the entry of Eastern countries to lobby for its own accession to the European Union.
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 this case, Barack Obama overcame 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.
Washington could modulate its support for Kurdish militias in northeast 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.
4
