Sweden believes it has gone very nearly as far
as it is possible to go in meeting the demands of Turkey’s president, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, who has a casting vote on whether the country’s application to
join NATO is successful.
In May 2022, responding to the threat posed by
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a few weeks before,
Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO.
The move was greeted with some apprehension by Sweden’s Kurdish
citizens. To the Kurdish community NATO
meant Turkey, a long-time NATO member – and Turkey had for many years been
fighting Kurdish separatists within the country, and also Kurdish Peshmerga
forces along the Turco-Syrian and Turco-Iranian borders.
Erdogan, who held up progress on both
applications for months, has insisted that Sweden take effective action against
its Kurdish minority as the price for lifting his veto. Even though the Swedish government
decided on June 11 to
extradite a Turkish citizen resident in Sweden who had been convicted in 2013
of a drug crime in Turkey, what
Sweden has done so far has not satisfied Erdogan. He recently reversed his objection to
Finland’s application, but continues to blackball Sweden. The matter has turned into a conflict between
Sweden’s widely acknowledged humanitarian, tolerant, liberal values, and
Erdogan’s determination to crush the movement for Kurdish independence at all
costs.
The forthcoming NATO summit, scheduled for July 10, will be dealing with vital issues arising from Russia’s partial and illegal occupation of Ukraine. The organization as a whole very much hoped that the meeting would see it significantly strengthened by the acquisition of two new members. That will not now take place. At a press conference on March 17 with his Finnish counterpart, Erdogan praised Finland's "authentic and concrete steps" on Turkish security, and withdrew his opposition to its joining NATO. He continued to maintain that Sweden has a way to go before he is satisfied. On June 9 Erdogan said: “Sweden at the moment is a country that terror organizations use as a playground. In fact, there are terrorists even in this country’s parliament.”
He was referring to the leading Swedish politician Amineh Kakabaveh, a member of parliament, who grew up in a poor Kurdish home in western Iran. She is a strong advocate for Kurdish self-determination in the Middle East and a fierce critic of Erdogan.
Kurds represent some 20
percent of Turkey’s 84 million population, and nationalist demands from the
more extreme Kurdish elements seem to the Turkish establishment to represent a
threat to the integrity of the state. The PKK, founded in 1978, is a political
group seeking Kurdish independence and has not been averse to pursuing its
political ends by way of armed terrorist attacks within Turkey. Erdogan has responded by proscribing
the PKK as a terrorist organization (a designation now widely adopted
internationally), and to combat the PKK and its associate bodies where they are
strongest – in northern Syria and Iraq.
Erdogan has
made no secret of the fact that he considers Sweden has become a safe
haven for members of the PKK. Although
Sweden condemns terrorist activities, it does host those Kurdish bodies known
as the People’s Protection Units (YPG) that in the years 2014-2019 fought
alongside the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces against ISIS – and indeed
chased them out of Syria. The Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), their
political wing, is a recognized group in Sweden and has an office in
Stockholm. Many Swedes believe, along
with professor Khalid Khayati of Linköping University that “It would be unfair
and inhuman to consider that group as a terror organization.”
Erdogan claims that
elements of the PKK are being sheltered under the wing of the YPG which,
together with the PYD, he describes as a terrorist body, and has been demanding
that Sweden withdraw its support from them all and also extradite a list of
named individuals to Turkey. As Mark
Almond observes in the London Daily Telegraph on June 16, the problem is
that Erdoğan, emboldened by an unprecedented third election victory, is more
intent than ever on pursuing policies that challenge not only the West, but the
very democratic and human rights principles that the NATO alliance is there to
defend. “We can debate the rights and wrongs of Sweden’s asylum policy for
Kurds,” writes Almond, “but can any advocate of the rule of law agree to let a
foreign government decide whom it should expel from its territory?”
Of all the countries that Kurds fled to during
the past turbulent half-century, it was in Sweden that they found the warmest
welcome and real freedom from political repression. Sweden is now host to
100,000 Kurds, and the Kurdish community has become well integrated into
Swedish society, politically, socially and culturally.
The NATO quandary is of concern to
the whole country. It touches on
Sweden’s long-standing willingness to avoid firm positions on
controversial issues – in other words, neutrality. After all, Sweden managed to remain neutral
throughout the Second World War. One observer believes that this
moral ambivalence worries many Swedes. He
reckons the question on many Swedes’ minds now is “Are we willing once again to
shrug our shoulders at moral issues for the sake of joining NATO?” and he
believes the answer of most would be: “If the price for NATO membership is the
sacrifice of Kurds, then it's not worth it.”
A dilemma is a problematic situation
with no clear solution. Do the
advantages to Sweden itself, and to the western world, of joining NATO outweigh
the generous, open-hearted, democratic instincts of the Swedish people in
supporting the Kurds and their efforts to gain independence, or at least
autonomy? If so, Sweden needs to
ascertain just how far Erdogan would
have them go in restricting the liberty of their Kurdish minority, and act
accordingly. If not, the Swedes
themselves, NATO and the western world will have to be content with the
situation as it has always been, with Sweden outside NATO, but collaborating with
it as closely as possible.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-747647
