It was a visit that must have been eagerly awaited in Washington and at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Ulf Kristersson, the new Swedish prime minister, flew to Ankara on Monday to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The topic was Sweden’s application for NATO membership, which all member countries have now ratified – except for Hungary and Turkey. Budapest is said to have signaled behind the scenes that it would agree before the end of the year. So stay Ankara.
But the Turkish leadership says Sweden supports Kurdish terrorist groups. Erdoğan, who gained international stature through his role as a mediator in the Ukraine war, is using the request to unrestrainedly inflate the price of his approval and thus also achieve other goals. For example, that the USA will supply him with new F 16 fighter jets. With the problem of the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist group in Turkey, the USA and the EU, he has found a tried and tested means of exerting pressure.
Kurdish members of the opposition, who are generally labeled by Turkey as terrorists close to the PKK, find protection from political persecution in EU countries. But the PKK’s underground war has been going on for four decades and has already claimed the lives of 40,000 people. And the Syrian Kurdish militia YPG and the PYD party behind it are PKK offshoots. That is why Ankara considers them terrorist groups. But the YPG has allied itself with the United States in the “fight against terror” and the so-called Islamic State. In the Syrian Kurdish areas bordering Turkey, on the other hand, the YPG is fighting the Turkish army. Erdoğan’s forces have undertaken several military operations against the YPG.
Finland, Sweden and Turkey had already signed a memorandum in the summer in which the two northern European countries pledged not to continue to support YPG/PYD activities. In an interview over the weekend, the new foreign minister, Tobias Billström, emphasized this again. He said the forthcoming negotiations with Turkey would be made easier by the fact that the new governing coalition did not carry the same “baggage” as the previous Social Democrat government, alluding to left-wing sympathies for the Kurdish cause.
Swedish MPs in front of the PKK flag
So it didn’t really help Kristersson that on the morning of the Ankara visit, photos appeared in the Swedish (and immediately in the Turkish) press, show Billström’s party colleague, the moderate MP Margareta Cederfelt, as she performs at a Kurdish cultural festival in Solna near Stockholm during the 2018 election campaign; behind her hangs the flag of the PKK, marked as terrorist.
Kristersson rushed to write on Facebook on Monday that Sweden must do a lot more to fight terrorism, “through new laws that offer whole new ways of stopping involvement in terrorist organizations.” But in the end, Billström’s and Kristersson’s efforts came to nothing. The two heads of state were still talking when Turkey’s parliamentary speaker Mustafa Sentop said that Sweden “still had a lot of steps to do” before Turkey’s NATO application could be approved. Sentop claimed terrorists could continue to conduct “propaganda, financing and recruitment activities” in Sweden and that no progress had been made regarding Turkey’s extradition requests.
In the press conference, Erdoğan demanded that Sweden first extradite “terrorists”. Kristersson, who repeatedly emphasized the extraordinarily close Turkish-Swedish relations at the press conference, remained cautious on this one point: European law would be adhered to when it came to examining individual extradition requests.
Of course, people in Ankara are familiar with the Swedish legal situation and know that hardly any political refugee can simply be extradited. But Erdoğan not only wants to weaken the PKK and YPG politically and militarily, he is also thinking about the elections in April. Now he can present himself as a president who doesn’t allow the US or other NATO members to dictate anything to him. This always goes down well with the nationally-minded population. So this meeting might have been useful for him. At the end he said we would see each other again soon. He hopes to “see more positive signals” by then.