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Turkey is not ready to ratify Sweden’s accession to NATO

Turkey “is not in a position” to ratify Sweden’s accession to NATO, Ibrahim Kalin, a close adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said on Saturday, after a new incident that occurred this week, reports AFP. Ankara on Thursday denounced a video montage made by a group close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Sweden, in which President Erdogan appears as being hanged and called a “dictator”. The Swedish ambassador to Ankara was summoned by the Turkish Foreign Ministry. This new incident comes at a time when Turkey has been blocking the entry of Sweden, as well as Finland, into NATO since May, accusing it of harboring on its territory members of the PKK and organizations allied to this party, which it considers terrorists.

Sweden’s new government has said that joining NATO is its top priority, and its application has been approved by 28 of the alliance’s 30 members. But Hungary — whose parliament is expected to ratify Sweden and Finland’s membership bids in the coming weeks — and Turkey have yet to do so. Stockholm has made a number of concessions to Ankara, including distancing itself from a Kurdish militia, lifting an embargo on weapons exports to Turkey and stressing it would work to combat terrorism. Kristersson said on Sunday that Stockholm was living up to commitments it made at Nato’s Madrid summit last July, but that it had to follow the law on deportations, which is a judicial process in Sweden with no role for the government. Turkey’s foreign ministry did not immediately return a request for comment. Opinion polls have shown Swedes do not favour offering too many concessions to Turkey: in a survey for daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter last week, 79 per cent said they wanted Sweden to stand up for the rule of law — even if that delayed its Nato membership.
Asked if Turkey would ratify Sweden’s membership before its presidential elections in June, Kristersson said it was “impossible to know”. Pekka Haavisto, Finland’s foreign minister, said it looked unlikely that Turkey would ratify membership for the two countries before the elections, leaving the Nato summit in Vilnius in July as the next possible deadline. Speaking at the same event on Sunday, NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg did not directly reference Turkey’s block on the process but said he was “happy that the agreement [with Ankara] has been followed through”. He was “confident that we will soon be able to warmly welcome [Sweden and Finland] as full members of NATO”, he said. Both countries’ membership “erases grey areas, strengthens the political community and . . . will make us all safer”, Stoltenberg said.

By Cora Sulleyman

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