Turkey calls on Sweden to take more ‘concrete measures’ before joining Nato

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Turkey’s vice president said Sweden must take further “concrete measures” on counterterrorism to win Ankara’s support for joining NATO as Turkey’s parliament prepares to accept the Nordic country’s membership request.

“We are not seeing a satisfactory level of implementation,” Cevdet Yılmaz told the Financial Times protocol Last year, Sweden vowed to take tougher action against extremist groups, including the Kurdish armed group that has waged a decades-long insurgency in Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to Stockholm’s request to join NATO at the military alliance’s Vilnius summit in July, but Turkey’s parliament still needs to reconvene on Sunday after a summer recess. Approval of Sweden’s accession.

Stockholm ended its long-standing policy of neutrality following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, and its request to join NATO has been approved by all NATO members except Turkey and Hungary.

Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party (AKP) leads a coalition that controls parliament, has repeatedly said Turkey’s support for Stockholm’s NATO membership is conditional on Sweden’s claims of links to the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Take action. and a religious network that claimed to be behind a 2016 coup attempt.

“Our parliament is very sensitive to these issues because there is public opinion in Turkey,” Yilmaz said in an interview at the sprawling presidential palace in Ankara. “If we don’t see enough progress in practice then there will be huge pressure on councils.”

Senior AKP politician and former MP Yilmaz, who was appointed vice president in June, said parliamentary approval would depend on “whether real concrete measures are taken against terrorist groups or individuals who speak out against Turkey” .

Sweden argued that it had fulfilled its agreement with Turkey, including the new anti-terrorism law that came into effect in June. In the first use of the new legislation, a Swedish court jailed a Turkish man in July for financing the PKK.

However, sporadic demonstrations by protesters carrying PKK flags have angered Ankara in Sweden, a country with broad protections for freedom of speech and expression. Erdogan and his government have also repeatedly cracked down on public burnings of Qurans by demonstrators in Sweden in recent months.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson wrote an article in the Financial Times in May that Sweden had taken major counter-terrorism actions, but any measures must be “in line with the rule of law and democracy.”

Nordic diplomats said Sweden remained confident Turkey would approve its application, following strong support from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and the United States. Stoltenberg and Turkey’s foreign minister discussed NATO expansion in a phone call on Friday, according to the Turkish government.

Sweden’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, a wave of gang crime in Sweden – which has led the government to consider using the military to assist police – stems in part from internal strife within a drug gang run by Kurds who fled Sweden for Turkey. Despite NATO’s application, some politicians are urging the Swedish government to be more assertive in raising the issue with Turkey.

Analysts believe Sweden’s bid for NATO may be related to Turkey’s request to buy billions of dollars worth of F-16 fighter jets, which has stalled in the US Congress. “I hope that if they (the United States) keep their word, our parliament will do the same,” Erdogan told state media this week.

U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, once one of the most vocal critics of Turkey’s F-16 order, resigned as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week after being indicted on federal bribery charges. But he denied the accusation.

New Chairman Ben Kadin said on Thursday that the F-16 issue was beyond NATO’s scope, but Turkish officials assured him that Ankara would approve Sweden’s admission to the alliance in the “first half” of October, Reuters reported.

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