Sweden takes Turkey “seriously” on NATO’s demands
Sweden and Finland are expecting further talks with Turkey to unlock their NATO membership, as Western diplomats wonder what Ankara really wants.
“The Swedish government takes the implementation of the memorandum very seriously,” the Swedish Foreign Ministry told EUobserver on Thursday (15 September), referring to an agreement reached in June with Turkey to go after alleged Kurdish terrorists in return for NATO entry.
“Further meetings in a trilateral format between Sweden, Finland and Turkey are planned,” the Swedish ministry said after the latest talks on August 26.
Finland is “also cooperating with Türkiye to organize further expert-level meetings,” its foreign ministry said.
They spoke after Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoglu warned a day earlier that the Turkish parliament would not ratify the Nordic NATO bids unless they played ball. “No concrete action has been taken until today,” he said.
Finland and Sweden are joining the Western alliance to protect themselves against Russia, in a tectonic shift in European security in response to the Ukraine war.
Some 24 out of 30 NATO members have already ratified the step in the fastest accession process in its history, demonstrating the overwhelming support for Nordic enlargement.
But Turkey first wants Sweden to hand over 73 Kurdish separatist suspects and Finland to hand over 12 more.
It also wants them to toughen national terrorism laws and sell Turkey advanced weapons systems, but those changes are already being made.
Çavuşoğlu’s warning was prompted by the formation of a new right-wing government in Stockholm, including the far-right Sweden Democrats, after Sunday’s election.
But the Sweden Democrats support NATO entry, and right-wing voters are likely to be more comfortable with extraditing exiled Kurds than supporters of the outgoing centre-left government would have been.
And despite all the harsh words, few in the EU or NATO believe that Turkey expects to get everything it wants.
Its demands for Finnish extraditions can easily melt away because they are largely symbolic. “There is no PKK in Finland,” an EU diplomat said, referring to a leading Kurdish militant group.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s frustration at Sweden giving home to so many Kurds was more “real”, Jamie Shea, a former senior NATO official, told this website.
But given the high burden of proof from Turkey that Swedish courts will require to substantiate any terror charges, “it is highly unlikely that all the individuals on Ankara’s list will be handed over,” Shea also said.
“Erdoğan knows he cannot stop the process indefinitely (regardless of the rhetoric from Ankara), and so my view is that he will declare victory after some token extraditions and lift his objections,” Shea said.
There still remains the question of when Turkey might decide to back down.
Finland and Sweden are not covered by NATO’s mutual defense clause until the day they join, in a rapidly evolving security environment in their region.
But Erdoğan is preparing to contest elections next June amid an economic downturn in Turkey, and his spin doctors may want to drag out the Nato dispute as long as possible for campaign reasons, the EU diplomat said.
“It makes him [Erdoğan] looks like a major player on the world stage,” the diplomat noted.
“It also has a rallying effect on the flag on Turkish nationalists and on the large sections of Turkish society where anti-Americanism is still rife,” he said.
“Erdoğan also has other cards to play, such as creating a new crisis with Greece over migrants or gas drilling in the Mediterranean. His people are obsessed with opinion polls, and they will be frantically polling to see how each of his moves plays out .”, noted the EU diplomat.
Meanwhile, the Finnish and Swedish bids are moving so quickly because they are already de facto NATO members in military-technical terms after decades of close cooperation.
There is very little left for NATO itself to do to finish the process, said Shea, who now teaches war studies at the University of Exeter in Britain.
This includes adjustments to the budget and some legal documents.
“NATO commanders will also need to revise their contingency plans for the defense of Europe to cover Swedish and Finnish territory, which includes islands in the Baltic Sea,” Shea said.
“They will also propose Swedish and Finnish military contributions to defend other allies. But again, given the recent closeness of Sweden and Finland to NATO, they have probably finalized these plans (at least informally) already for months or even with years ago.” he said.