Sweden’s top diplomat: We will fulfill the NATO agreement with Turkey
“There will be no nonsense from the Swedish government when it comes to the PKK,” Billström told The Associated Press in an interview. “We fully support a policy which means that terrorist organizations do not have the right to operate on Swedish territory.”
Turkey blocked Sweden’s and Finland’s historic bid to join NATO over concerns that the two countries – Sweden in particular – had become a haven for members of the PKK and affiliated groups.
Under a memorandum of understanding signed by Sweden’s former leftist government at a NATO summit in June, Sweden and Finland pledged not to support Kurdish groups in Syria that Turkey says are affiliated with the PKK and to lift an arms embargo against Turkey imposed after its incursion. in northern Syria in 2019. They also agreed to “address pending deportation or extradition requests of terror suspects,” which has proven more complicated due to the broad definition of terrorism in Turkey, where anti-terror laws have been used to crack down on opponents to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Everything that is written in the trilateral memorandum, and that has been agreed upon by all three parties, must be fulfilled, must be fulfilled by all three parties,” Billström said, adding that “everything must also be done in a legally secure manner.”
The PKK has led an armed insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, and the conflict has since resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Paul Levin, head of the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University, said the new government may have an advantage over the previous Social Democratic government in dealing with Turkey because it does not have the same connections to the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden. But the independence of authorities and courts “set limits to what is possible, and so does international law,” Levin said.
Hungary and Turkey are the only NATO countries that have yet to ratify the accession of Sweden and Finland, traditionally non-aligned countries that rushed to apply for membership after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
Like most European countries, Sweden has clearly sided with Ukraine in the war, supplying its armed forces with anti-tank weapons, automatic rifles and anti-ship missiles. Ukraine has also asked Sweden to provide the Archer artillery system and the RBS-70 portable air defense system. Billström said that the new government has not yet made a decision on these wishes.
“We are ready to try to provide as much assistance as possible to the Ukrainian government in its heroic fight against the Russian forces,” Billstrom said. “We’ll see when we’ve made the right judgments on these issues.”
A former migration minister, Billström is a right-wing member of the conservative Moderates, who formed a coalition government last week with the center-right Liberals and Christian Democrats. The new government relies on support from the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, with whom it has drawn up a joint political platform that includes strong immigration restrictions and a crackdown on organized crime.
Billström also promised a change in Sweden’s foreign relations, with an emphasis on northern Europe. Traditionally, Sweden has strived to project itself internationally as a “humanitarian superpower” with relatively generous support to developing countries around the world and a strong commitment to the UN.
“This is not to say that we will not be interested in the rest of the world, far from it,” Billstrom said, noting that he had given a speech earlier Monday at the celebration of United Nations Day, which marks the anniversary of the 1945 United Nations Charter .
“But when it comes to these recalibrations that we’re aiming for, it’s true that there will be a change in focus,” he said. “And the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries and the European Union will be the three legs on which we will base this recalibration.”
In addition, the new government will abandon the “feminist foreign policy” established by the previous government in 2014. The label has since been used by other countries, including Canada, France, Spain and Germany.
“We believe that equal rights between men and women are important, but using the expression ‘feminist foreign policy’ means that you sometimes divert attention from what is really important. You place more importance on the label than on the content itself, said Billström.