We will fulfill the agreement with Turkey on NATO, says Sweden’s top diplomat
Sweden’s center-right government will meet all requirements under a deal with Turkey to join NATO and will focus external relations on its immediate neighborhood while dropping the previous administration’s feminist foreign policy, the country’s top diplomat said on Monday.
Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrm said the new government shares Turkey’s concerns about the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is considered a terrorist organization in Turkey, Europe and the United States.
There will be no nonsense from the Swedish government when it comes to the PKK, Billstrm 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 deal with ongoing deportation or extradition requests for 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 of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Everything written in the trilateral memorandum, which 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. However, the authorities and the independence of the courts in Sweden set limits to what is possible, and so does international law, said Levin.
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. Billstrm said the new government has not yet decided 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, Billstrm said. We will see when we have made the right judgments in these matters.
A former migration minister, Billstrm is a senior member of the conservative moderate party, which 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 power 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, Billström said, noting that he had given a speech earlier Monday at the celebration of UN Day, which marks the anniversary of the 1945 UN. 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.
Additionally, 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 is important, but using the expression ‘feminist foreign policy’ means that you sometimes divert the interest away from what is really important. You put more emphasis on the label than on the actual content, Billstrm said.
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