Turkey summons Swedish ambassador over Erdoğan picture | Sweden
Turkey has summoned the Swedish ambassador after a Kurdish group hung a picture of the Turkish president in Stockholm in a stunt that has raised tensions between the two countries over Sweden’s bid to join NATO.
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Tobias Billström said his government strongly distanced itself from “threats and hatred against political representatives”. Without naming any specific country, he added: “Portraying a popularly elected president executed outside City Hall is abhorrent.”
His words did little to calm anger in Turkey, which summoned Sweden’s ambassador to Ankara to express its anger. “Our expectation – that the perpetrators of the incident need to be identified, the necessary processes carried out and Sweden keep its promises – was emphasized,” a Turkish source told Reuters.
The stunt was organized by a Kurdish group, the Rojava Committee in Sweden, which compared Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was hanged upside down after his execution in the final days of World War II.
“History shows how dictators end up,” the group wrote above a video posted on social media showing images of Mussolini and a dummy painted to look like Erdoğan swinging on a rope by the legs.
In a historic decision in May, Sweden and Finland announced they wanted to join the NATO military alliancein response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
While 28 of 30 NATO members have ratified their bids, Hungary and Turkey have not, and the latter is likely to prove the biggest obstacle. Ankara has so far refused to ratify the applications unless the two countries do more to crack down on Kurdish groups they consider terrorists.
Just a day before the latest row, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson had said that the talks with Ankara “are going very well”. Kristersson said “we are moving forward in a good way” on a trilateral memo between Turkey, Sweden and Finland, but declined to give a date for membership.
Kristersson said there were “different views” with Turkey on what needed to be done for Stockholm to join the military alliance, but admitted there had been a loophole in Sweden’s anti-terror laws.
“We are showing Turkey that we are doing exactly what we promised to do, not least when it comes to fighting terrorism,” he told reporters in Stockholm on Wednesday. “I think that has been one of the core tasks: to strengthen the Swedish legislation on combating terrorism, to realize that activities on Swedish soil can be dangerous for other countries… To realize that Turkey has been one of the countries most affected by terrorism .”
Kristersson said that Turkey sometimes named people it wanted to extradite from Sweden, but that such decisions was the responsibility of Sweden’s courts, not its government. “I don’t think it should [over-]shadow the fact that these [discussions] going well, he said.
Hungary is the second country that has not yet ratified Sweden’s membership bid. Swedish sources expressed confidence that the Hungarian parliament would take that step in February. They also played down suggestions that Budapest would use Stockholm’s membership hopes as leverage to gain an advantage in an unrelated EU dispute over the rule of law in Hungary.