Turkey cancels Swedish ministerial visit due to right-wing protest | News
Turkey has been outraged by Sweden’s green light for a protest in front of its embassy in Stockholm.
Turkey has canceled a visit by Sweden’s defense minister due to a planned demonstration by a hard-right group in Stockholm.
A day after summoning the Swedish ambassador over the issue, Turkey said on Saturday it was canceling the visit to overcome Turkey’s objections to its NATO membership.
Turkey has been outraged by Sweden’s green light for a protest outside its embassy in the capital Stockholm, amid ongoing tensions following Ankara’s objections to Sweden’s bid to join the NATO military alliance.
“At this point, Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson’s visit to Turkey on January 27 has lost its significance and meaning, so we canceled the visit,” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said, adding that Sweden has failed to take action against “disgusting” anti -Turkish protests on their land.
Sweden’s Ministry of Defense gave Swedish-Danish politician Rasmus Paludan, from the far-right Stram Kurs (Hard Line) party, permission to stage the demonstration on Saturday, during which he said he intended to “burn the Koran”, Islam’s holy book.
Organizers said around 500 to 600 people were expected to gather to protest Sweden’s NATO bid and show support for Kurds.
Last April, Paludan’s announcement of a Koran “tour” during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan sparked riots across Sweden.
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin condemned the planned demonstration as a “blatant hate crime”.
“Allowing this act despite all our warnings encourages hate crimes and Islamophobia,” he tweeted. “The attack on sacred values is not freedom but modern barbarism.”
Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström told the TT news agency on Friday that Sweden respects freedom of expression.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said he hoped Swedish authorities would not allow the protest to take place.
“This permit is given to this person, despite all our warnings. I hope the Swedish authorities will take the necessary measures and not allow this,” Cavusoglu told reporters, adding that the protest could not be classified as freedom of expression.
Billström did not want to speculate on how Paludan’s protest would affect Sweden’s NATO bid, but noted that “anything that prolongs the process unnecessarily is of course something we take very seriously”.
Meanwhile, pro-Turkish and pro-Kurdish groups also planned demonstrations in the Swedish capital.
Turkey summoned the Swedish ambassador on Friday to condemn the protests, saying demonstrations by pro-Kurdish groups linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) would be a violation of the joint memorandum signed between Turkey, Sweden and Finland that prevented a Turkish veto of the Nordic countries’ NATO accession in June.
Sweden and neighboring Finland lost decades of military non-alignment last year when they applied to join the Western defense alliance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Turkey has so far refused to accept their bid, which must be signed by all member states, tying its positive vote to Swedish measures to extradite people it accuses of terrorism or having played a role in the 2016 coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey claims that Sweden is not doing enough to crack down on Kurdish groups that Ankara sees as “terrorists”.
Sweden’s ambassador to Turkey was summoned last week after a video posted by a Kurdish group in Stockholm showed Erdogan swinging his legs from a rope.
A tweet from the group, Rojava Committee of Sweden, compared Erdogan to Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was hanged upside down after his execution in the final days of World War II.
Earlier in January, a picture of the Turkish president was hung from a lamppost during a Kurdish protest. Turkey condemned a decision by a Swedish prosecutor not to investigate, and Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson called the protest an “act of sabotage” against Sweden’s bid to join NATO.