NATO chief again calls on Erdogan to lift his veto against Sweden

June 4, 2023

NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg on Sunday called on Turkey to lift its objections to Sweden, which “has fulfilled its obligations” and to finalize its membership of the Alliance “as soon as possible”.

Mr. Stoltenberg, who hailed “a productive meeting”, spoke to the press after a two-hour meeting at Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reinvested the day before for a new term. five years at the head of the country.

Turkey has been blocking Sweden’s entry into the Atlantic Alliance for thirteen months, reproaching it for its leniency towards the Kurdish militants it hosts on its soil.

For Mr. Stoltenberg, “it is time” for this membership to be confirmed before the Alliance summit in Vilnius on July 11 and 12.

To this end, he announced the creation of a “permanent mechanism” between NATO and Turkey with a next meeting “in the week of June 12” – without specifying where it will be held.

“Sweden’s membership in NATO will strengthen its security but it will also make Turkey stronger”, he insisted, adding that he “intends to finalize Sweden’s accession as soon as possible”.

Turkey remains the only one of the 31 NATO member states with Hungary to have not yet ratified this enlargement after the green light given to Finland.

Simultaneously, an anti-Erdogan demonstration and against this membership took place on Sunday in Stockholm, authorized despite the protests of Ankara on the initiative of an “Alliance against NATO”, which notably includes the Rojava committee, a group of support for Kurdish armed groups in Syria.

For Mr. Stoltenberg, “freedom of assembly is at the heart of the democratic values ??of our societies”, but “the demonstrators want to prevent Sweden from joining NATO: we must not let them win”, he said. -he assures.

The NATO boss, who was invited to Ankara on Saturday at the inauguration ceremony of President Erdogan, re-elected on May 28, also “thanked Turkey” for having deployed reinforcements in Kosovo, plagued by violent riots .

Ankara participates in Kfor, the multinational force led by the Atlantic Alliance in Kosovo, which has decided to send seven hundred additional men.

Turkey’s new foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, former head of Turkey’s MIT intelligence service, who succeeds Mevlut Cavusoglu, attended the interview, according to photos released by the presidency.

Fulfilling a key demand from Ankara, Sweden’s parliament passed a new law that came into effect last week banning activities linked to extremist groups, strengthening its terrorism legislation.

The head of Swedish diplomacy remarked on this occasion that his country fulfilled “all the conditions” allowing the last oppositions to be lifted without waiting.

“Sweden has kept all the commitments we made at the Madrid summit last year, including new legislation on terrorism,” Tobias Billström told a meeting of NATO foreign ministers. , Thursday in Oslo.

“The time has come for Turkey and Hungary to start ratifying Sweden’s NATO membership.”

In congratulating Mr. Erdogan on his re-election, US President Joe Biden also reminded him of NATO’s expectations regarding Sweden: for the first time, he seemed to link the lifting of the Turkish veto and the delivery of F fighter jets. -16, claimed by Ankara.

Since then, Washington has backpedaled by saying that Sweden was not a condition for the delivery of the planes, even if the United States also wanted its membership to be recorded “by the NATO summit in Vilnius”.

Desired by the American administration, the arms contract for the delivery of F-16s has so far been blocked by American parliamentarians, worried about the in-between displayed by Turkey with Russia.