10- July-2023- Aljazeera
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he would back Sweden’s NATO candidacy if the European Union resumes long-stalled membership talks with Ankara.
“First, open the way for Turkey’s membership in the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan said in a televised media appearance on Monday before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania
The Turkish leader said he told the same thing to US President Joe Biden when the pair spoke by phone on Sunday.
Erdogan also said Sweden’s accession hinges on the implementation of a deal reached in June last year during the alliance’s summit in Madrid.
Turkey wants Sweden to crack down on groups that it considers national security threats, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, which Ankara considers the Syrian branch of the PKK.
Ankara also wants Stockholm to extradite suspects whom it calls “terrorists” and lift an arms ban it has imposed on Turkey. Erdogan said no one should expect compromises from his government
Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership last year, abandoning their policies of military non-alignment due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. New members require approval from all NATO countries, and Finland was given the green light in April.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that while he supports Ankara’s EU membership, as far as he was concerned, Sweden had already met the conditions required to join NATO.
“It is still possible to have a positive decision on Sweden in Vilnius,” Stoltenberg told a news conference.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also said Turkey’s stance is a positive development
“This is what I’m taking as the positive message from the Turkish president’s comments.”
Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar, reporting from Istanbul, said Sweden argues that Turkey’s requests cannot be decided by the government’s executive branch but by the judiciary.
“However, Erdogan says that this is a security matter and, despite positive steps, PKK supporters still hold demonstrations [in Sweden] and this is not acceptable,” he said.
EU talks frozen
Turkey first applied to become a member of the European Economic Community, a predecessor to the EU, in 1987.
It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.
The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about human rights violations in Turkey.