Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hinted on Sunday that Turkey could approve Finland’s NATO candidacy without doing the same for Sweden.
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“If necessary, we can give a different message in relation to Finland. Sweden will be shocked if we send a different message about Finland,” the Turkish leader replied to a question about the two Nordic countries’ candidacy for NATO during a TV meeting with young people.
This is the first time Ankara has indicated that it is prepared to treat Finland’s candidacy separately from Sweden’s.
Turkey on Tuesday blocked Sweden and Finland from joining NATO and indefinitely postponed a tripartite meeting originally scheduled for early February to resolve Ankara’s objections to its candidacy.
Turkey’s president warned on Monday that Sweden, already accused by Turkey of harboring Kurdish “terrorists”, could no longer count on Ankara’s “support” after a far-right activist burned a copy of the Koran in Stockholm .
However, without mentioning this event, the Turkish President repeated his accusations against Sweden regarding Turkey’s extradition requests.
“We told them: ‘If you want to join NATO, you have to send these terrorists back to us.’ We gave them a list of 120 people (…) But they laugh at us saying they changed their constitution,” he said.
The burning of a Koran by an Islamophobic right-wing extremist near the Turkish embassy in Sweden last week sparked violent protests from Ankara and several capitals of the Muslim world.
Ankara had already canceled an announced visit by the Swedish defense minister.
Regretting a “deeply disrespectful” act, Stockholm expressed its “sympathy” to Muslims, stressing that the Swedish constitution forbids banning this type of act, but without quenching Turkish anger.
Separate Membership
Joint membership of the two Nordic countries remains “the first option”, but “of course we have to assess the situation if something has happened, which means that Sweden cannot progress in the long term,” said the chairman on Tuesday. Finnish diplomacy Pekka Haavisto on public television Yle, but judged that it was “too early to take a stand”.
Until recently, Helsinki had refused to speculate about joining without Sweden, citing the benefits of joint membership with its immediate neighbour.
The Finnish minister also said on Wednesday he hopes the ratification process for the two Nordic countries will be completed ahead of the Atlantic Alliance summit in Vilnius in July, despite disagreements with Turkey.
Turkey has blocked Sweden – and Finland – from joining NATO since May, accusing them of harboring Kurdish militants and sympathizers whom it calls “terrorists”, particularly those of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Unlike Sweden, Turkey has said in recent months that it has no major objections to Finland joining NATO.
Like the 30 members of the alliance, Ankara must ratify the accession of each new member and therefore has veto power.
Only Turkey and Hungary – which has declared that it does not want to block the applications from Finland and Sweden – have yet to ratify these two accessions.