Ankara, January 25 Turkey’s National Security Council (MGK), chaired by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Wednesday reiterated its conditions for accepting a NATO expansion, but refrained from excluding Sweden despite recent friction with the Scandinavian country the alliance.
After a Council meeting attended by generals and government ministers, the MGK noted that “Turkey supports NATO’s open door policy as long as the states wishing to join act in accordance with the law and the spirit of the Alliance “.
In a statement, the Council specified that it considers it imperative that the two Scandinavian countries fulfill the commitments they made by signing a memorandum of understanding with Turkey last June on the fight against Kurdish and Islamist terrorism.
Following anti-Turkey protests and the burning of a Koran near the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, Erdogan said last Monday that he would not authorize Sweden’s accession to NATO, which the MGK did not reiterate in its statement today.
Of course, the Council’s statement condemns “in the strongest possible terms” what it described as “cruel attacks that are expressions of anti-Islamic racism and attack the sacred values of billions of people.”