ISTANBUL, Turkey —
Turkey said Wednesday it would seek the extradition of 33 alleged
Kurdish militants and coup plot suspects from Sweden and Finland under a deal
to secure Ankara’s support for the Nordic countries’ NATO membership bids.
اضافة اعلان
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dropped weeks of resistance to the two countries’ NATO ambitions
at crunch talks held on the eve of an alliance summit Wednesday focused on
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Erdogan emerged
from the meeting declaring victory after securing a 10-point agreement under
which the two countries vowed to join Turkey’s fight against banned Kurdish
militants and to swiftly extradite suspects.
Turkey put the
deal to the immediate test by announcing that it would seek the extradition of
12 suspects from Finland and 21 from Sweden.
“We will seek the
extradition of terrorists from the relevant countries within the framework of
the new agreement,” Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said in a statement.
“We ask them to
fulfil their promises.”
The unnamed
suspects were identified as being members of the outlawed
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a group led by a US-based Muslim preacher that Erdogan blames
for a failed 2016 coup attempt.
The EU and
Washington both recognize the PKK as a “terrorist” organization because of the
brutal tactics it employed during a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish
state.
But the agreement
also stipulates that Sweden and Finland vow to “not provide support” to the YPG
— a PKK offshoot in Syria that played an instrumental role in the US-led
alliance against Daesh.
Sweden and Finland
abandoned decades of military non-alignment in response to Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and were formally invited into the alliance at Wednesday’s summit in
Madrid.
‘Got what it wanted’
Their applications appeared to be headed for swift approval until Erdogan
stepped in.
The Turkish leader
accused
Finland and particularly Sweden of providing a haven to Kurdish
fighters and financing terror.
Erdogan also wanted
the two countries to lift embargoes on weapons deliveries they imposed in
response to Turkey’s 2019 military incursion into Syria.
The memorandum
appears to address many of Erdogan’s concerns.
It says Finland and
Sweden pledge to “address Turkey’s pending deportation or extradition requests
of terror suspects expeditiously and thoroughly”.
“Finland and Sweden
confirm that the PKK is a proscribed terrorist organization,” says the
agreement.
“Finland and Sweden
commit to prevent activities of the PKK and all other terrorist organizations
and their extensions, as well as activities by individuals ... linked to these
terrorist organizations.”
Erdogan’s office
hailed the agreement as a full victory.
“Turkey got what it
wanted,” his office declared in a statement.
Erdogan also
secured the promise of a long-sought meeting with US President Joe Biden on the
sidelines of the NATO talks.
A US official told
reporters that Biden was “keen” to improve relations with Turkey after a
difficult spell caused in part by Turkey’s crackdown on human rights.
‘Loose and aggressive’
Most of Turkey’s demands and past negotiations have involved Sweden
because of its more robust ties with the Kurdish diaspora.
Sweden keeps no
official ethnicity statistics but is believed to have 100,000 Kurds living in
the nation of 10 million people.
Stockholm
recognized the PKK as a “terrorist” organization in the 1980s but has adopted a
more supportive stance toward the YPG.
Pro-government
Turkish media were outraged by two meetings Swedish Foreign Minister
Ann Linde held last year with Ilham Ahmad — the leader of the political wing of the
YPG-led forces that expelled Daesh from a large swathe of Syria.
Linde called her
two meetings “good” and “fruitful” on Twitter.
It was not
immediately apparent whose extradition Turkey sought.
Finnish President
Sauli Niinisto told reporters that his country has “not been presented with any
list so far, at least as far as I know”.
But the Brookings
Institution warned that problems may arise from Turkey’s “loose and often
aggressive framing” of the term “terrorist”.
“The complication arises from a definition of terrorism in
Turkish law that goes beyond criminalizing participation in violent acts and
infringes on basic freedom of speech,” the US-based institute said in a report.
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