Turkey demands concrete Finnish and Swedish actions to address Turkish security concerns over extraditing hostile group members before it unblocks their accession into NATO, experts said ahead of a possible meeting between Ankara and the NATO chief later this week.
Turkey remains one of the two NATO members yet to ratify their accession since the two Nordic countries officially applied to join NATO in May against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Their accession procedure officially started in early July after 30 NATO members, including Turkey, signed accession protocols. It then went to the parliament of each member to ratify their accession to the military alliance.
However, Ankara has been complaining that the two countries moved slowly in fulfilling their commitments over Turkish security concerns, which are the deportation and extradition of members and associates of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and the Gulen Movement, both deemed terrorist organizations by Turkey.
Delegations from Turkish and Finnish justice ministries held a technical meeting last week in Ankara on the extradition requests, a follow-up on the security pledges Finland made along with Sweden in June, when the three countries reached an agreement, with the other two promising to support Turkey’s fight against terrorism and agreed to address its “pending deportation or extradition requests of terror suspects expeditiously and thoroughly.”
“Turkey expects Finland and Sweden to support its efforts to combat PKK and the Gulen movement,” Oytun Orhan, an analyst at the Ankara-based Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, told reporters. It “expects concrete measures,” Orhan said.
The PKK is blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Türkiye and Western allies like the European Union. The Gulen Movement is led by and named after the U.S.-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, of which Ankara accuses masterminding the failed coup in 2016 that killed at least 250 people.
While the two NATO-aspirant countries are reported to have made concessions over the PKK, this does not apply to members of the Gulen movement, who are not considered terrorists in the West.
According to the Turkish presidency, Erdogan is expected to meet later this week in Turkey with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, and next week with Sweden’s newly elected Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to discuss Turkish demands.
For Batu Coskun, an independent political risk analyst, the Turkish demand for Gulen members is not likely to be accepted. “There are very few precedents for political extraditions to be realized in international law,” he told reporters.
Meanwhile, Coskun argued that Turkey’s reservations about Sweden and Finland’s membership bear another consideration — beefing up its foreign policy to impress voters in the runup to the next presidential and parliamentary elections in mid-2023.
“There are upcoming elections in Turkey, and this kind of rhetoric particularly in a multilateral forum like NATO is perceived well amongst most of the electorate,” he said.
However, both Orhan and Coskun concluded that Turkey will eventually approve Finland’s and Sweden’s membership.
“It would be far too costly for Turkey to block this process in an open-ended manner, particularly when there are concerns in the West about the nature of Turkish-Russian relations,” he added.
