Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stood his ground almost to the end. Not even the meetings held in recent months with different European leaders managed to get the president of Turkey to lift his veto on the accession to NATO of Sweden and Finland. But this Tuesday, during the Madrid summit, Erdogan has finally decided to support the Nordic countries to join the Alliance, which leads to the question: What has changed?
Quite simply, the position of Finland and Sweden about the PKK, the currency of exchange in this negotiation. From the beginning, Erdogan has used the presence of groups that Ankara considers terrorists in Scandinavian territory as an excuse to stop the annexation process.
Among them is the Kurdish guerrilla PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) and, to a lesser extent, the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), which they have been carrying out attacks on Turkish territory for decades.
The President of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Finland, Sauli Niinisto, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Magdalena Andersson, and the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, this Wednesday in Madrid.
Since 1984 the PKK has been fighting to claim autonomy for the Kurdish population (the largest ethnic group without its own state in the Middle East) in Turkey. A position that has become an open war that, according to the platform Global Conflict Trackerhas caused more than 40,000 deaths and thousands of displaced people.
Is it a terrorist group or not?
The truth is that the European Union and the United States consider both terrorist groups. Also Finland and Sweden, although in the territory his supporters enjoy a certain freedom.
In fact, in recent years, Turkey has made up to 30 extradition requests for PKK sympathizers to both countries – 28 to Sweden and 12 to Finland – that have been rejected or simply ignored, according to the Turkish presidential spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin.
[Erdogan utiliza una masacre del EI para justificar la represión]
The reason? The fine line that, in Erdogan’s autocratic government, separates terrorists and opponents of the regimelike the Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen, whom Turkey accuses of orchestrating the failed coup against the current Turkish president in 2016.
Hence, Erdogan pointed out in an open letter published in The Economist that “Turkey has the right to expect NATO member countries to prevent the recruitment, financing and propaganda of PKK activities.”
And that is precisely what Finland and Sweden have signed at the NATO summit, where they have committed to “agree extraditions, suppress the activities of the PKK and modify its national legislation”according to the text of the trilateral memorandum.
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