News / Turkey

'Return 130 terrorists!' Turkey sets condition for Sweden, Finland in NATO bid saga

Tuesday, 17 January 2023 6:11 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 17 January 2023 6:11 PM ]

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech at the International Ombudsman Conference at the presidential complex in Ankara, Turkey, on January 11, 2023. (Photo by AFP)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Sweden and Finland must deport some 130 "terrorists" to Turkey before Ankara approves their bids to join NATO.

"We said look, so if you don't hand over your terrorists to us, we can't pass it [NATO applications] through the parliament anyway," Erdogan said in comments on Monday. "For this to pass the parliament, first of all, you have to hand more than 100, around 130, of these terrorists to us."

Sweden recently said Turkey had demands it could not — and would not — meet. Swedish Prime Minister Kristersson, however, said on Monday that his country was in a "good position" to secure Turkey's ratification of its NATO bid.

On Saturday, Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said that time was running out for Turkey's lawmakers to ratify the bids before presidential and parliamentary elections expected in May.

Finland's Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto interpreted Erdogan's demand as an angry response to an incident in Stockholm last week in which an effigy of the Turkish leader was strung up during a small protest. "This must have been a reaction, I believe, to the events of the past days."

Haavisto said he was not aware of any new official demands from Turkey.

In recent months, Swedish and Finnish delegations met with Turkish official in Ankara to address their objections to their NATO bids.

Ending decades of military neutrality, Sweden and Finland have applied to join the US-led military alliance in the wake of the Russian military offensive against Ukraine.

All 30 NATO members must agree on admitting new members.

Russia's deputy FM says Moscow will not tolerate NATO’s expansion into Nordic states

Russia says the latest push by Sweden and Finland to join NATO will only make the matters worse.

Turkey's opposition to the countries' membership in NATO stems from Sweden's — and to a lesser extent Finland's — perceived support for the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, and other entities that Turkey views as "terrorist" and security threats.

Militants of the PKK — designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union — regularly clash with Turkish forces in the Kurdish-dominated southeast of Turkey attached to northern Iraq. The decades-long conflict between Turkey and the autonomy-seeking militant group has led to the death of tens of thousands of people.

The Turkish government has accused the two countries of giving a safe haven to the PKK and refusing to extradite its members.

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