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May 18, 2022, was a big day for Sweden. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and more than 200 years of non-military alignment, the Nordic country finally broke with tradition and applied for NATO membership along with Finland. But what was supposed to be an easy accession has proven to be anything but a smooth sail. NATO member Turkey has a problem with Sweden, and its patience is wearing thin – with both the country’s humour and its freedom of expression principles.
The ink had barely dried on Finland and Sweden’s joint application letter before Turkey started conditioning their aspiring NATO memberships, saying they posed a threat to its national security and they needed to take more concrete steps if they ever wanted its blessing to join the military alliance.
“Neither country has an open, clear stance against terrorist organisations,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said just hours after the application was filed, accusing them of acting as safe havens for Kurdish militant groups such as the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK. He also demanded they lift an arms export ban imposed on Turkey in 2019 after it launched an offensive in northern Syria targeting the YPG, the Kurdish militia fighting the Islamic State group there.
After signing a memorandum of understanding on the sidelines of a NATO summit in June – in which both Finland and Sweden in broad brushstrokes agreed to address Turkey’s concerns surrounding arms exports and its fight against terrorism – Ankara suddenly started getting very specific in its demands.
At first, it issued a long list of “terrorists”, or alleged Kurdish militants, that it insisted the two countries extradite – despite many of them having been granted asylum by the Nordic countries years, or even decades, earlier.
But Turkey’s demands soon grew in numbers, and began focusing more and more on Sweden: Ankara called…
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