Will Turkey greenlight Sweden’s NATO bid?

Will she or won’t she? The question of whether Turkey will greenlight Sweden’s accession to NATO continues to consume diplomatic circles as Ankara accuses Stockholm of failing to adequately address its “terror” concerns — in other words, to not extradite alleged “terrorists” and ban anti-Turkish demonstrations. The drama escalated when an Iraqi immigrant decided to tear out pages from a Koran, then wipe his shoes with some and burn others outside a Stockholm mosque on the first day of the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, or Eid al-Adha. He then placed a slice of bacon in the sacred book as some 200 people looked on.

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Ankara was incensed at Swedish authorities’ decision to allow the ritual to proceed. Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s freshly minted foreign minister who is scheduled to hold talks with his Swedish and Finnish counterparts in Brussels on July 6 to unlock the deadlock over Sweden’s NATO membership, called the action “vile” and said it was “unacceptable to allow anti-Islam protests in the name of freedom of expression,” as Ezgi Akin reported. 

Erdogan chimed in on Thursday. “We will eventually teach Western bastions of arrogance that insulting Muslims is not freedom of thought,” Erdogan told members of his Justice and Development Party via a video message.

We had the scoop on how Turkey is holding up NATO’s new strategy plan with, among other demands, insistence that the Bosporus Straits be referred to as the “Turkish Straits” in the strategy document. Ankara’s other objections concern references to the divided island of Cyprus whose membership of NATO has been blocked by Turkey. The thinking informing Ankara’s obduracy is that this is a rare opportunity to leverage its veto power as a NATO member to gain maximum benefits on a range of issues before relenting.

There is nothing surprising about the strategy. Remember how Turkey haggled with Washington over allowing US troops to use its territory to invade Iraq in 2003, asking for billions of dollars and being promised them, only for the Turkish parliament to strike the motion down. 

Meanwhile, news that Swedish and US prosecutors were investigating claims that the Swedish affiliate of a US company had weighed paying massive kickbacks to Erdogan’s younger son, Bilal, to sell dashboard breathalyzers in Turkey — the company eventually gave up on the idea — prompted angry rebuttals from Turkish authorities. They directed their ire at Reuters, which broke the story, and blocked access to the piece on the internet. There followed another incriminating story in The Wall Street Journal exposing how sanctioned Russian cargo has made more than 100 stops at Turkish ports since the invasion of Ukraine. The conspiracy club immediately seized on both news items as examples of dirt the United States would continue to leak unless Erdogan caved on Sweden in time for the NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11-12.

Those who still entertain illusions that Erdogan might resume talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader, will have been sobered by the arrest this week of Merdan Yanardag, the head of opposition television channel Tele 1. As Ezgi Akin reported, Yanardag was locked up after lamenting Ocalan’s continued isolation in Imrali, the prison island where he’s been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in 1999. Ocalan has been denied access to his family since 2021 and to his lawyers since 2019.

Life in the slammer is especially hard for women. Cigdem Mater, a Turkish filmmaker who was imprisoned for an allegedly seditious film that she never made, was told by prison authorities that she could not purchase tampons from the prison commissary because “Turkish women do not use tampons.” Ezgi Akin had that story.

Nazlan Ertan had two pieces detailing the pronounced drift towards religious conservatism in the public sphere. Imams are being appointed as “spiritual counselors” to elementary and secondary schools. The anti-LGBTQ campaign is also continuing full swing, with pro-Islamic pressure groups and government deputies calling for the closure of an exhibition in Istanbul featuring the country’s top artists on the grounds that they contain “perversity and blasphemy.” My gay friends in Istanbul don’t seem too concerned, even as the government reportedly mulls passing laws banning LGBTQ associations. They view the noise around their “deviance” as more of a ploy to distract the public from inflation and other woes. 

Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is apparently hoping to capitalize on Erdogan’s religiosity to score brownie points as his tiny Christian nation faces further assault by Turkey’s top ally, Azerbaijan. He called the Turkish leader to wish him a “Happy Eid.” I explained Pashinyan’s thinking here.

If you are in a masochistic mood, you can tune into my utterly depressing conversation with veteran Turkish journalist Yavuz Baydar, who edits the Free Turkish Press news site and believes Turkey’s descent into full blown authoritarianism is irreversible. 

If you are an Erdogan fan you will be cheered by this video showing the supposedly ailing Turkish leader shooting hoops recently.

I am a huge fan of the Turkish rap artist Ezhel and absolutely thrilled that he will be touring Germany in the autumn. Click on this link for his schedule and enjoy the weekend!