Sunday 05 / May / 2024
Ankara: Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar on Saturday announced that a planned visit by Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson to Turkey had been cancelled.
The visit, aimed at overcoming Turkey's objections to Sweden's bid to join the NATO military alliance, had been scheduled for next week.
"At this point, the visit of Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson to Turkey on January 27 has become meaningless. So we canceled the visit," Akar said.
Later on Saturday, Jonson tweeted that he and Hulusi had agreed to postpone the visit on Friday during a summit at the Ramstein air base in Germany.
"Yesterday I met with my Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar at the US military base in Ramstein, Germany. We decided then to postpone the planned meeting in Ankara until later," Jonson said.
"Our relations with Türkiye are very important to Sweden, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue on common security and defence issues at a later date," he added.
Why was the visit cancelled?
Akar cited a planned far-right protest in Stockholm — at which a copy of the Muslim holy book, was to be burned — as the reason for the cancellation.
Swedish authorities granted Rasmus Paludan, a Swedish-Danish politician whose anti-Islamist actions sparked riots across Sweden last year, to stage the protest near the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.
"It is unacceptable not to make a move or react to these [protests]. The necessary things needed to be done, measures should have been taken," Akar said.
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin condemned the protest, calling it a "clear crime of hatred."
"Allowing this action despite all our warnings is encouraging hate crimes and Islamophobia," he said.
"The attack on sacred values is not freedom but modern barbarism."
On Friday, Turkey summoned Sweden's ambassador over Swedish authorities' permission for the protest.
Meanwhile, pro-Kurdish and pro-Turkish groups in Sweden were planning demonstrations in Stockholm over the weekend.
Ankara had summoned the ambassador at the start of a month over a video circulated on social media showing an effigy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan swinging from a rope at a Kurdish protest in Sweden's capital.
Turkey holds off on approval of NATO bid
Ending decades of military non-alignment, Sweden is seeking to join the NATO alliance in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Accession is only possible with the approval of all the alliance's current members, including Turkey.
Turkey has demanded that Sweden and neighbouring Finland crack down on Kurdish militants in exchange for support for the countries' membership bid. Helsinki and Stockholm have since signed a memorandum with Ankara to secure its support for the two Nordic countries' accession to NATO.
Turkey says progress depends on Swedish steps to extradite people it accuses of "terrorism" or of having ties to a 2016 coup attempt.
