Mark Campbell
Our subject this week is Turkey blocking Sweden and Finland’s applications to join the NATO alliance after Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, and what this will mean for the Kurds.
I’m very happy to say that joining us today to give us her thoughts is Iida Käyhkö, a Finnish academic and feminist activist, researching the criminalisation of the Kurdish freedom movement at the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London.
On 18 May 2022 it became apparent that the applications of Sweden and Finland to join the bloc in the wake of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine were going to be blocked by fellow NATO member Turkey.
The excuse given by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was that Ankara knew Stockholm and Helsinki to support and harbour Kurdish militants.
“We asked for 30 terrorists. They said: ‘We are not giving them’. You won’t hand over terrorists but you want to join NATO. We cannot say yes to a security organisation that is devoid of security,” Erdoğan said in a speech in parliament.
Turkey’s concerns about terrorism were “legitimate”, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said.
Aso Viyan, a member of the diplomacy commission at the Finnish-Kurdish community’s representative body Kurdish Democratic Community Centre, said Turkey’s block was meant to “blackmail NATO and the United States, and also get the green light from Russia to occupy more territories in Rojava”.
“Accepting any demands of Turkey means killing more civilians, ethnic cleansing and demographic change, empowering dictatorship and eradicating democracy,” Viyan said in an interview with Declassified UK.
For this podcast, Käyhkö and Medya News take a deeper look into this issue and to see how Erdoğan’s threats resonate in the Nordic countries themselves.
Käyhkö has been monitoring Finnish media and the reactions in Finland to Turkey’s veto threats. She spoke about the background of Finland’s relations with Turkey, and separately the Kurdish struggle for rights in the Middle East.
Käyhkö spoke about Erdoğan’s motive for the veto, the timing in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Turkey’s intentions to occupy more territory in northern Syria.
She also spoke clearly about Erdoğan’s criminalising language against Kurds, and the role of NATO’s more prominent members in relation to Turkey’s demands from Finland and Sweden.
Käyhkö painted a clear picture of the domestic atmosphere in Finland and of some of the political reactions to Turkey’s threats, including the stance taken by some parties on the left and the youth section of the Left Alliance, who recently voted for a proposal to unban the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey accuses Syrian Kurdish groups of being affiliated with the PKK, which is currently listed in the European Union’s list of foreign terrorist organisations although several efforts are underway to get the group delisted.
