(Istanbul) Turkey on Saturday canceled a planned visit by the Swedish Minister of Defense, to denounce an anti-Turkish demonstration authorized in Stockholm, a new incident in the negotiations on NATO between the two countries.
“Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson’s visit to Turkey on January 27 has lost its meaning and meaning, so we have canceled it,” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said.
The purpose of this visit was to try to remove Ankara’s objections to Sweden’s entry into NATO.
The authorization given to a Swedish-Danish right-wing extremist, Rasmus Paludan, to demonstrate on Saturday in front of the Turkish embassy in the Swedish capital aroused the anger of Ankara.
Under heavy police protection and sheltered by metal barriers, this anti-Islam and anti-immigration activist, as he had announced, burned a copy of the Koran, noted an AFP journalist.
“If you don’t think there should be freedom of expression, you have to live elsewhere,” said this regular in the burnings of the Koran, in a diatribe of almost an hour.
The Swedish police had estimated Friday that the Constitution and the freedoms of demonstration and expression in Sweden did not justify the prohibition of this demonstration in the name of public order.
On Saturday, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin condemned the planned protest, calling it a “manifest hate crime”.
“To allow this action despite all our warnings is to encourage hate crimes and Islamophobia,” he tweeted. “The attack on sacred values is not freedom, but modern barbarism,” he added.
In protest, several dozen people gathered at the end of the day on Saturday in front of the Swedish consulate in Istanbul, where they burned a Swedish flag and called on Ankara to break all diplomatic ties with Stockholm, noted a journalist from the AFP. Others demonstrated near the Swedish embassy in Ankara.
PHOTO EMRAH GUREL, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Demonstrators protest outside the Swedish consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on Sunday.
Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, has via a statement from its Foreign Ministry “condemned and denounced that the Swedish authorities allowed an extremist to burn a copy of the Koran in front of the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm “.
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have also condemned the move.
The head of Swedish diplomacy condemned “an appalling Islamophobic provocation” and stressed that the authorization of the demonstration did not mean that it was supported by the executive.
“The Islamophobic provocations are appalling. Sweden has very extensive freedom of expression, but that does not imply that the Swedish government, or myself, supports the views expressed,” Tobias Billström tweeted.
“Terrorists”
On Friday, Turkey had already summoned the Swedish ambassador to Ankara to “condemn this provocative action which clearly constitutes a hate crime – in the strongest terms”, according to a diplomatic source.
It was the second time in a few days that the Swedish representative in Ankara was summoned by the Foreign Ministry, after the release last week of a video showing a hanged mannequin, identified as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
This staging was carried out by a group close to the Rojava Committee, support for the Kurds of Syria.
A pro-Kurdish demonstration, in which this committee participates, also began on Saturday afternoon in a square in central Stockholm, against Swedish membership of NATO and Turkish President Erdogan.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTINE OLSSON, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Kurdish protesters with flags bearing the likeness of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in Stockholm on Sunday
Several hundred people were gathered, with many flags of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the European Union.
Turkey has been blocking Sweden’s – and Finland’s – entry into NATO since May, accusing them of harboring Kurdish militants and sympathizers whom it calls “terrorists”, in particular those of the PKK and its allies in northern Syria and Iraq.
For Ankara, any possible progress depends on Swedish moves to extradite people accused by Turkey of terrorism or of taking part in the 2016 coup attempt against Mr Erdogan.