The Islamophobic extreme right, the Kurdish exile and the Swedish judiciary seem to have conspired to complicate Sweden’s entry into NATO. This Wednesday, Lamb Day, a man has desecrated a Koran near the Great Mosque of Stockholm, protected by a large police device. The reaction of the Turkish government, the final recipient of the provocation, has not been long in coming. “We condemn this despicable act against our holy book,” said the new Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan.
Turkey and Hungary maintain the veto on Sweden’s entry into the Atlantic Alliance, after having lifted it in the case of Finland, which had submitted its candidacy simultaneously. The NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has summoned both Nordic countries, in addition to Turkey, to a meeting on July 6, on the eve of the Atlanticist summit on July 11 and 12 in Lithuania, in an attempt to clear in extremis the Turkish reluctance.
The allegedly Iraqi provocateur – it has not been revealed if he is of Kurdish origin, like many of the Iraqi refugees and immigrants in the Scandinavian country – has torn out pages from the Koran, wiped the soles of his shoes with them, then stuffed them with slices of bacon and finally set it on fire, behind the police protection barrier, while some of the two hundred protesters applauded him and others cursed him. One of the latter, who tried to throw a stone at him, was subdued by the police. At the end of the provocation, and after waving a Swedish flag, the protagonist of it also received a police complaint for violating the summer ban on lighting fires and, according to some sources, also for inciting hatred.
“It is unacceptable to allow these actions under the pretext of freedom of expression,” Hakan said. “To tolerate such a heinous act is to be complicit.”
“Especially before the NATO summit, the Swedish authorities should put an end to the provocations,” added Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc. The performance derails some progress in Sweden, which has recently passed new anti-terrorism legislation that should facilitate some of Ankara’s requested extraditions of suspected Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members, especially when there is evidence of extortion of his own community and collection of the revolutionary tax. This same spring there has been a sentence in France with several prison sentences, along these lines.
In the case of Sweden, the Kurdish exile (from Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria and very active in left-wing formations) has staged several marches in recent months against the rapprochement with Turkey and accession to NATO, viewed with suspicion as two sides of the same coin.
Last January there was already a burning of the Koran in Stockholm, at the hands of a Danish far-right whose political party barely has votes. The Swedish police have sometimes prohibited this type of act for “security reasons”, but the prohibitions have been appealed by those concerned and systematically lifted by judges, in the name of freedom of expression.
Today, however, the police have not escaped the wrath of the imam of the mosque: “It was in their power, at least, to force a change of location, but they have refused.” Today is the first day of the Feast of the Lamb -or Sacrifice- as important in the Muslim calendar as Christmas is for Christians. Swedish citizens who live in difficult Muslim countries throw their hands up because of the risk to their integrity that this type of provocation poses, in a country that until now had been better known as an example of acceptance and non-alignment.
The Swedish provocation undermines various attempts at persuasion recorded in recent days, with a call today between German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the meeting a few days earlier between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Turkish counterpart.
Hakan Fidan, now head of Turkish diplomacy, is not a diplomat, not even a typical politician. He was, until a month ago, the head of Turkish espionage, in charge of the MIT agency. For this reason, in some circles he has begun to earn the nickname of “Turkish Putin.” The position puts him at the crossroads of the possible succession of Erdogan, whose health he once again gives rise to talk after being indisposed for several days in the middle of the campaign. His unexpected rise – to the detriment of former Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu – is compared by some to the rise of an even more obscure intelligence agent, Vladimir Putin, until he was anointed by Boris Yeltsin.
Hakan shares Kurdish origin with the Minister of Finance, Health or the Deputy Prime Minister. The Kurdish vote will be decisive in next spring’s elections in Istanbul, Ankara and other big cities that Erdogan’s AKP hopes to win back. In Turkey, more than in other countries, international politics and the rereading of history maintain the power to cast many votes.
Stoltenberg, for his part, says that “the time has come to welcome Sweden as a full member of NATO.” Finland will participate in the Vilnius summit, for the first time, as a full member of the organization. A victory for the former Social Democratic Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, which did not help her win the elections. Today Finland is governed by a coalition of the right and the extreme right. In Sweden itself, the Social Democrat who started the accession negotiations, Magdalena Andersson, was ousted a few months later by the conservative Ulf Kristersson.
