NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will attend the inauguration ceremony of re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Saturday 2 June as he works to lift Turkey's opposition to Sweden's membership of the Alliance.
During his visit, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, he will hold bilateral talks with President Erdogan and several senior Turkish officials, NATO said Friday in a statement.
'As soon as possible'
Jens Stoltenberg announced on Thursday his intention to visit Turkey "in the near future" to try to remove obstacles to Swedish membership and ensure that the Scandinavian country "becomes a member of the Alliance as soon as possible". Turkey and Hungary are the latest of the 31 NATO countries that have not yet ratified Sweden's membership. Finland, for its part, formally became the Alliance's 31st member on 4 April. Re-elected on 28th May as head of the country, President Erdogan has so far blocked the Swedish candidacy, accusing Stockholm of being a haven for Kurdish militants qualified as "terrorists" by Turkey. He is demanding the extradition of dozens of activists. But Sweden stresses that it has not received any precise list and that it is independent courts that ultimately rule in these cases.
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Fulfilling a key demand of Ankara, the Swedish Parliament has passed a new law banning activities linked to extremist groups, strengthening its terrorism legislation. The legislation came into force on Thursday. "I am confident that Hungary will also ratify the accession protocol," Stoltenberg told a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Oslo on Thursday. During this meeting, the head of Swedish diplomacy, Tobias Billström, said that his country now fulfilled all the conditions for NATO membership, "including new legislation on terrorism", and called on Turkey and Hungary to lift their opposition. Many ministers present in Oslo expressed the wish that a decision on Swedish membership could take place before the NATO summit in Vilnius on 11 and 12 July, a hypothesis that Jens Stoltenberg described as "absolutely possible" on Tuesday.
A new incident has come to remind the fragility of the Swedish candidacy: a pro-Kurdish group broadcast earlier this week a video on social networks showing the projection on the Swedish Parliament of a flag of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) hated by Ankara. Turkey condemned the "unacceptable" action and asked Stockholm to prevent a demonstration by militants close to the PKK and Kurdish armed groups in Syria scheduled for Sunday in the capital.