Turkey has shifted attention to US warplanes from Koran-burning in endless bargaining on Sweden’sNato entry.<\/p>\n
It looked like a done deal on 11 July, when Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan shook hands withthe Swedish prime minister at a Nato summit in Vilnius.<\/p>\n
He also put his signature on a written promise to “transmit the accession protocol for Sweden to theGrand National Assembly [Turkish parliament], and work closely with the assembly to ensureratification”.<\/p>\n
In return, Sweden pledged to crack down on anti-Turkish “terrorists” and help Turkey to get EUcustoms perks and visa-free travel, but declined to ban Koran-burning due to free-speech laws.<\/p>\n
And the deal “made history” said Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg at the time.<\/p>\n
But as the Turkish parliament prepares to resume work after summer, Erdo\u011fan has spotlightedanother demand \u2014 for the US to first sell Turkey high-tech F-16 fighter jets.<\/p>\n
Erdo\u011fan told press on Sunday (10 September) he had spoken to US president Joe Biden about thepurchase in the margins of a G20 summit in India.<\/p>\n
In his view, it was the US that was making untoward demands. Biden had linked the F-16 deal toSweden’s Nato bid and “this approach seriously upsets us”, Erdo\u011fan said, according to Reuters.<\/p>\n
But in another view, it was Turkey that wanted to lock the F-16s into a grand bargain on Sweden.<\/p>\n
“It [the F-16 deal] is apparently largely contingent upon agreeing on a sequencing that everyone trusts.Congress is reluctant to approve the sale until Turkey has ratified, whereas Ankara doesn’t want to giveup its leverage [Sweden] without first getting the sale,” said Paul Levin, the director of StockholmUniversity’s Institute for Turkish Studies.<\/p>\n
“Both sides [Turkey and the US] publicly deny that there is a linkage between the F-16 deal and Natoenlargement, but my sense is that the former is the key to the latter,” Levin added.<\/p>\n
Turkey-US defence ties soured four years ago, when Turkey bought an anti-aircraft system from Russiainstead of its Nato ally America.<\/p>\n
The Turkish foreign ministry didn’t reply to EUobserver.<\/p>\n
But one Istanbul-based international relations expert and asset manager, Alp Sevimlisoy, gave aninsight into feeling in the country.<\/p>\n
Turkey should get the F-16s because it “is now the supreme military power in its region” and “the only[Nato] partner with the necessary prowess capable of containing both Russia and China,” in the BlackSea area, he told EUobserver.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Erdo\u011fan’s demands on EU customs perks and visa-free travel are less likely to delaySweden ratification.<\/p>\n
The European Commission told EUobserver Nato issues had nothing to do with its technical talks on”resolving trade irritants”.<\/p>\n
Any breakthrough on visas is also likely to take months, with six out of 72 onerous benchmarks still tomeet, instead of coming before Turkey’s parliament reconvenes.<\/p>\n
But for Levin, Erdo\u011fan wouldn’t burn any more goodwill in Nato for the sake of his EU demands alone.<\/p>\n
“If, for other reasons, he [Erdo\u011fan] is not ready to drop his [Sweden] veto, he might use that as anexcuse. Otherwise no, I don’t think those things are important enough to him,” Levin said.<\/p>\n
“The Swedes and the rest of Nato have the belief that Erdo\u011fan made a firm commitment in Vilnius andthat it is only the long summer vacation of the Turkish Grand Assembly that is holding ratification up,”said Jamie Shea, a former senior Nato official who now teaches war studies at Exeter University in theUK.<\/p>\n
“When the assembly reconvenes in October there will be strong expectations that ratification will moveahead. But expect Erdo\u011fan to talk tough and raise doubts to the end,” he added.<\/p>\n
Orb\u00e1n factor<\/p>\n
The careful “sequencing” of trust is being further complicated by Hungary, the only other Nato statestill to ratify Sweden’s bid.<\/p>\n
A few days after Erdo\u011fan shook hands on things at the Nato summit in July, Hungarian foreign ministerP\u00e9ter Szijj\u00e1rt\u00f3 also pledged, via a Facebook post: “If there’s movement there [in Turkey’s stance], thenof course we’ll keep the promise that Hungary won’t delay any country in terms of [Nato] membership”.<\/p>\n
The Hungarian parliament is to resume work on 25 September, but opposition MPs don’t expect primeminister Viktor Orb\u00e1n to leave his friend Erdo\u011fan on his own in negotiations just yet.<\/p>\n
“Orb\u00e1n is watching Erdo\u011fan and I don’t think Hungary will be the last one [Nato state] to ratify,” said\u00c1gnes Vadai from the opposition Democratic Coalition party. “Probably they’ll arrange it so that theHungarian parliament votes first, but nobody knows when,” she said.<\/p>\n
And all that leaves behind the issue of Koran-burning in Sweden, which enraged Erdo\u011fan so muchbefore the summer that he said Swedish police must ban it if Sweden wanted to join Nato.<\/p>\n
Korans<\/p>\n
Various people have kept burning the Muslim holy book in Sweden in separate anti-Islam protests inAugust.<\/p>\n
For Sevimlisoy in Istanbul: “Sweden will answer to Ankara’s will”.<\/p>\n
And if it won’t, he said: “It may be time for Turkey to view Finland’s already agreed entry into Nato as asatisfactory already achieved, stand-alone in the interim”.<\/p>\n
“New Koran-burnings and pro-PKK [Kurdish group] demonstrations in Sweden might stir up enoughtrouble to stall the [Nato] process,” Stockholm University’s Levin added.<\/p>\n
But for the Swedish Institute, a government body which monitors foreign media coverage, Erdo\u011fan isn’tpushing that button any more.<\/p>\n
“We can see that there has been a lot less coverage in news media as well as in social media during thelast Koran burnings, compared to the coverage after the Koran burning on 28 June,” it said.<\/p>\n
“This goes for the coverage in Turkish and a number of other contexts,” it added, with Hungarianlanguagemedia also declining to report on the latest burning cases.<\/p>\n
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