The Swedish Prime Minister deplored on Wednesday July 6 the action of deputies from a left-wing party who posed with the flag of the Kurdish PKK, at a time when Stockholm is trying to coax Turkey into joining NATO.
“The PKK is on the list of terrorist organizations, not only in Sweden but also in the EU, and posing with these kind of flags is extremely inappropriate“said Magdalena Andersson in an interview with the TT agency.
PKK confirmed terrorist by Stockholm and Helsinki
Sweden and Finland signed an agreement last Tuesday with Turkey which immediately lifted Ankara’s veto on the entry of the two Nordic countries into the alliance. The text confirms that Stockholm and Helsinki consider the PKK to be a terrorist organization and that the two capitals undertake not to support various groups hated by Ankara, including the Kurdish armed movement YPG in Syria. Sweden and Finland also undertake to studypromptly and meticulously»Turkish extradition requests. The agreement has aroused concerns in the major Kurdish community of Sweden and criticisms in Swedish left parties, which accuse the government of having given up too much to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The action by several parliamentarians from the leftist party took place on Tuesday during a week of Swedish political party summer schools on the island of Gotland, where they are seen posing with PKK flags, but also YPG and the armed movement of Kurdish women YPJ. MP Lorena Delgado Varas, one of those who posed with the flags, lamented Stockholm’s hypocrisy towards Kurdish groups in Syria who fought the Islamic State jihadist organization. “Now they are turning, to get closer to the Erdogan dictator. All that to reach NATO“, she wrote on Twitter.
Hostile to membership of NATO, the Left Party (ex-communist) is a parliamentary support of Magdalena Andersson, without being part of the government. If Turkey gave its green light to the first phase of the membership candidacy of Sweden and Finland, the Turkish parliament must still ratify this entry.
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Ankara warned that this ratification would be conditioned on compliance with the commitments made by Stockholm and Helsinki. President Erdogan said last week that Sweden had “promised“To extradite 73”terroristsLiving on her soil and wanted by Ankara, even if no commitment of this kind appears in the agreement signed on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Madrid.
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