by Tuvan Gumrukcu and Anne Kauranen
ANKARA/HELSINKI (Reuters) – Finland and Sweden will have to change their laws, if necessary, to meet Turkey’s demands and win its support for NATO membership, Turkey’s foreign minister said on Tuesday, reiterating his threat to veto a historic enlargement of the Alliance.
Turkey opposed on May 13 the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO on the grounds that they harbor people linked to groups it considers terrorists, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and because they halted arms exports to Turkey in 2019.
The Nordic states applied to join NATO after Russia invaded Ukraine and any membership must be approved by the 30 members of the Atlantic Alliance.
Mevlüt Cavusoglu said Turkey, a NATO member for seven decades, would not lift its veto until its demands were met, echoing recent comments by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Ankara said Sweden and Finland must stop supporting the PKK and other groups, ban them from holding events on their territory, extradite people wanted by Turkey for terrorism, support Turkey’s military and counter-terrorism operations. Ankara and lifting the embargo on arms sales.
“Are our demands impossible? No. We want them to stop their support for terrorism,” Mevlüt Cavusoglu told the official Anadolu news agency, adding that Ankara was aware that some of its demands would require a modification of the laws.
The Nordic states have declared that they condemn terrorism and are open to dialogue.
Finland and Sweden have sought to negotiate a solution and other NATO countries have said they are confident that objections raised by Turkey, which has the Alliance’s second-largest army, can be overcome.
(Reporting Anne Kauranen in Helsinki and Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara; French version Federica Mileo, editing by Kate Entringer)
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