The Kurdish question

According to a trilateral memorandum signed at the end of June between Sweden, Finland and Turkey, all parties commit to addressing Turkey’s requests for deportation or extradition of terror suspects. This referred particularly to cracking down on the alleged funding and recruitment of the Kurdistan Workers' Party's (PKK), which Turkey, the U.S. and the EU classify as a terrorist organization.

The Kurdish people mostly live in southeast Turkey, northern Syria, northern Iraq and northwest Iran. They have faced a long history of discrimination in Turkey, where the Kurdish language was banned until 1946. The PKK's ostensible aim is equal rights for Kurds and Kurdish autonomy within Turkey, but it has carried out terror attacks in the country for four decades.

So far, Finland and Sweden have addressed the requests but declined the Turkish demand to extradite a number of its citizens.

Turkey will have to finally agree to their accession.

During negotiations on the memorandum, Turkey also accused the Nordic countries of being “guesthouses for terrorists” to which Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Ann Linde responded that the PKK has been defined as a terrorist organization in Sweden since 1984, eight years before the EU followed suit.

Since signing the memorandum, some authorities in Sweden have echoed Turkey’s demands, including Swedish Security Police chief Charlotte von Essen, who called for a ban on demonstrations in solidarity with the PKK in July. In response, Janne Flyghed, professor of criminology at Stockholm University, called the proposal a threat to freedom of speech.

Turkey’s aims do not seem to be limited to only cracking down on the Kurds. At the end of May, Turkish officials demanded that Finland extradite a Turkish man whom Turkey accuses of defaming the president.

So far, Helsinki has declined to take any action based on the request. The court dealing with the matter has stated that extraditing the man would be a violation of human rights and the right to free speech.

Turkey's diplomatic leverage

At the end of July, Turkey reaffirmed its demands and stated that neither Nordic country had fulfilled their part of the memorandum. Furthermore, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu also added that if Helsinki and Stockholm would not meet the demands of the memorandum, Turkey would block their membership.

As more member states move to ratify Finland's and Sweden’s memberships, Turkey will have to finally agree to their accession or do something drastic with serious repercussions for the world's biggest military alliance. For the time being, however, it seems that Turkey will try to squeeze as much diplomatic leverage as possible from the memorandum signed with the Nordics until the very last moment.

And even if the Sweden and Finland do join the alliance, a Turkish attack on the Kurds in Syria would put the Nordic states in a serious predicament.