Leave it to Erdogan to throw a wrench in the works

 The push for NATO expansion and strengthened Western resolve has hit a road bump:

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has come out against allowing Sweden and Finland to join Nato, putting the two Nordic countries’ hopes of joining the western military alliance in jeopardy.

 

In a move that could undermine Turkey’s efforts to strengthen ties with the US and Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Erdoğan — whose country has been a Nato member since 1952 — on Friday said he could not take a “positive view” of the two nations’ potential bids for membership.

 

The obstacle was their support for the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long armed insurgency against the Turkish state, he said. It is classified as a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the US and the EU. Turkey’s president also named a far-left extremist group.

 

“Scandinavian countries are like some kind of guest house for terrorist organisations,” Erdoğan told reporters, referring to the Nordic countries. “They are even in parliament.”

 

He added: “At this point, it’s not possible for us to look positively at this.”

 

Some Swedish officials and MPs have been worried that Turkey could pose the most dangerous opposition to a potential Nato bid, which appears to be backed by most of the alliance’s other 29 members but requires unanimous support.

 

“There are a lot of Kurds in Sweden, there are a lot of MPs with Kurdish background, Sweden has been active on the Kurdish issue — I’m afraid there could be a backlash,” one senior Swedish official said earlier this month.

 

Finnish and Swedish diplomats have been crossing Europe and the Atlantic to curry favour with Nato members, whose ratification is necessary for them to become members.

The Turkish president has a different set of criteria for weighing factors on a situation like this. 

But then, he's harbored prejudice against Kurds all his political life and has a track record of acting on it: 

In troubled times, people worship self-assured leaders, and Erdogan sees himself as the anointed vessel of Ottoman resurrection. He allowed Islamic State to murder Kurds and unleashed his army on them. He must and can be stopped.

 

Kurds, formerly referred to as Mountain Turks, constitute more than 20% of the country's citizens. Many want independence, but in 1999, the inspirational, formerly separatist Marxist leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, urged peace after being captured and jailed. Most obeyed, but many still dream of uniting with Kurdish enclaves in Syria, Iraq and Iran to re-establish historic Kurdistan.

In 2013, Erdogan promised to recognize Kurdish identity and language, and increase Kurdish liberties. A truce followed, but hostilities resumed in 2015. Erdogan said he was responding to PKK terrorism. The PKK claimed Erdogan destroyed the ceasefire by building dams and security stations in Kurdish regions. In either case, a war was on. Erdogan attacked with helicopter gunships, artillery and armored divisions, murdering thousands and displacing 335,000 mainly Kurdish citizens. A UN report described destroyed villages as moonscapes. 

 Erdogan perceives Kurdish nationalism as an existential threat. 

Recalling the Armenian Genocide, Turkish Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk lamented Erdogan's mass killings of Kurds. Pamuk er was prosecuted for insulting "Turkishness," and public Pamuk book-burnings followed. International outcry spared Pamuk imprisonment, but he sees his once democratic moderate Muslim country heading towards "a regime of terror."

So where do things stand regarding Erdogan vis-a-vis the Kurds at present and in the near-term future?

The economic and foreign struggles of Turkey combined with the fact that the Turkish government historically has pushed its failures onto minority groups means that the ultra-nationalist alliance in Turkey will further scapegoat, persecute, and brutalize minorities, especially the Kurds, because much of their ongoing foreign policy is centered around the Kurds and the alleged existential threat they present. 

There's been a feeling in a lot of quarters for some time that Turkey was arguably the iffiest member of NATO. We now have a rather high-stakes example of this that is going to be thorny to deal with.