Tag: Sweden

NATO Summit shows Erdogan’s turn to the West

The NATO Summit held in Vilnius, Lithuania, last week was mostly about Ukraine’s joining the club. As a result, and a new NATO-Ukraine Council was established to help boost cooperation.

However, there is one more important aspect on the Summit results that deserves attention is the role of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who gave the green light to Sweden to join NATO.

Fresh and full of energy after the re-election, Erdogan seemed to meet everyone and be everywhere during the Summit and demonstrated his strong commitment to further collaboration with the West.

To the surprise of many, the Turkish leader, after years of blocking the Sweden’s efforts to get a NATO membership, this finally shook a hand of his Swedish counterpart. Certainly, Erdogan got a decent reward for his decision – hours after his vote for Sweden’s joining NATO the U.S. approved a supply of F-16 fighter jets delivered to Turkey.

For the first time since entering the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden also met his Turkish counterpart. Despite the relations of the two countries has been frosty recently due to Erdogan’s sharp comments towards the U.S., the European Union and the Western values in general, this time the Turkish leader seemed to have chosen the right tone to break the ice and described his American counterpart as “my dear friend” when giving his comments to the media.

But with the surprise comes some disappointment, too. Some experts believe, Erdogan showed that he was buckling under the West’s pressure. Before the summit, the entire Islamic world looked at him as the leader of Great Turkey with a stern stance to the Islamic values. But in fact, he changed his mind about Sweden and went along with it. The Turkish people were proud of their President for his steadfastness, character and ability to keep his word, but in fact he once again has shown he does not live up to expectations.

Playing different cards with opposing sides has become a signature of the Erdogan’s policy. However, changing mind and sides often results with ending up with nothing.

July 21, 2023
Greek sues over photo on ‘Turkish’ yoghurt in Sweden

A Greek man is suing a dairy in Sweden for 50 million kronor ($6.9m; £4.5m) for using his image on pots of Turkish-style yoghurt, Swedish media report.

The man only found out his moustachioed face featured on the containers of Turkisk Yoghurt made by Lindahls when a friend living in Stockholm told him.

Athanasios Varzanakos told Swedish Radio his friend “was annoyed and asked how it was possible” when informed.

The dairy said it bought the photograph in good faith from an image library.

Chief executive Anders Lindahl said it had come as a shock when the Greek man lodged a 40-page legal complaint saying that the company had used a misleading image because he had no links with Turkey.

“We bought it from a photo agency so we assumed that everything was in order,” Mr Lindahl told the AFP news agency.

The image remains on the Lindahls website despite the legal action.

Relations between Greece and Turkey have long been strained and at times have turned into outright hostility.

BBC

April 14, 2010
Armenia Thanks Sweden For “Genocide” Recognition

Armenia — President Serzh Sarkisian greets Goran Lennmarker (L), chairman of the Swedish parliament committee on foreign affairs, in Yerevan, 12 March 2010.

12.03.2010

Ruben Meloyan

Armenia’s leaders thanked Sweden’s parliament on Friday for adopting a resolution that recognizes the World War One-era mass killings and deportations of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.

President Serzh Sarkisian hailed the development at a meeting with Goran Lennmarker, the visiting chairman of the Swedish parliament’s foreign affairs committee. He said “recognition of and condemnation of crimes against humanity is the best way to avert such crimes.”

Speaking to RFE/RL earlier in the day, Lennmarker endorsed the resolution which was opposed by the Swedish parliament but passed by a 131-130 vote. He said he would have voted for the measure had he not been absent from Stockholm during Thursday’s vote.

Lennmarker, who is better known in Armenia as the Nagorno-Karabakh rapporteur of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, visited on Thursday the Yerevan memorial to up to 1.5 million Armenians killed in what many historians consider a genocide.

Parliament speaker Hovik Abrahamian also welcomed the resolution strongly condemned by Ankara. “I think that with its historic decision Sweden’s parliament … will also contribute to peace and stability in the South Caucasus,” Abrahamian said in a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Per Westerberg.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned, meanwhile, that the Swedish vote “can hurt relations between Turkey and Armenia.” He appeared to refer to the fence-mending agreements signed by the two estranged nations last fall.

The Turks were already fuming over a similar resolution that was approved last week by a key committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Reuters news agency reported that Turkish parliamentary speaker Mehmet Ali Sahin said on Friday Western countries whose assemblies have passed such resolutions should “look in the mirror, if they want to find criminals.” He mentioned no specific country.

“Our ‘friend’ Sweden has stabbed us in the back with one vote!” read a front-page headline in “Sabah,” a leading Turkish daily.

Fatih Altayli, editor-in-chief of “Haberturk” daily cited by Reuters, was more sarcastic: “Soon, there will be no Turkish ambassadors left abroad and no foreign country our officials can visit.”

https://www.azatutyun.am/a/1982309.html

March 12, 2010
Turkey Recalls Envoy After Sweden Recognizes Armenian ‘Genocide’

Turkish Ambassador to Sweden Zergun Koruturk said Swedish lawmakers ”acted thinking that they were historians rather than parliamentarians, and it’s very, very unfortunate.”

March 12, 2010

(RFE/RL) — Turkey has reacted angrily to a decision by Sweden’s parliament to recognize as genocide the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians by Turkish forces.

The parliament narrowly approved the resolution on March 11 despite opposition from the government in Stockholm.

Ankara immediately recalled its ambassador to Sweden over what it condemned as a resolution made for “political calculations.” And it said its Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was canceling a visit to the Scandinavian country planned for next week.

Sweden’s move comes just a week after Ankara recalled its ambassador from Washington following a U.S. congressional panel’s decision to approve a similar “genocide” resolution.

“I’m very disappointed,” said Turkey’s ambassador to Sweden, Zergun Koruturk. “Unfortunately the parliamentarians — I think they acted thinking that they were historians rather than parliamentarians, and it’s very, very unfortunate. This is going to have drastic effects on our bilateral relations and I don’t think it will be compensated in a short time.”

Genocide Issue

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed by their Ottoman Turk rulers in 1915 in a planned campaign of extermination.

Turkey accepts that many Armenians were killed, but it rejects the term “genocide,” saying the death toll has been inflated and that many Turks were also killed during a period of civil war and unrest.

Sweden now joins a growing list of countries recognizing the massacres as genocide, alongside Russia, France, and Switzerland among others.

But the March 12 vote was razor-thin. It passed by a one-vote margin thanks to several lawmakers from the ruling center-right coalition who broke ranks to back the measure.

Conservative legislator Gustav Blix and Hans Linde of the Swedish Left Party argued each side of the debate, with Blix saying: “This is not something that should be decided by parliament. It is a question for historians and not for politicians to decide on.”

Linde responded that “If the victims are not acknowledged and get their sufferings proved true, this trauma may go on for generations.”

Complicating Normalization?

Some worry that the vote could complicate not just bilateral relations between Turkey and Sweden — which has been a firm backer of Ankara’s long-standing bid to join the European Union.

Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, said it would have a knock-on effect on the halting process now under way to normalize ties between Turkey and Armenia.

“I’m very concerned, I am worried about the consequences,” Bildt said. “I got a report from Turkey that the opposition now wants the normalization of the contacts between Armenia and Turkey to stop. I think this politicizing of history risks making reconciliation more difficult.”

Ankara has also made similar warnings. In the latest, an official in Turkey’s ruling party said before Sweden’s vote that Ankara was extremely unlikely at this point to ratify its fence-mending protocols with Armenia.

Suat Kiniklioglu, deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that Turkish ratification had been made “more difficult” by the U.S. resolution.

But Swedish lawmaker Goran Lennmarker, told RFE/RL that he believed the reconciliation process would not be jeopardized, “irrespective of what happened” in Sweden or the United States.

Lennmarker is chairman of the Swedish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and the special representative of the OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly for Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory disputed by Armenia and Azerbaijan and site of a war in the 1990s.

“There should be ratification in the [parliament] of Turkey of the agreement as soon as possible, they don’t’ have to wait for anything else, not least a solution on Nagorno-Karabakh,” Lennmarker said.

RFE/RL’s Armenian Service contributed to this report. With agency reports

https://www.rferl.org/a/Turkey_Recalls_Envoy_After_Sweden_Recognizes_Armenian_Genocide/1981705.html

March 12, 2010