Turkey on Saturday called off a visit by Sweden’s defense minister over a planned demonstration by a right-wing extremist in Stockholm, Agence France-Presse reported.
Turkey has been angered by a permit obtained by Rasmus Paludan, a Swedish-Danish politician whose anti-Islamist actions sparked riots across Sweden last year, to stage a protest in front of its embassy in the Swedish capital.
A day after summoning the Swedish ambassador over the issue, Ankara said it was canceling a visit by Sweden’s defense chief that was aimed at overcoming Turkey’s objections to Sweden’s bid to join the NATO military alliance.
“At this point, Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson’s visit to Turkey on January 27 has lost its significance and meaning, so we canceled the visit,” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said.
Jonson also confirmed the decision to postpone the visit, which he said was made together with Akar at the US air base in Ramstein, Germany, on Friday.
Yesterday I met with my Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar at the US military base in Ramstein, Germany. We decided then to postpone the planned meeting in Ankara until later. (1/2)
— Pål Jonson (@PlJonson) January 21, 2023
“Our relations with Türkiye are very important to Sweden, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue on common security and defence issues at a later date,” he tweeted.
Paludan expressed his intention to “burn the Koran,” Islam’s holy book, during his protest on Saturday.
In April last year, Paludan’s announcement of a Koran burning “tour” for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan sparked riots across Sweden.
Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu hoped that Swedish authorities would not allow the protest.
“It’s a racist action, it’s not about freedom of expression,” he said.
‘Modern barbarism’
Turkish presidential spokesman İbrahim Kalın on Saturday condemned the planned protest, slamming it as a “clear crime of hatred.”
“Allowing this action despite all our warnings is encouraging hate crimes and Islamophobia,” he tweeted.
“The attack on sacred values is not freedom but modern barbarism.”
Turkey had on Friday summoned Sweden’s ambassador to “condemn this provocative action, which is clearly a hate crime — in the strongest terms,” a diplomatic source said.
Foreign ministry officials told the ambassador that Sweden’s permit for the protest under the pretext of defending democratic values was “unacceptable,” the source added.
This is the second time in more than a week that Sweden’s ambassador to Turkey was summoned.
Last week, he was called to answer for a video posted by a Kurdish group in Stockholm that depicted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan swinging by his legs from a rope.
A tweet by the group Rojava Committee of Sweden compared Erdoğan to Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was hung upside down after his execution in the closing days of World War II.
Sweden, along with neighboring Finland, needs Turkey’s consent to join NATO.
Both countries dropped decades of military non-alignment last year when they applied to join the Western defense alliance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ankara says any progress depends on Swedish steps to extradite people it accuses of terrorism or of having played a part in the 2016 coup attempt against Erdoğan.
Turkey also argues that Sweden has not done enough to crack down on Kurdish groups that Ankara views as “terrorists.”