Former guerrilla has NATO’s fate in her hands
A Swedish MP born in the Kurdish mountains holds a swing vote as NATO prepares to make a decision based on Sweden’s policy towards the Kurds.
As a teenage Kurdish guerrilla fighter in northern Iran, Amineh Kakabaveh could hardly have imagined that one day she would hold the fate of Europe in her hands. But 35 years later, after an extraordinary life that began in the Kurdish mountains and led to exile in Sweden, as an MP in Stockholm she holds a swing vote in the national parliament at a moment when the most important decision NATO has had to make for decades depends on Sweden’s policy towards the Kurds.
On Wednesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is likely to veto applications lodged by Sweden and Finland to join NATO, their response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He wants their governments – and in particular Sweden’s – to adopt a more hostile policy towards the Kurdish parties and militias Turkey is fighting in its own southeast and in northern Syria and Iraq. That comes up against the influence of Sweden’s small but vociferous Kurdish exile community on its politics.
Mr Erdogan told the Swedish prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, that he wanted to see a “concrete change in attitude” from her country, but that she had not so far “alleviated Turkey’s concerns”, according to his office. That appears to have dashed any remaining hopes for a compromise by the NATO summit in Madrid, which was supposed to have agreed the Swedish and Finnish applications.
Some Turkish officials have even demanded the extradition of Ms Kakabaveh, 51, as a condition of a deal. She is a lone independent in a parliament otherwise evenly divided between Ms Andersson’s Social Democrat-led government and the opposition. She said that she would rather Sweden not join NATO than give way to Mr Erdogan’s demands. “It’s unbelievable that Sweden is so scared of Putin that it would abandon everything it stands for another dictator, Erdogan,” she said.
Sweden and Finland, long neutral outliers in northern Europe, rushed in their NATO applications within weeks of Russia’s tanks rolling across the Ukrainian border in February. With unanimous approval being required from all 30 existing NATO members for their applications, Mr Erdogan was always seen as the most likely obstacle. He has developed a close working relationship with President Putin in recent years after their countries ended up on opposing sides of a number of Middle East conflicts, particularly in Libya and Syria.
At first Erdogan signalled there would be no opposition in principle – Turkey had in any case supplied Ukraine with one of its most potent weapons against Russian tanks, the light Bayraktar 2 attack drone.
But then he seemed to sense that he should use the strong bargaining position offered him by the two Nordic countries’ applications. Sweden has been a haven for Kurdish dissidents from across the Middle East, with more than 100,000 Kurds among its sizeable ethnic minority population, much to the annoyance of Turkey.
Although the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla group fighting in southeast Turkey, is banned in Sweden as it is in the rest of the EU, its ideological allies have a strong representation.
Like the PKK, Komala, the Iranian-based Kurdish group with which Ms Kakabaveh trained as a teenager, is a secular left-wing opposition movement demanding greater autonomy for the ethnic group whose heartland spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and northern Syria.
In fact, Ms Kakabaveh’s name is not thought to be on the list of those whose extradition Turkey is demanding, but prominent activists and journalists are. Mr Erdogan will meet Ms Andersson, President Niinisto of Finland and Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, on Wednesday in the hope of reaching a compromise. But Turkish analysts say that is unlikely to happen quickly, even though they believe Mr Erdogan sees it in his long-term interests to allow Sweden and Finland to join.
He may have in mind that elections are due in Sweden later this year. While Ms Kakabaveh won enough assurances about the government’s position to abstain from a confidence vote earlier this month – allowing Ms Andersson and her ministers to stay in place – Ms Kakabaveh is unlikely to retain her seat.
She has little trust in the Swedish government to resist Turkish demands afterwards. “The Kurds, and many other people like me of other backgrounds, don’t like the idea of membership of NATO,” she said. It was bizarre to see Sweden try to curry favour with an “Islamist dictator” like Mr Erdogan.
Sinan Ulgen, of the Edam think tank in Istanbul, said Mr Erdogan still wanted to “recalibrate” Turkish foreign policy on more pro-NATO lines. But he added: “A lot will depend on the steps that will be promised by Sweden to demonstrate its willingness to more seriously tackle this issue of the fight against PKK influence.”
The Times
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