HELSINKI: Security concerns raised by Turkey in its opposition to Fin-land’s and Sweden’s NATO membership applications are legitimate, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Sunday during a visit to Finland.
“These are legitimate concerns. This is about terrorism, it’s about weap-ons exports,” Stoltenberg told a joint news conference with Finnish Pres-ident Sauli Niinisto while visiting him at his summer residence in Naantali, Finland.
Sweden and Finland applied to join the Western defence alliance last month, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But they have faced opposition from Turkey, which has accused them of supporting and harbouring Kurdish militants and other groups it deems terrorists.
Stoltenberg said Turkey was a key ally for the alliance due to its strategic location on the Black Sea between Europe and the Middle East, and cited the support it has provided to Ukraine since Russia sent troops into its neighbour on Feb 24. Moscow calls its actions a “special military opera-tion”. “We have to remember and understand that no NATO ally has suffered more terrorist attacks than Turkiye,” Stoltenberg said, using the Turkish pronunciation of the country’s name, as preferred by Turkey and its Pres-ident Tayyip Erdogan.
Stoltenberg and Niinisto said talks with Turkey would continue but gave no indication of progress in the negotiations.
“The summit in Madrid was never a deadline,” Stoltenberg said, referring to a NATO meeting in Madrid at the end of June.
Last month, the United States had struggled to get clarity from Turkey over the severity of its opposition to Finland and Sweden joining NATO, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took an increasingly tough line against their membership bids.
In a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the United Na-tions on May 19, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had offered mixed signals. He had affirmed his country’s support for NATO’s “open-door” policy and its understanding of Finland and Sweden’s desire to join the alliance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But he also repeated Erdogan’s demands that Turkey’s security concerns about the candidate nations be addressed.
“Turkey has been supporting the open-door policy of NATO even before this war,” he said. –Agencies
