BSS :
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signalled on Saturday that no progress had been made in Sweden’s bid to join NATO, urging Stockholm to take “concrete actions” to meet Ankara’s oncerns, his office said.
In a phone call with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, Erdogan
reiterated that “Sweden should take steps regarding such fundamental matters as combatting terrorism”, the Turkish presidency said in a statement.
Turkey “wanted to see binding commitments on these issues together with concrete and clear action,” he added. Finland and Sweden discussed their stalled NATO bids with Turkey in
Brussels on Monday, but Ankara dashed hopes that their dispute will be resolved before an alliance summit next week.
Turkish officials said Ankara does not view the summit as a final deadline for resolving Ankara’s objections. Andersson, who became prime minister late last year, said the conversation with Erdogan went well.
She tweeted that they had “agreed on the importance of making progress
ahead of the NATO summit in Madrid next week, where I look forward to meeting President Erdogan and other allied leaders”.
Ankara has accused Finland and in particular Sweden of providing a safe
haven for outlawed Kurdish militants whose decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Erdogan told Andersson that Sweden “should make concrete changes in its attitude” toward the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its Syrian affiliates, the presidency said.
