In a surprise move, Turkey has ended its veto on Sweden joining Nato, thereby removing all the barriers to its membership of the military alliance.

Hungary quickly followed suit and, as a result of the two countries’ support, a consensus was able to be reached at the 2023 Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agreeing to support Sweden’s bid to join will be touted as one of the key achievements of the summit.

Sweden submitted its formal application for membership in May 2022 alongside Finland, which was admitted into the alliance in April 2023.

Sweden, though not a formal member, has had a very close relationship with Nato for almost 30 years, since joining the alliance’s Partnership for Peace programme in 1994. It has contributed to Nato missions. And as a member of the European Union and contributor to the bloc’s common security and defence policy, it has also worked closely with the vast majority of European Nato allies.

In pursuing Nato membership, both Sweden and Finland have dramatically shifted their traditional policy of military non-alignment. A critical driver of this move was, clearly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It is also more evidence that Russian president Vladimir Putin has failed to achieve two of his own strategic objectives: weakening solidarity in the alliance and preventing further Nato enlargement towards Russia’s borders.

Finland and Sweden’s accession is of significant operational importance to how Nato defends allied territory against Russian aggression. Integrating these two nations on its north flank (the Atlantic and European Arctic) will help to solidify plans for defending its Ukraine-adjacent centre (from the Baltic Sea to the Alps). This will ensure that Russia has to contend with powerful and interoperable military forces across its entire western border.

Why Turkey lifted its veto

For a few years now, Turkey’s relationship with Nato has been nuanced and strained. Turkey’s objections to Sweden’s accession were ostensibly connected to its concerns over Sweden’s policy towards the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Turkey has accused Sweden of hosting Kurdish militants. Nato has acknowledged this as a legitimate security concern and Sweden has made concessions as part of its journey towards Nato.

Image by DANIEL DIAZ from Pixabay

The main material driver of the agreement, however, may always have been a carrot being dangled by the US. American president Joe Biden now appears to be moving forward with plans to transfer F-16 fighter jets to Turkey – a deal that appears to have been unlocked by Erdoğan’s changed stance on Sweden. But it is often the case that a host of surrounding deals and suggestions of deals can help facilitate movement at Nato. Everyone, including Turkey, now seems able to sell the developments as a win to their constituents back home.

The ‘Nordic round’

Sweden’s accession means all Nordic nations are now part of Nato. As well as being significant in operational and military terms, this enlargement has major political, strategic and defence planning implications. Although Finland and Sweden have been “virtual allies” for years, their formal accession means some changes in practice.

Strategically, the two are now free to work seamlessly with the rest of the Nato allies to plan for collective defence. Integrating strategic plans is extremely valuable, particularly considering Finland’s massive border with Russia and Sweden’s possession of critical terrain like the Baltic Sea island of Gotland. This will increase strategic interoperability and coordination.

Nato allies also open their defence planning books to one another in unprecedented ways. Finland and Sweden will now undergo bilateral (with Nato’s international secretariat) and multilateral (with all allies) examinations as part of the Nato defence planning process. They will also contribute to the strategic decisions that undergird that process.

Their defence investments will also be scrutinised (and they will scrutinise the spending of other allies). Initial analysis suggests that while Finland and Sweden have lagged behind their Nordic neighbours’ increases in defence investment since 2014. Finland’s investment in defence leapt significantly leading up to and following its accession to Nato. While we may not know for months if the same is true of Sweden, we may expect similar increases on its part. Alliance norms and peer pressure are powerful.

The expansion of Nato to include Sweden is a major step for all these reasons. But while anyone watching the Vilnius summit will naturally now be asking whether the shift changes the situation for Ukraine’s membership aspirations, an answer is unlikely to be on the near horizon. Any final decision on Ukraine being offered a membership action plan for the time being is a bridge too far, especially in the current context of an ongoing war with an outcome that, as yet, is unpredictable.

Simon J Smith, Associate Professor of Security and International Relations, Staffordshire University and Jordan Becker, Director, SOSH Research Lab Assistant Professor of International Affairs, United States Military Academy West Point

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hate acts targeting minorities are not actually free speech, of course.*

The great exponent of mystical Islam, Sayyed Hossein Nasr, argued that if we want to understand the position of the Qur’an in Muslim societies, we should think of it as the way Christians venerate Christ. It is the very “Word of God,” which of course is what Christians call Jesus (John 1:1).

Nasr wrote, “What corresponds to Christ as the word of God in Christianity is not the Prophet Muhammad but the Koran in Islam.”

So burning the Qur’an is sort of like throwing a big wooden crucifix with the corpus of Christ on a bonfire.

Iraqis in several cities, led by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, held demonstrations for the past two days against the desecration of scripture. On Thursday they had tried to storm the Swedish embassy in Baghdad.

Ironically, the man who burned the Qur’an in Sweden is himself Iraqi, and he had served alongside the Shiite militias in a Chaldean Christian Popular Mobilization Force, fighting ISIL, which targeted Iraqi Christians. A lot of Iraqi Christians are angry about how Muslim fundamentalists in Iraq treated them after the American invasion. Since they are Christian they seem to have been unfairly tagged as somehow related to the American occupiers, but this allegation was untrue. Many Kurds and Shiite Muslims were close to the Americans, though.

It is interesting to me that there are indications in the Qur’an itself of how believers should respond to ridicule and harassment. In the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself, the Qur’an says, pagans in the city of Mecca subjected the early believers to a great deal of humiliation.

I wrote about these peace verses in my edited book,

Peace Movements in Islam, edited by Juan Cole. London: IB Tauris, 2021. Click here. .

Enwrapped 73:10-12 speak of how the believers were to respond to hostile comments: “Be patient with what they say and take your leave of them graciously. Leave to me the affluent who impugn your integrity, giving them a short reprieve, for we possess shackles and a searing abyss . . .”

The notion of leaving vengeance to God can be compared to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 12:19, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

The Prophet was so far away from harboring any ill-will toward his opponents that in Ornaments 43:33-35, Muhammad appears to speak in his own voice with these sentiments: “If it would not have caused all people to observe a single communal path (an yakun ummatan wahida) we would have bestowed roofs of silver and staircases for their houses on those who reject the All-Merciful, and would have furnished their homes with fine doors and couches on which to recline, and gilded ornaments. But all that is merely for the enjoyment of the life of this world, whereas the hereafter is for the God-fearing.”

The Criterion 25:63 says, “The servants of the All-Merciful are those who walk humbly upon the earth — and when the unruly address them, they reply, “Peace!”

The word for “unruly” here literally means “ignorant,” but it was used in that era to refer to people who lacked self-control. They clearly were low-lifes, taunting the believers, who kept their dignity and replied by praying for peace and security for their tormentors.

The Table 5:45 in the Medina period paraphrases Deuteronomy 19:21. Arberry translates it this way: “And therein We prescribed for them: ‘A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation’; but whosoever forgoes it as a freewill offering (tasaddaqa bi), that shall be for him an expiation (kaffara). Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down – they are the evildoers.”

So, as in the Gospels it is urged that the faithful go beyond the principle of an eye for an eye to exercise forgivenes, so in the Qur’an believers are urged to forgo demanding this satisfaction for a wrong against them, and it is implied that exercising restraint in this regard will bring the blessings of divine forgiveness on the believer.

Distinguished 41:33-35 observes, “Whose discourse is more beautiful than one who calls others to God and performs good works and proclaims, ‘I am a monotheist? The good deed and the evil deed are not equal. Repel the latter with what is best and behold, it will be as though the one, with whom you have a mutual enmity, is a devoted patron. Yet to none is this granted save the patient (alladhina sabaru), and to none is it granted save the supremely fortunate.” This remarkable verse goes beyond counseling gracious withdrawal from and forgiveness of foes to urging doing good toward them and returning their evil deeds with good ones, which over time has the prospect of winning them over and making them patrons rather than enemies.

So that’s it. That’s how the Qur’an advises dealing with unruly and hostile harassers. Return good for evil. Win them over. Wish peace on them. If the harassment becomes too much, withdraw graciously.

It might be objected that there are verses in the Qur’an authorizing violence. There are, but they are clearly about permission for self-defense when being violently attacked by marauding enemy warriors. They aren’t talking about how you would behave in peacetime and in civil society. Christian thinkers also made a distinction between war-time ethics and peace-time ones.

The Christian monk Athanasios of Alexandria (d. 373) wrote, “For even in the case of the other actions in life we will find that there are differences based upon the circumstances in which they are done. For example, it is not permitted to commit murder, but in wars it is both lawful and praiseworthy to destroy one’s enemies, so much so that those who displayed valor in war are deemed worthy of the highest honors, and monuments to them are erected to proclaim their achievements. And so, the same action is not permitted in certain circumstance and at certain times, but is allowed and excused in different circumstances and at the right time.”

I also discussed the historical context for these verses in my biography of the Prophet Muhammad:

Juan Cole, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires (NY: Bold Type Books, 2018). Click here.

—–

*An earlier version of this posting linked to an article alleging that Sweden had banned the burning of the Hebrew Bible. Apparently the person threatening to do so actually withdrew the threat before the police could decide on the issue.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Israelis are watching political developments in Europe with interest, particularly in Sweden and Italy, amid fears that the Jewish communities there may soon face problems. Italy, for example, is expected to have a right-wing government involving Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and Matteo Salvini’s party, the League (formerly the Northern League). Israelis consider this to be problematic because of their previous links to the extreme right and neo-fascists. However, even the list of centre-left candidates for the Democratic Party included figures who publicly expressed anti-Semitic and anti-Israel positions.

Israel’s concern over the outcome of the elections requires the government to establish common interests and closer relations with the various parties. It is true that the latter are generally supportive of Israel in certain aspects, but not as a whole. There is also anti-Semitism in Italy, including Holocaust denial.

A real challenge facing the Israeli project for colonizing the West Bank is posed by the left. The Italian left encourages the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and pro-Palestinian positions. More seriously for Israel, is that all such positions pass quietly without an official response. There has to be a question mark over how and to what extent the incoming Italian government will fight against anti-Semitism and anti-Israel positions.

There is a fear in Israel that a right-wing Italian government will take anti-Israel positions at the UN, and oppose anti-BDS legislation. The number of openly anti-Israel Italian MPs across all parties may increase, putting doubts in Israeli minds about how far the allies of Israel in Rome will go to defend Israel, especially against BDS campaigns.

Although support for BDS in Italy is relatively low compared with other countries, the problem of anti-Semitism still exists. This has prompted the Jewish community to agree with the Italian Ministry of Education to teach about anti-Semitism in schools. An agreement has also been reached with the Roman Catholic Church to review all textbooks and remove everything related to religious and political anti-Semitism. Zionists believe that any anti-Israel activism is de facto anti-Semitism, but such conflation of the two is disputed.

Away from the elections, Israel is concerned about growing Palestine solidarity among Italians. Major Italian cities — including Rome Milan, Genoa, Turin and Florence — witness frequent demonstrations against Israel’s illegal settlements. Palestinian Italians as well as local solidarity groups take part.

In Sweden, meanwhile, the far-right has also swept to power after many years of left-wing government. This constitutes another challenge and opportunity for Israel to renew and strengthen its relations with the government in Stockholm.

Sweden is generally not friendly towards Israel; successive left-leaning governments probably explain why. The past eight years of a Social Democrat government had a negative record in terms of Sweden’s attitude towards Israel state, especially under former Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom. The Social Democratic Party has an influential pro-Palestinian lobby.

Before the latest election in Sweden, especially under Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, relations with Israel improved, but that was a little late. Now the right-wing parties show a more positive attitude towards Israel. They tend to sympathise with Israel as an extension of the West in a hostile Islamic region. They stood with Sweden’s Jewish community in the face of an increase in anti-Semitic violence.

It is worth noting the position of Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid towards the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats. His Foreign Ministry has supported the boycott of the party on the basis that Israel, officially at least, does not give legitimacy to parties with a neo-Nazi heritage. Such a policy will not serve Israel in its relations with Sweden over the next four years, as the Sweden Democrats will be the most influential party. Paradoxically given such a heritage, the party is a supporter of the Zionist state. Israel may not have the luxury of giving up its contact with the Swedish far-right, despite its Nazi heritage, because it is now a political majority.

Relations between Israel and Sweden have stumbled from crisis to crisis, with Israel accusing the left-wing government in Stockholm of being one of the most hostile in Europe, and behind many EU initiatives to condemn Israel at every opportunity. Former Foreign Minister Wallstrom has always waved a “red card” towards Tel Aviv, as Israel puts it, which prompted Israeli leaders to refuse to meet her.

Today, Israelis are cautiously optimistic about the right-wing victory in Sweden, claiming that this will mean a change in foreign policy towards Israel. The belief is that most of these parties are more pro-Israel, although they do not support Jews; oppose the recognition of an independent State of Palestine; and call for tighter control over financial aid for the Palestinians.

Dr Adnan Abu Amer is the head of the Political Science Department at the University of the Ummah in Gaza. He is a part-time researcher at a number of Palestinian and Arab research centers and he periodically writes for Al Jazeera, the New Arabic and the Monitor. He has written more than 20 books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian resistance and Hamas.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Article lightly edited for Informed Comment house style.

This week, as NATO held its summit in Madrid, Erdogan folded and said his country would welcome the two new entrants to the treaty organization. NATO immediately issued an invitation to the two countries to join, with the process likely to be fast-tracked. The two had applied for NATO membership out of fear that without it, Russian President Vladimir Putin might do to them what he did to Ukraine.

The big losers in these developments are Putin, who lambasted NATO for expansionism, and the Syrian Kurds, whose major paramilitary force has lost further legitimacy in the eyes of Europeans.

President Biden observed at the NATO summit in Madrid that Putin had sought the Finlandization of Europe, but got the NATO-ization of Europe. Biden also announced a bigger US troop presence in eastern Europe, including in Poland. Washington’s confrontational policy with a nuclear-armed power, however, poses dangers for the future.

The Turkish government has waged a battle against the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, for over forty years. Some 40,000 persons are thought to have been killed in the dirty war fought between the PKK and the Turkish army. The PKK was initially a Marxist group, and the US feared it as an arm of Moscow during the Cold War, concurring with Türkiye that it is a terrorist group. Kurds comprise about 20% of Türkiye’s population and are concentrated in the poverty-stricken southwest of the country. Opinion polls and voting patterns do not suggest that very many of them have separatist tendencies.

Ankara had defeated the PKK, capturing its leader Abdullah Ocalan, by the late 1990s. Then the movement got a new lease on life when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, since in the subsequent chaos, some 5,000 PKK guerrillas were able to establish a base at Qandil in Iraq’s northeastern, heavily Kurdish, highlands.

Then when the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, the Syrian Kurds threw off central government rule. The Democratic Union Party took over the Syrian Kurdish regions, with its YPG paramilitary. The YPG is viewed by Ankara, which was petrified at its new autonomy since it is right on Türkiye’s border, as merely the PKK by another name. The US and most other countries did not agree, seeing the YPG as an ally against the ISIL terrorist organization and against the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad. But Erdogan in Türkiye branded the YPG terrorists.

After the US used the YPG to take Raqqa and defeat ISIL, Trump abruptly agreed in the fall of 2019 to pull US troops out of Syria’s northeast and to allow Erdogan to invade northern Syria and attack the YPG, in campaigns that also killed, wounded and displaced thousands of ordinary Kurdish villagers.

Finland and Sweden, which has a sizeable Kurdish expatriate community, condemned Türkiye’s incursions into Syria and said they would decline to sell certain arms to Ankara as a result.

Erdogan saw an opportunity in their application for NATO membership, over which he had a veto as a longstanding member of the treaty organization, to push the two countries away from their stance on the YPG.

Altun Fahrettin, the Turkish communications director, announced on Twitter according to AA that all parties “agreed to full cooperation against the terror organization PKK and all its extensions . . . Sweden and Finland committed to stand with Türkiye against all forms of terrorism and promised not to provide support to the PYD/YPG and FETO terror groups.” They also, he said, committed to removing any arms embargoes on Türkiye and to increase military cooperation with the country. He concluded, “they have committed to revise counter-terrorism laws to address our concerns regarding terror activities cloaked under pseudo political activities.”

So Erdogan got the commitments he wanted on the Kurdish groups accused of terrorism, including the YPG, about which there is disagreement among NATO members.

Natasha Turak at CNBC reports that another sweetener to the deal may have been an offer by President Biden, who is meeting with Erdogan in Madrid, to allow Türkiye to buy F-16s. The Pentagon became wary of such sales to Ankara after the latter showed interest in the Russian S-400 missile defense batteries, which are connected to the internet of things and so could spy on nearby U.S. high-tech weaponry.

The episode shows the way in which Türkiye has benefited from the Russian war on Ukraine. Ankara has declined to join the US-led NATO economic boycott of Russia, but continues to sell deadly drones to Ukraine. It was able to change Swedish and Finnish foreign policy on Türkiye and the YPG, and to emphasize its importance to Washington as NATO’s easternmost bulwark.

( Waging Nonviolence) – “What local people?” This was the highly controversial question posed in 2014 by the former head of the British mining company Beowulf — to dismiss concerns over the impacts of a proposed iron-ore mine on the Indigenous Sámi people. The project is set to take place in Gállok, an Arctic region located within Sápmi. This is the name of the ancestral territory of the Sámi, who have lived in reciprocity with all sentient beings dwelling in this part of the world since time immemorial. That is, until this way of living was assaulted through the colonization by Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

Almost eight years later, in late March 2022, Sweden’s social-democratic government finally awarded a mining license for Gállok. Despite many efforts to stop the project, the government decided to side with Beowulf, ignoring the wide chorus of criticism by Sámi governing bodies, environmental activists, scientific experts and leading international organizations. Based on Western governments’ current transition plans, this decision could pave the way for ever more erasure of Indigenous livelihoods, destruction of biodiversity and violations of fundamental rights.

In February 2013, the government agency that oversees mining interests — the Swedish Geological Society — designated Gállok as “an area of national interest for minerals.” This decision gave the green light to start exploratory drilling in Gállok. In response, the Sámi and their allies mobilized one of the most significant resistance movements against extraction industries in Sweden to date.

Beowulf‘s planned iron mine would perpetuate previous issues tied to extraction industries in Sápmi, such as the violation of fundamental Indigenous rights, the eradication of the reindeer’s seasonal migration patterns and the degradation of rivers. Moreover, the area is a living entity in its own right, and an open-pit iron-ore mine would endanger the lands’ own rights to exist.

“Today, our reindeer have to live with the negative impacts of ‘renewable’ energy production and large-scale forestry,” said Jan-Erik Länta, whose reindeer herding community would be affected by the mine. “In addition, we also have to work around infrastructures and deficient conservation policies.”

According to Länta, Sápmi is already experiencing aggregated effects of a warming climate, which is amplifying their issues even more. “There is no more room for a co-existence between Sámi livelihoods and extractive industries,” he said.

Both private and state-owned companies increasingly claim that their projects in Sápmi are “green” and could help ease the impacts of climate change. For example, Swedish companies like Sveaskog rebranded its tree plantations in the region as “carbon storage facilities.” Meanwhile, LKAB legitimizes its mining operations in Sápmi through decarbonization, and Vattenfall obscures the detrimental environmental impact of their dams by emphasizing that they produce “renewable energy.”

Since its inception, Swedish governments repeatedly refused to take measures that would counteract the systemic violation of the Indigenous inhabitants who live on the lands Sweden claims for itself. For example, they have not ratified international conventions for the protection of Indigenous rights, including the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention Nr. 169 by the International Labour Organization. Quite the contrary, Swedish colonialism is sustained and promoted via a revolving door between the leadership of international corporations, industry lobbyists and high-ranking government officials.

Together, they advocate false climate solutions across economies that stretch well beyond Sápmi. For example, a new deep-sea wire recently set up to transfer wind and water energy extracted from Sápmi to continental Europe has been dubbed “the green link.” Despite the well-established disastrous impacts of wind and water industries on Sámi communities, the Dutch, German and Norwegian companies behind the initiative pride themselves on making “green energy available safely and affordably in the E.U.” This exemplifies the widespread disregard of these actors when it comes to the upstream consequences of their projects, especially for Indigenous communities like the Sámi.

Greenwashing colonial exploitation

In contrast to common perceptions, colonization is not driven exclusively by settlements, military conquest and corporate expropriation — nor are its impacts limited to far off people and lands. Today, colonization is maintained via neo-colonial institutions. Authorities simply point to seemingly objective legal codes and technocratic administrations to repackage and legitimize their exploitative violence as a necessary evil for the so-called greater good.

To distract from the structural devastation of extractive economies on Indigenous people, colonial states like Sweden often point towards consultations as a mechanism to ensure checks and balances. However, Indigenous communities and researchers regularly report how such processes end up in favor of corporations. In practice, most of these consultations are merely a smoke-screen for colonial exploitation, ignoring key principles like free, prior and informed consent. These principles are protected by international human rights recognizing the right of people to self-determine how they chose to pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

In 2020, for example, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination evaluated a mine, similar to the one proposed in Gállok, built on the lands of the Vapsten Sámi reindeer herding community. In its report, the committee highlighted how state-sanctioned consultation processes in Sweden create a perception of choice while reducing fundamental rights to mere economic interests. For example, consultations do not allow Sámi communities to reject projects — their inclusion is only meant to “polish the project somewhat from a reindeer herding perspective.” The committee declared these practices as acts of racial discrimination on several accounts.

Beyond attempts at greenwashing, Western states continue to justify colonial practices by rendering the colonized unfit to govern themselves and their lands. This approach invalidates traditional livelihoods and allows for the creation of sacrifice zones, for example, as happened by the flooding of areas in Sápmi during the construction of water dams. Concerns for the climate crisis result in the creation of new sacrifice zones. This green colonialism is facilitated by the expansion of the wind industry in Sápmi, promoted by private investors like German Aquila Capital or international banks like Credit Suisse.

Given the West’s continuous prioritization of economic growth, every stopped project in one sacrifice zone increases pressures in another. This is not a matter of single-issue politics; it is a systemic failure that turns the entire planet into a sacrifice zone. Decisions like a mine in Gállok strengthen the role of short-term economic gains to guide how social progress is evaluated. 

While global ecological breakdown disproportionately benefits a small elite, the impacts are imposed on the global majority, largely Black, Indigenous and people of color, especially women and workers. This is exemplified by the fact that high-consumption countries in the global North alone are responsible for 92 percent of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary.

The bottom line is that most current climate solutions promoted by Western governments ransom our collective future by pitting people against one another. In Sápmi, for example, these solutions rely on forest workers, miners, and public servants to carry out fundamental rights violations, forced displacements and extermination of ecosystems.

We must hold actors that promote such unjust and misleading climate solutions accountable. A key aspect of this work is to resist the spread of fraudulent environmentally-friendly language, dismantle racism and nurture narratives to counter the monolith of Western techno-utopias. As Indigenous communities across the world have repeatedly highlighted: the idea of destroying nature to protect her is ill-fated at best and fatal at worst.

To promote genuine climate solutions

The Indigenous Environmental Network recently looked at the impact of Indigenous-led resistance to fossil fuel projects across Turtle Island — the landmass commonly referred to as North America. They found that in the last decade, “Indigenous opposition has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.”

The historical forces of colonization have tied our fates together. If we are to avert a climate dystopia and create a just, healthy and sustainable future for all, then we must support Indigenous communities’ self-determination, learn with Indigenous knowledge holders, and return stolen lands into the hands of their ancestral custodians.

“Today, the Sámi are required to appeal to colonial governments and their legal frameworks to raise concerns about projects impacting our lands,” said Sanna Vannar, whose reindeer herding community will also be affected by the mining project in Gállok. “But we never gave up our territories. Sámi customary law and land management should have the final say on any initiatives in Sápmi.”

Under present political structures, Sámi are constantly forced to navigate their lives in relation to all kinds of colonial intrusions, from discriminatory policies to hate speech and extractive industries. The movement in Gállok is not simply a reaction to Beowulf’s plans to build an iron ore mine. The effort to protect livelihoods, culture and lands doesn’t stop with Gállok. Theirs is a radical politics of refusal connected to generations of Sámi who have struggled for their people’s legitimate right to self-determination

We have to provide the necessary space to address how current practices by Western governments and complicit companies reproduce structures of oppression and violence. These processes require us to, for example, nurture reciprocal relationships, transition our communities to become caretakers in service of the planet and abolish anthropocentric worldviews.

The climate emergency is a systemic issue. There is no space for green-washed justifications of business as usual. Projects like the mine in Gállok are designed to feed the same capitalist monsters that are responsible for escalating the climate crisis. Together, we have the tools and knowledge to make false climate solutions obsolete, emphasizing our collective creativity, love and imagination.

The Sámi’s traditional ways of living in symbiosis with their lands, through reindeer herding, fishing and hunting, provide the most consistent approach to achieving reciprocal relations between humans and nature in Sápmi today. They teach us that genuine climate solutions require the implementation of just transformations, inserting communal self-determination, restoring the rivers and letting the reindeer roam.

Instead of forcing Sámi to adapt their livelihood and cultural practices to a mine in Gállok, we should support them to develop on their own terms as a free Indigenous people.

This story was produced by Resistance Studies

—
Jenni Laiti

Jenni Laiti is a Duojár (Master of Traditional Sámi Crafts), Indigenous Rights Activist and Climate Justice Advocate. She is engaged across Sámi civil society, most recently with increased attention on the resistance movement against a planned mining project in Kallak/Gállok in her home village, advocating for climate justice in Sápmi and working with local Sámi communities to strengthen Sámi self-determination and local governance.
Florian Carl

Florian Carl is an Italy based community organizer supporting multi-front anti-colonial struggles, decolonization initiatives, and climate justice. He has long worked alongside frontline communities of the climate crisis, for example, as a project coordinator and campaigner for the People’s Climate Case. Florian has recently been awarded a four-year PhD scholarship at the Centre on Social Movement Studies, writes debate articles, and is passionate about creating electronic music.

Via Waging Nonviolence

The longstanding neutrality of Sweden and Finland was abandoned when both states submitted formal applications to Nato. But they are facing an unexpected obstacle on the way to membership: Turkey. While Turkey supports the alliance’s “open door” policy, Ankara’s veto reflects its aims to change the status quo and make gains in three areas: the eastern Mediterranean, Syria – and in its own domestic politics.

Turkey has always had bumpy relations with Nato. In 2009, Ankara blocked the appointment of the former Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as Nato secretary-general, because of his defence of free speech during the Danish cartoons crisis in 2006. He also allowed a rebel Kurdish TV station to broadcast from Denmark into Turkey. Another low point was in 2019, when Turkey started a military campaign against the Kurdish forces in Syria. This led to Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, criticising Ankara for “jeopardising” the fight against Islamic State.

The current crisis is in some ways a hangover from previous episodes particularly in relation to the Kurdish region in Syria. But it is unfolding against the backdrop of different geopolitical realities, including the deterioration of relations between the west and Russia, as well as a new domestic political context in Turkey.

Turkey vs Greece

There is an interesting backstory to the recent confrontation between Greece and Turkey involving tensions between the US and Turkey – which have been building up for some time. When, in 2017, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed on a deal for the purchase of Russian S-400 missile system, the US retaliated with the exclusion of Turkey from the F35 jet fighters development programme, banning Turkey from the purchase of the jets. The Biden administration has reportedly been considering dropping this ban in recent months, prompting the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, to urge the US Congress to reconsider.

There’s a complex background to all this. Athens is a key player in eastern Mediterranean energy politics, and the exploration of energy sources in the contested waters of the eastern Mediterranean as well as Egypt’s need to transport its natural gas exports to Europe has forged an alliance between Greece, Israel, Egypt and Cyprus – a bloc which excludes Turkey. Meanwhile, the EU has sanctioned two executives of Turkish Petroleum Incorporated Company for “illegal drilling activities”, because they were unauthorised by the Republic of Cyprus, which claims sovereignty in the area.

But as the search for alternative energy sources for Europe continues against the backdrop of the breakdown of relations with Russia over the war in Ukraine, Ankara sees an opportunity to break its isolation by becoming an energy hub for the west. However it believes Sweden and Finland’s prospective Nato membership could increase opposition to Turkey’s energy interests within the alliance in favour of Greece and Cyprus.

Turkey vs YPG

Meanwhile Sweden and Finland have operated an arms embargo against Turkey since 2019, prompted by Turkish military operations against Kurdish People’s Defence Forces (YPG) in northern Syria. Turkey sees the YPG as the offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is recognised as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US and the EU.

Sweden is home to a huge number of Kurdish refugees, estimated at more than 100,000 and Ankara has long been uneasy about the relationship between the Swedish leadership and the the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD – the political wing of YPG). These concerns deepened after Magdalena Andersson was elected as prime minister in 2021, partly as a result of the support of a Kurdish member of parliament. It has been reported that the support was secured in exchange for increasing cooperation between Andersson’s Social Democrats and the PYD, including better treatment of the supporters of YPG in Sweden and not giving in to Turkey’s demands.

Turkey also claims that Sweden provides military equipment to the Kurds, something it has criticised as against “the spirit of the alliance”.

Like in the eastern Mediterranean, the new geopolitical context offers Ankara an opportunity to change the status quo in favour of Turkey. If Ankara were to secure Swedish and Finnish concessions on reducing support to the Kurds in Syria, it would be seen as an important victory for Turkey. Assurances that Sweden and Finland would not block the military equipment transfer to Turkey or veto the trigger of Article 5 of the Nato treaty in case Turkey is attacked by an aggressor, would also be significant gains.

Domestic politics

Domestic politics is also playing an important part in Turkey’s diplomatic manoeuvrings. According to the latest polls, Erdoğan faces stiff opposition in the 2023 presidential elections and his Justice and Development Party could lose its parliamentary majority to a united opposition alliance, thanks to a deepening economic crisis, high inflation and devalued Turkish lira.

Erdoğan, like any populist politician, knows how to manipulate voters by presenting himself as a strong hand against perceived enemies at home or abroad. Presenting a tough stance against Sweden and Finland’s support for the Kurdish forces in Syria, plays well to domestic audiences in Turkey. As does hitting back against Greece. It all adds up to a “siege mentality” strategy, which is likely to be the backbone of the government’s election campaign in coming months. The government is likely to make strong associations between the opposition parties and internal and external threats to help shift the focus from the deep economic crisis besetting the country.

Turkey cannot postpone Swedish and Finnish membership forever – but it’s possible that Ankara will receive some of the assurances it seeks. After all, Erdoğan has got away with using international crises for its own domestic and foreign policy ends. But in the context of a new cold war between the west and Russia, Turkey’s manoeuvrings might play into the hands of those questioning Turkey’s commitment to the alliance.

Ali Bilgic, Reader in International Relations and Security, Loughborough University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Turkey alone of the NATO members is refusing to join in sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and has attempted to host peace talks between the two sides.

Sweden and Finland sent delegations to Ankara on Wednesday to clear up what they consider to be misunderstandings.

The largest-circulation Turkish newspaper, Hürriyet reported on a statement by Swedish Prime Minister Magdelena Andersson, in which she said talks were ongoing. At a press conference, she said in exasperation, “Of course we don’t send money or weapons to terrorist organizations.” She underlined that Sweden was “one of the first countries to put the PKK on the terrorist list.”

The PKK is the Kurdistan Workers Party, which Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist organization. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s it was a Marxist guerrilla insurgency against which the Turkish army fought a dirty war in which 40,000 people are estimated to have died. Southwest Turkey is heavily Kurdish, but the modern Turkish state is based on Turkish ethno-nationalism and has difficulty accepting the notion of a multicultural state. On the other hand, however much some Kurds may chafe at restrictions on the expression of their identity, neither opinion polls nor voting patterns suggest that any significant number want to secede from Turkey.

Another issue is the Kurds of northern Syria, whose YPG militia Turkey considers to be identical to the PKK. The United States and European states typically disagree on this designation, considering the YPG to be independent of the PKK and to be innocent of terrorism charges. The US used the YPG to defeat the hard line fundamentalist ISIL terrorist organization in Syria. Erdogan’s spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, seemed to insist on Wednesday that Sweden and Finland list the Syrian YPG as terrorists, along with the Gulen movement.

Trump allowed Turkey to invade northern Syria in 2019 and to attack the Syrian Kurdish allies of the US. Turkey accuses Sweden and Finland of sympathizing with the YPG and of refusing Turkish extradition requests for expatriate members of the group. Sweden and Finland were so upset about the Turkish incursion into the Syrian Kurdish region that they refused to sell arms to Turkey, which Erdogan says is outrageous.

Turkey has five demands of Sweden and Finland having to do with ceasing military support for the YPG, halting the arms embargo on Turkey, and showing willingness to cease hosting expatriate YPG and Gulen members. Erdogan accused the Gulen group, with which he was allied for a decade and a half, of being behind a failed coup in 2016. Turkey says it wants these commitments in writing.

Columnist Mehmet Barlas at the mass circulation Sabah said that the resolution of the problem was very simple– that Sweden and Finland should commit to not breaking up Turkey along ethnic divides. He insisted that the solution had to come from NATO, which should be sensitive to Turkish security concerns, not from Ankara.

Jomana Karadsheh and Isil Sariyuce at CNN suggest that Erdogan may in part be acting out because he wants a closer relationship with US President Joe Biden. The two have so far not warmed to one another.

No doubt Erdogan’s demnds are one part posturing for his next election, which looks to be a tough one for him, and one part an “ask” for more perks from the US and/or NATO. He is also leveraging these applications to NATO to force Europe into an anti-Kurdish posture in line with his own priorities.

President Biden has expressed confidence that the issues can be resolved.

The neo Nazi Swedish Resistance Movement claims it was behind a wave of violence in Stockholm targeting homeless refugee children.

Swedish police have made at least four arrests after a mob stormed the country’s capital Stockholm in a spree of anti-refugee violence.

As many as 100 masked people marched through the city handing out fliers threatening to target “North African street children” and give them the “punishment they deserve,” according to local tabloid Aftonbladet.

The fascist group Swedish Resistance Movement has claimed responsibility for the demonstration. According to RT, the group has issued a statement claiming it “cleaned up criminal immigrants from North Africa” in central Stockholm.

The mob has been accused of attacking anyone on the street that didn’t appear white.

According to The Local, witnesses said at least three people were assaulted by the mob.

“They came from Drottninggatan (Stockholm’s main shopping street) and walked down toward the square and began to turn on immigrants,” the publication quoted one witness as stating.

Police have confirmed the mob was believed to have gathered “with the purpose of attacking refugee children,” according to The Guardian.

The violence came a day after Sweden’s interior ministry announced plans to deport tens of thousands of migrants and refugees.

The Swedish government has vowed to crack down on refugees, after receiving around 163,000 asylum applications in 2015. Most refugees heading for Europe are fleeing violence in countries including Libya, Syria and Iraq.

While far right groups have claimed the refugee intake threatens local culture, newly released European Union documents suggest the bloc has barely resettled 0.17 percent of what refugees member states agreed to take in in 2015.

This means more than 98 percent of the refugees included in the EU’s plan remain in Greece and Italy, the points of arrival for most people fleeing violence, war and poverty in various Middle Eastern and African nations.

Via

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Telegraph: “Swedish far-Right mob attacks migrants”

Following the Paris attacks on Friday, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom made a connection between Islamic State extremism and the Israeli occupation, causing a feud between the two governments, that the Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned its Swedish envoy on Monday.

In an interview with a Swedish TV channel, following the Paris attack, Wallstrom said she is concerned that Swedish youth will be radicalized to fight for the so called Islamic State group (Daesh or ISIS), and that the situation reminds her of Palestinians who resort to violence because they see no future for themselves.

“Of course we have cause for concern, not just in Sweden but throughout the world, because there are so many being radicalized, and again, it reminds us of the situation in the Middle East, where the Palestinians see that there is no future for them and have to either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”

Wallstrom later released an official response condemning the Paris attacks, which claimed the lives of at least 129 people and wounded hundreds.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry responded to Wallstrom’s comments by saying that her statements were “hostile” and “appallingly imprudent,” then summoned their Swedish envoy.

Sweden was the first European Union member to recognize Palestinian statehood in October of last year.

Via IMEMC