If Sweden Won’t Stand Up to Turkey, the US Should

There’s a Turkish joke about a political prisoner who goes into his prison’s library and gives the librarian a list of books he’d like to check out. The librarian looks at his list and then responds apologetically, “I’m sorry. We don’t have these books. We only have their authors.”

Turkey has already humiliated Sweden by successfully extorting concessions in the hope that the Swedish government could get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to lift his consensus-busting veto on Sweden’s NATO accession. The Swedish foreign minister has already said that Sweden will distance itself from the Kurdish militias in Syria who liberated captured Yezidis and fought the Islamic State at a time when Erdogan supported the militant group.

Erdogan is now demanding more. He has already given Stockholm a list of dissidents and activists he wants Sweden to extradite. Because of Erdogan’s intolerance of dissent, he has launched a multidecade crackdown on the Turkish press at home. Turkey now ranks below Qatar and China-controlled Hong Kong in Reporters Without Borders press freedom rankings, and is barely above Russia. Now, he seeks to leverage his NATO veto to export his purge.

 
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Πηγή: aei.org