The Erdoğan dictatorship wants Sweden to ban completely normal things such as protests and journalism.
Don’t other NATO countries have Rojava committees too? Is every single NATO country really as 1984 repressive as the Erdoğan regime is?
The discourse, the push-and-pull here in Sweden have been between our anti-Erdoğan groups vs our local government over how the latter (both S and M) seems to sweep things under rug, promise Turkey impossible things, sell out our own citizens etc.
A missing 🧩 has been other NATO countries. Can’t their citizens also join in with these sort of protests? Erdoğan effigies all around. Normalize it, don’t criticize it? 🤷🏻♀️
Erdoğan’s regime has leverage on Sweden and Finland right now. That’s why protests in other countries would be so valuable and vital. And they could be much more expressive and intensive because of that same lack of leverage.
It’d also assuage a lot of the fears we have about NATO. If other NATO countries could distance themselves from Operation Claw-Sword, if they could protest Erdoğan, that’d be a great message of support to both the AANES and to Sweden.
Provided, of course, that it’s true that they actually could do that. This proposal is also a mirror for these countries so they can discover whether they are as much under the thumb of Recep Tayyip as his own country is.
While joining NATO is not worth the blooded hands of joining Erdoğan’s repression, and I’d much much much rather we not join than bend the knee to the dictator, there are a lot of other options. The entire reason for the application in the first place was because we were getting uncomfy with the oligarch regime and Erdoğan’s good buddy Putin. If protests against Erdoğan within NATO can improve NATO or improve the situation for Rojava (Sweden’s ally!), that’d be good. Withdrawing would be status quo.