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SWEDISH-SAUDI ARMS DEAL

MILITARY

‘Neutrality to blame in Saudi arms scandal’

Sweden's neutrality policy and its inability choose between decency and Soviet oppression lies at the heart of the current Saudi arms deal scandal, argues libertarian Swedish commentator and author Fredrik Segerfeldt.

'Neutrality to blame in Saudi arms scandal'

Many are rightly outraged over the fact that Sweden has an arms trade agreement with the Saudi theocracy.

How can it come to pass that we have a state-to-state relationship with a terrible dictatorship based on the trade in capacity to commit violent acts?

There is an historical explanation.

For decades – during the Cold War – Sweden had a hard time choosing between communist oppression and democracy, and instead a sort of middle ground.

At the same time, we had to protect ourselves against a possible attack from the Soviet Union, and therefore needed a strong defense.

Since we were not part of a larger alliance, we had to build a huge, private industry that could provide the Swedish military with materiel.

Keeping an industry like that afloat cost a lot of money.

Developing an aircraft (JAS) or an anti-tank missile system (BILL) was extremely expensive. In order to make it work, we had to export a substantial amount of armaments.

Our neighhours, like NATO-members Denmark and Norway, could use NATO-integrated systems and thus buy equipment from other Western countries, and thereby gain all the specialization and economies of scale that entails.

So it is Sweden’s policy of neutrality that is the original culprit: it was the Russians and our inability to decide between decency and oppression that lies behind the Saudi arms deal scandal.

And this policy and practice – to secretly sell arms to dubious regimes – is a hangover from that.

This is quite unreasonable, of course.

Saudi Arabia is a harsh, religious dictatorship; an inhumane theocracy without the rule of law and the total lack of basic freedoms and rights.

Freedom House, which assesses the world’s countries for civil liberties and political rights, classifies the country as a completely non-free, giving it a score of 6.5 out of worst possible 7 in its rankings.

As recently as March 2011, Saudi forces took part in beating down the Arab spring of Bahrain.

Sweden should not have military cooperation agreements with such countries, but with like-minded people.

We should cooperate with states that stand for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Then we can share the cost of development and production of weapons systems. If we can buy weapons from democracies, we don’t need to sell them to dictatorships.

One positive aspect of Saudi scandal, however, is that an increasing number of commentators who have previously been extremely vague with respect to their stance on the democracy-dictatorship have now opened their eyes to this crucial difference.

They have realized that we need to distinguish how a state and its regime should be valued, depending on how it is controlled.

Our ability to make that distinction has been notoriously inconsistent for decades.

Finally, those who now shout the loudest about arms exports are the same people who strongly defend the United Nations (UN) and international law.

They have trouble with selling arms to Saudi Arabia, but not with “cooperating” with the state on matters such as human rights and women’s rights in the UN.

One moment they reject Saudi Arabia, only to give the state legitimacy as reformers the next.

It’s time to take the issue of Sweden’s relations with dictatorships more seriously.

In all contexts.

Fredrik Segerfeldt is a libertarian Swedish commentator and author. He has previously been affiliated with the liberal Swedish think tank Timbro as well as the New Welfare Foundation (Den Nya Välfärden).

This article was originally published in Swedish on the Newsmill opinion website. English translation by The Local.

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NATO

Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday he would back Sweden's Nato candidacy if the European Union resumes long-stalled membership talks with Ankara.

Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

“First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan told a televised media appearance, before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania.

Erdogan said “this is what I told” US President Joe Biden when the two leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.

Turkey first applied to be a member of the European Economic Community — a predecessor to the EU — in 1987. It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.

The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about Turkish human rights violations.

“I would like to underline one reality. Turkey has been waiting at the EU’s front door for 50 years,” Erdogan said. “Almost all the NATO members are EU members. I now am addressing these countries, which are making Turkey wait for more than 50 years, and I will address them again in Vilnius.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is due to meet Erdogan at 5pm on Monday in a last ditch attempt to win approval for the country’s Nato bid ahead of Nato’s summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th. 

Turkey has previously explained its refusal to back Swedish membership as motivated by the country’s harbouring of people connected to the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group, and the Gülen movement, who Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in 2016. 

More recently, he has criticised Sweden’s willingness to allow pro-Kurdish groups to protest in Swedish cities and allow anti-Islamic protesters to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

In a sign of the likely reaction of counties which are members both of Nato and the EU, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the two issues should not be connected. 

“Sweden meets all the requirements for Nato membership,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is not connected with it and that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue.”

Malena Britz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, told public broadcaster SVT that Erdogan’s new gambit will have caught Sweden’s negotiators, the EU, and even Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg off guard. 

“I think both the member states and Stoltenberg had expected this to be about Nato and not about what the EU is getting up to,” she said. “That’s not something Nato even has any control over. If Erdogan sticks to the idea that Turkey isn’t going to let Sweden into Nato until Turkey’s EU membership talks start again, then Sweden and Nato will need to think about another solution.” 

Aras Lindh, a Turkey expert at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs, agreed that the move had taken Nato by surprise. 

“This came suddenly. I find it hard to believe that anything like this will become reality, although there could possibly be some sort of joint statement from the EU countries. I don’t think that any of the EU countries which are also Nato members were prepared for this issue.”

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