To many Europeans, the PKK’s enduring appeal among Kurds reflects Turkey’s own democratic shortcomings. Kurdish pleas for cultural autonomy have gone unanswered for decades
hopefuls dropped a partial arms embargo against Turkey and promised to crack down on financing and recruitment by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (, Turkey’s president, had earlier threatened to spoil the welcome parade for the two Nordic countries, accusing them of harbouring terrorists. “While terrorist organisations are roaming the streets of Sweden and Finland, will we open our doors to them?” he said on June 15th.
The war has raged mostly in south-east Turkey, where a majority of people are Kurds, and in the mountains of northern Iraq. Recently it has spilled into Syria. The’s local offshoot, known as the People’s Defence Units, became the ground force in America’s war against Islamic State in 2015, and eventually brought down the self-described caliphate. The Kurds ended up in control of long swathes of Syrian land on the border with Turkey.
Well over 1m Kurds, many of them refugees, have settled in European countries other than Turkey. Finland is home to up to 18,000; as many as 100,000 live in Sweden. European countries have also become magnets forloyalists, and are a focus of the group’s fundraising and recruitment efforts.
The row is fundamentally one over the meaning of terrorism. Kurdish politicians and activists in Turkey are routinely thrown into jail alongside militants. On June 16th 16 Kurdish journalists were arrested in Diyarbakir, a city in south-eastern Turkey, on vague terror charges. The list of people that Turkey wants extradited from Sweden includes writers and publishers. One of them has been dead for years.
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