ISTANBUL
\nTurkey on Saturday called off a visit by Sweden\u2019s defence minister over a planned demonstration by right-wing activists in Stockholm.
\nTurkey has been angered by permission obtained by Rasmus Paludan, a Swedish-Danish politician whose anti-Islam actions sparked riots across Sweden last year, to stage a protest in front of its embassy in the Swedish capital.
\nA day after summoning the Swedish ambassador over the issue, Ankara said it was cancelling a visit by Sweden\u2019s defence chief that was aimed at overcoming Turkey\u2019s objections to Sweden\u2019s bid to join the NATO military alliance.
\n\u201cAt this point, Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson\u2019s visit to Turkey on January 27 has lost its significance and meaning, so we cancelled the visit,\u201d Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said.
\nJonson also confirmed the decision to postpone the visit, which he said was made together with Akar at the US military base in Ramstein, Germany, on Friday.
\n\u201cOur relations with Turkey are very important to Sweden, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue on common security and defence issues at a later date,\u201d he tweeted.
\nPaludan has expressed his intention to \u201cburn the [Holy] Koran\u201d, during his protest on Saturday.
\nIn April last year, Paludan\u2019s announcement of a Holy Koran burning \u201ctour\u201d for the holy month of Ramadan sparked riots across Sweden.
\nForeign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu hoped that Swedish authorities would not allow the protest.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a racist action, it\u2019s not about freedom of expression,\u201d he said.
\n\u2018Modern barbarism\u2019
\nTurkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin on Saturday condemned the planned protest, slamming it as a \u201cclear crime of hatred\u201d.
\n\u201cAllowing this action despite all our warnings is encouraging hate crimes and Islamophobia,\u201d he tweeted.
\n\u201cThe attack on sacred values is not freedom but modern barbarism.\u201d
\nTurkey had on Friday summoned Sweden\u2019s ambassador to \u201ccondemn this provocative action which is clearly a hate crime \u2014 in strongest terms,\u201d a diplomatic source said.
\nForeign ministry officials told the ambassador that Sweden\u2019s permission for the protest in the pretext of defending democratic values was \u201cunacceptable\u201d, the source added.
\nThis is the second time in more than a week that Sweden\u2019s ambassador to Turkey was summoned.
\nLast week, he was called to answer for a video posted by a Kurdish group in Stockholm that depicted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan swinging by his legs from a rope. A tweet by the group, Rojava Committee of Sweden, compared Erdogan to Italy\u2019s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was hung upside down after his execution in the closing days of World War II.
\nSweden, along with neighbouring Finland, needs Turkey\u2019s consent to join NATO. Both countries dropped decades of military non-alignment last year when they applied to join the Western defence alliance in response to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.
\nAnkara says any progress depends on Swedish steps to extradite people it accuses of terrorism or of having played a part in the 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan.
\nTurkey argues that Sweden has not done enough to crack down on Kurdish groups that Ankara views as \u201cterrorist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ISTANBUL Turkey on Saturday called off a visit by Sweden\u2019s defence minister over a planned demonstration by right-wing activists in Stockholm. Turkey has been angered by permission obtained by Rasmus Paludan, a Swedish-Danish politician whose anti-Islam actions sparked riots across Sweden last year, to stage a protest in front of its embassy in the Swedish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-308880","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n