Turkey’s foreign minister has criticised the burning of the Qur’an outside a Stockholm mosque in a demonstration that could further complicate Ankara’s long-delayed approval of Sweden’s application to join Nato.
The protest came as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, told the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, on Wednesday that Sweden had made some progress, but not enough. Nato said top diplomats from both countries would meet in Brussels next week.
“I condemn the vile protest in Sweden against our holy book on the first day of the blessed Eid al-Adha,” the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, tweeted on Wednesday, adding that it was “unacceptable to allow anti-Islam protests in the name of freedom of expression”.
Swedish police had allowed the protest, attended by about 200 people on Wednesday, the start of the three-day Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, saying the security risks “were not of a nature to justify, under current laws, a decision to reject the request”.
The Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported that the event passed off peacefully, saying the man responsible for the demonstration tore pages from the Qur’an, wiped his shoes with some of them and burned others, then placed a slice of bacon in the book.
Police said the organiser was being investigated for incitement and violating a seasonal ban on lighting fires in Sweden. One man was reportedly suspected of attempted assault, and another who was carrying a rock was removed by police.
Media reports named the organiser as Salwan Momika, 37, who reportedly fled to Sweden from Iraq and has denied his intention was to sabotage its Nato applicaation, saying he had considered waiting to stage his protest until after Sweden had joined the alliance.
“I don’t want to harm this country that received me and preserved my dignity,” Momika said in April. In his protest application, however, he said he wanted “to protest in front of the mosque in Stockholm, and … express my opinion about the Qur’an”.
A series of protests in Sweden against Islam and in support of Kurdish rights have offended Turkey, which has held up the Nordic country’s accession process, accusing Sweden of harbouring people it considers terrorists and demanding their extradition.
Nato has been pushing Turkey to give Sweden the green light before an alliance summit in Lithuania on 11-12 July. “The time is now to welcome Sweden as a full member of Nato,” the alliance chief, Jens Stoltenberg, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Stoltenberg said earlier this week that the Brussels talks, which will be held at the city’s Nato headquarters next Thursday, would include the foreign ministers and intelligence advisers from Turkey, Sweden and Finland.
In January, Ankara suspended talks with Sweden on its Nato application after Rasmus Paludan, a Swedish-Danish activist who has been convicted for racist abuse, burned a copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.
Paludan, leader of the far-right Danish party Hard Line, did not attend Wednesday’s demonstration. Last year, he provoked rioting in Sweden when he went on a tour of the country, publicly burning copies of Islam’s holy book.
Citing security concerns, Swedish police have rejected at least two more recent requests to stage anti-Qur’an protests, but their decisions have been overruled by the courts on the grounds that they infringed the right to freedom of speech.
The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, declined to speculate on the protest’s possible impact. “It’s legal, but not appropriate,” he said. “We live in a time when one should stay calm and think of what’s best for Sweden’s long-term interest.”
Several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, also denounced the January Qur’an-burning.
