On Friday, January 20, Turkey summoned Sweden’s ambassador over an upcoming event wherein the protestors are planning to burn Quran.
Rasmus Paludan, a prominent Danish-Swedish politician from the Danish party Stram Kurs (Hard Line), reportedly obtained permission from the Swedish Police to burn a copy of the Quran near the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm.
In a video posted by Rasmus Paludan on his Instagram page, he claimed that he has received permission from the Swedish Police to burn Quran at 1 PM on Saturday, January 21, outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm. He said that the burning of the Quran will be a “great manifestation of freedom of speech and criticism against Islamist Erdogan (Turkish President).”
Reacting to Paludan’s post, Turkish officials summoned Ambassador Staffan Herrstrom to the Foreign Ministry to condemn the protest calling it a ‘hate crime’ and ‘provocation’.
This, however, is not the first time that Rasmus Paludan is planning to burn the Quran. In May last year, Paludan claimed to have burned the Quran outside the Raslatt Mosque in Sweden’s southern city of Jonkoping despite Swedish police denying permission for it.
Earlier last week, Turkish authorities summoned Sweden’s ambassador, in response to a recent protest in Stockholm where pro-Kurdish protesters hung an effigy of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Now, he has been summoned again over this planned Quran burning in Sweden.
Notably, In May last year, Turkey raised an objection against Sweden’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Turkey held that Sweden had not taken action against exiled Kurdish ‘militants’. After the Ukraine-Russia war broke out, Sweden, in May, announced that they, along with Finland, would apply for NATO membership, ending 200 years of military nonalignment. However, a new member can only be inducted into NATO when all 30 member countries agree upon it.
In recent years, Sweden has taken in hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees, including ethnic Kurds from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.
