ANKARA, Feb 5 (AFP) - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was expected to arrive here Saturday for talks with Turkish leaders amid mounting concerns in Ankara over Kurdish moves in neighboring Iraq and anti-US demonstrations.
Rice was to meet with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Ankara airport, immediately after her scheduled arrival at around 1600 GMT.
Police stepped up security measures for the visit, Rice's fourth stop in a whirlwind tour of eight European capitals, Israel and the West Bank.
Hours before Rice was to land here, hundreds of anti-US activists held a demonstration near the US embassy to denounce Washington's policies in the Middle East and the occupation of Iraq.
"No to war. US, get out of the Middle East. Rice, get out of Turkey," said a large banner at the head of the procession of some 300 people.
Dozens of riot police, some armed with automatic rifles, stopped the crowd from marching to the embassy, although they allowed several of their members to lay a black wreath outside the mission.
Rice's talks with Turkish leaders were likely to focus on northern Iraq, where, Ankara suspects, the Kurds are laying the foundations of future independence, unrestrained by the United States.
Independence-minded moves in the region, Ankara fears, will embolden separatism across the border in southeastern Turkey, where a Kurdish rebellion has already claimed some 37,000 lives.
Turkish suspicions were reinforced when large numbers of Kurds said to have been expelled from the oil-rich city of Kirkuk under Saddam Hussein were allowed to settle and vote in the city in last week's elections, despite protests by rival ethnic groups that many of them have no bonds with Kirkuk.
As the Kurds braced for large political gains, Erdogan hit out at Washington, charging that "forces who say they came to the region to bring democracy have preferred to remain indifferent to anti-democratic ambitions."
The row over Kirkuk comes at a time when the two long-standing NATO allies are already struggling to repair their ties which hit an all-time low prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, when Turkey denied US troops access to its territory to mount an attack on Iraq from the north.
Ankara is also frustrated over US reluctance to clamp down on some 5,000 Turkish Kurd rebels who were holed up in the mountains of northern Iraq prior to the war and who last summer ended a five-year unilateral ceasefire with Ankara.
Washington has promised to act against the rebels, whom it considers as terrorists, but has so far failed to take military measures, arguing that its troops are swamped with violence in other parts of Iraq.
"The Iraq issue has become a determining factor in Turkish-US relations," foreign policy commentator Sami Kohen wrote in the Milliyet daily Saturday.
"But in diplomacy, it is always possible to fine-tune policies even if differences at the core persist. This is what Turkish-US ties need at the moment," he wrote. "Frictions stemming from some policies of the Bush administration should not be allowed to harm an alliance in its entirety."
The toughening US policy towards Iran, another troubled neighbor of Turkey, and efforts to revive the Middle East peace process were also expected to be high on Rice's agenda.
Following her meeting with Erdogan, Rice was to hold talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov late Saturday to prepare the ground for a summit of presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin on February 24.
The choice of Ankara as a venue for the talks was dictated by Rice's hectic schedule.
She was also to meet with Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul before leaving Sunday.
02/05/2005 13:04 GMT - AFP