|
  |
|
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Crucial France, UK talks over Iraq
By European Political Editor Robin Oakley
LE TOUQUET, France (CNN) -- French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair will meet Tuesday in the Northern French seaside town of Le Touquet for a summit which could be crucial to U.S.-UK hopes of winning wider support for an assault on Iraq if President Saddam Hussein does not do more to comply with U.N. resolutions. Their annual meeting, with a group of ministers on each side, will look at mutual interests in European defence arrangements, education and immigration. There will also be controversy over the French decision to invite Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe to an African summit in Paris despite EU sanctions against him and leading figures in his regime. But inevitably Iraq will be a dominant theme. Blair has been U.S. President George W. Bush's biggest supporter in threatening military action against Saddam. But he faces strong opposition within his own Labour Party to any action undertaken without the blessing of a second, specific U.N. Security Council resolution and has successfully pressed Bush to go again to the Security Council before launching any attack. (Full Story) Chirac warned his forces in a New Year message to be "ready for anything." But he has insisted all along that military action must be a last resort, undertaken only when approved by the U.N.. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has constantly declared that if the U.S. acts on Iraq without U.N. approval "we could not associate ourselves with such an action." When Chirac met last month with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who has insisted that Germany will have nothing to do with any attack on Saddam, the French leader said his country's view on Iraq was "identical" with Germany's But he has never actually ruled out French participation in military action approved by the U.N.. Recalling that Chirac's predecessor Francois Mitterrand never committed France to the 1991 Gulf War until the last moment, Blair and Bush are hoping that Chirac will relent and give his backing to a second U.N. resolution and to military action. For Blair it will be crucial to persuade the French president to do so. If the previously reluctant French were to come round and support military action it would lessen his political problems at home as well as providing a key building block in any ''coalition of the willing'' supporting U.S. action. And following his by-election defeat in Lower Saxony this week, the weak and isolated Schroeder is looking a less attractive ally for Chirac. British officials have been talking up the prospects of winning over the French president and they have noted that the French may be hedging their bets already, this week sending the country's only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to the eastern Mediterranean for ''exercises." But French sources suggest their country could still abstain or vote against war authorisation in the Security Council. The omens for a harmonious meeting are not that good. Blair and Chirac clashed bitterly over farm subsidies at an EU summit in Brussels in the autumn when the French leader outmaneuvered Blair by cooking up a deal with Schroeder. Chirac complained that he had never been spoken to so rudely and cancelled the Le Touquet summit, which was at that stage scheduled for December. Since then however, Blair has contributed a glowing tribute to a French magazine on Chirac's 70th birthday, declaring that he was "a great man in every sense of the word" with "the capacity to incarnate the grandeur of the French state." He presented him with a Churchill pen to mark the occasion and Chirac has relented sufficiently to re-stage the summit.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
