Action must have UN backing, says France
European leaders expressed grave concern today over US intentions to take military action against Iraq.
French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin said that any decision must have the backing of the international community through the United Nations Security Council.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Iraq should be given several weeks to readmit weapons inspectors and only then should other options be considered.
“We need to be consistent with our goal. And the goal of the international community, the goal of the Security Council, is to have the inspectors back,” he said.
“We do want to fight against proliferation. We do concede that there is a risk in Iraq, a risk for the population of Iraq, a risk for the security of the region and that’s why we think that the Security Council is the good instrument to take these decisions.
“Of course if the inspectors are not able to go back or are not able to work in Iraq then the Security Council will have to consider other options and we don’t exclude any option at this stage.”
If the US took unilateral action against Iraq the global order would be threatened, he said.
“We do believe that the world needs stability. If a country can decide alone to take military steps how are we going to stop?
“Other countries might take the same decision. We need a global order, we need to have coherent principles and to apply them.
“Unilateral action could create such a situation in which we will know more instability in the world. We need to be careful.”
Mr de Villepin told Today that any decision to take military action had to have the legitimacy of being backed by the UN Security Council.
“We need to make sure the decision is collective... we need the legitimacy of the international community.
“The only way to get the legitimacy which is going to make sure that we are going to be effective is to have the support of the Security Council.”
The Russian ambassador to the UN, Sergei Lavarov, told Today that his country had “serious doubts” about American motives for an attack.
“If under the slogan of anti-terrorist fight you really want to promote political goals which might be generally issues of the war but which are not proven by hard facts and you want to promote those political goals by military means without those hard facts, then quite a number of countries would have a very serious problem to explain this to their people and to understand this type of response themselves,” he said.
“My president clearly said that we have serious doubts about the justification of this approach.”
Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said that the UN must decide whether to take responsibility for action.
“The most important question we have to decide now is if the UN takes the responsibility of moving the process forward,” he said.
“At the end of the day the resolutions that Saddam Hussein is not complying by are resolutions of the United Nations, the Security Council, they therefore will have to come back to the Security Council.”
He told Today he hoped that President George Bush would accept that route, so that the Security Council could appeal to Saddam Hussein to open Iraq to weapons inspectors.
