Franco-German plan is a threat to peace, says UK
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Your support makes all the difference.Britain accused France and Germany of undermining the United Nations yesterday by pursuing their own plan to avoid a war in Iraq – and warned that they were making military conflict more likely.
British ministers fear the joint initiative by Jacques Chirac, the French President, and Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, could persuade the United States to abandon the UN route and take unilateral action against Iraq, the opposite of what France and Germany want to achieve.
Bill Rammell, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Britain's relations with the UN, told The Independent yesterday: "The UN's credibility is on the line. Through their actions, its members can put it at the centre of the Iraq issue, or at the sidelines." Recalling that Resolution 1441 was passed unanimously by the UN Security Council last November, he said: "Every member of the Security Council is responsible to ensure its implementation, not for coming up with reasons why it hasn't been implemented."
The minister warned: "The best way of avoiding war is by sending a clear and unconditional message that we're preparing for it. Anything else, anything that weakens, cuts across or undermines that message makes war more, not less, likely."
Mr Rammell dismissed the suggestion by France and Germany that more UN weapons inspectors should be sent into Iraq. "You can have as many inspectors as you like. But let's remember which way round this works. Resolution 1441 puts the onus on Iraq to comply, not on the UN to continually review its procedures to make Iraq comply," he said. "It's not a matter of time or numbers. It's a matter of whether they do what the international community has demanded of them." He said this was "a crucial time" for the UN. "I believe in the UN and I want its will to be upheld."
Although Tony Blair is privately furious that France and Germany are pursuing their own agenda, he still hopes and believes they will not vote against a second UN resolution on Iraq. One government source said: "There are people saying one thing in public and another in private."
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "We believe it's right to go down the UN route and the UN route has integrity." He regretted the split with France, Germany and Belgium inside Nato but insisted that to "write off" the organisation and say it was no longer relevant was premature.
He said: "There is clearly a disagreement at Nato regarding the Turkish request for prudent planning to protect its security. Clearly, agreement would be preferable to what we have at the moment, which is disagreement but there is a lot of work going on to try and resolve this."
The spokesman added: "This is a situation where 16 out of 19 members of Nato hold one point of view and three out of 19 hold a different view."
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