June 4, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 3, 1424

EVIAN, June 3: French President Jacques Chirac again criticized the war on Iraq on Tuesday and told the United States and Britain not to try to make peace there alone.

Mr Chirac, who met US President George Bush on Monday to try to patch up their acrimonious dispute over the war, said the US-British invasion was “illegitimate and illegal.”

“I didn’t approve of it and I still don’t approve of it,” he told reporters as he wrapped up a three-day summit of the Group of Eight in the French spa town of Evian.

“One can possibly make war alone, but one cannot make peace alone,” he added.

“It is thus our duty to contribute all that we can within the framework of the United Nations,” the French leader said, adding that peace “requires the strong, unflagging and responsible action of the UN.”

He said since the US-British victory in Iraq, “the situation demands that we rally together to try to put Iraq back on its feet,” restoring its territorial integrity.

“This will not be an easy task,” he added, promising that France would act in Iraq as it had done in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “in a spirit that repudiates aggression, a spirit of dialogue and multilateralism driven by the international community.”

Germany on Tuesday issued a similar thinly-veiled call on the United States not to go it alone in Iraq, pointing out that its reconstruction was “at least as important” for Europe as the United States because of its proximity to the region.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reiterated his call for the United Nations to be given a leading role in Iraq to cement the legitimacy of the reconstruction process and to help stabilize the region in the future.

UN INSPECTORS: Inspectors from the UN’s nuclear watchdog will leave for Iraq on Wednesday to investigate a nuclear site that has been pillaged, raising fears that radioactive material has gone missing, a official said on Tuesday.

“A team of seven inspectors will leave tomorrow and arrive in Iraq on Friday,” a spokesman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said.

“They will go to the nuclear research centre at Al-Tuwaitha to perform a safeguard inspection,” he added.

The Al-Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre, south of Baghdad, is one of Iraq’s main nuclear complexes and had been under IAEA seals since the 1991 Gulf war.

It was hard hit by a wave of looting that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and the IAEA has for weeks warned of a humanitarian disaster if radioactive material fell into the wrong hands.

Washington and the IAEA agreed in late May that UN inspectors could go to the site, but the inspectors could only leave this week as they needed time to prepare for the mission, the spokesman said.

“Their departure date has been determined by logistics. They needed to get the necessary equipment and material ready.

“They will fly to Frankfurt tomorrow and from there to Kuwait City, where they will spend one day before going into Iraq on Friday.”

The official, who asked not to be named, said the IAEA expected the mission to last “about two weeks.”

It is the first time that IAEA inspectors will return to Iraq after teams searching for weapons of mass destruction were pulled out of the country shortly before the US-led war to oust Saddam began on March 20.

The IAEA has however stressed that the new mission does not mark a resumption of weapons inspections, but relates to its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States insists on carrying out its own search for biological and chemical weapons.—AFP