ST. PETERSBURG: The leaders of Russia, France and Germany Saturday signalled their desire to mend ties with Washington, frayed by the trio’s fierce opposition to the US-led attack on Iraq.
Wrapping up their two-day summit, the three key critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy called for strengthening international law and giving the United Nations a central role in Iraq’s reconstruction.
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made their point partly by choice of venue: they appeared together to open a seminar on security and international law.
Chirac told the gathering that the anti-war trio has been motivated by concern for how power is organized in the world, not by any desire to see Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government survive.
“Condemnation of the dictatorship was never the issue,” Chirac said. “France and all other democracies welcome its fall. Our dispute was about how to manage the world and its crises, particularly proliferation crises. ... There can be no lasting international order based on the logic of power.”
The legitimacy of new political and economic institutions in Iraq can only be ensured through the United Nations and adherence to international law, Schroeder said.
If the world “had clear-cut and efficient legal mechanisms for resolving crisis situations,” Putin said, “it would be possible to find much more effective solutions to even the most complicated world problems — and, what’s especially important, do so without acting beyond the law.”
Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies, a Moscow think tank, said Chirac’s statements were “clearly an attempt to mend fences with the US after the protracted standoff in the international arena.”
“France and Germany are now racing each other trying to be the first one who asks the US for forgiveness for having misbehaved,” he said. “Today France and Germany are like pigeons who want to snatch a bit of the prey killed by hawks. They want contracts in the post-Hussein Iraq and are ready to work hard to get them.”
Chirac, at the St. Petersburg State University seminar, also stressed an upbeat view of future cooperation with Washington despite current strains over Iraq: “We can rebuild our unity around the values that all great democracies share. This spirit of solidarity and collective responsibility should emerge strengthened from this crisis.”
Viktor Kremenyuk, deputy director of the USA-Canada Institute, a Moscow think tank, said the determination of the three leaders to move the Iraq issue back to the United Nations ”is an indirect way of insisting on a share of the post-war Iraqi pie.”
The summit was also aimed at showing that these three European powers are united by more than opposition to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, he added.
The three are exploring whether Russia, France and Germany ”are just three countries that do not like something about the US, or they are something more serious and long-term,” he said. ”They needed to understand how strong the bond can be, what can come of their cooperation, and if some sort of alliance is possible.”
But the trio is also ready for compromise — and so is Bush, Kremenyuk predicted. “No one wants this fight today, neither the coalition nor Russia, Germany and France,” he said. ”They are ready to meet each other halfway.”
Moving beyond the Iraq issue, Putin later used the live broadcast of a Cosmonauts’ Day conversation with Russian and American astronauts on board the orbiting international space station to highlight cooperation with the United States — even more important in the field of space after the Columbia shuttle disaster.
The grounding of the US shuttle fleet has left Russian space vehicles as the only means to ferry crews and supplies to the station, and Putin noted that the Russian government recently decided to fund more of the badly needed transport craft. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times