Haaretz
Tevet 16, 5767
French President Jacques Chirac on
Friday renewed a call for an international conference to help restore
Middle East stability, saying that, "At the gates of Europe, the Middle
East has become the epicenter of international tensions."
Chirac,
in what is likely to be one of his last major foreign policy addresses
before April presidential elections, repeated his criticism of the
U.S.-led war in Iraq. He told diplomats in Paris that the situation risked
spilling over into wider conflict.
"As France feared and warned,
the war in Iraq set off upheavals whose effects have not yet been fully
played out," he said, adding that conflict in the wider region could
produce a confrontation "on an unimaginable scale."
"The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict crystallises all these resentments," he
said.
He said the international community had to act to restore the
peace process and backed proposals to revive the so-called "Quartet" of
Middle East mediators: the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and
the United States.
"Let us propose within the Quartet an
international conference of a new type which, without presuming to dictate
the terms of a settlement to the parties, would bring the guarantees to
which they aspire," he said, according to the text of his
speech.
"I firmly believe there can be a real impetus for
negotiation."
Chirac also backed German Chancellor Angela Merkel's
drive for progress on reforms to make decision-making easier in a European
Union that now counts 27 members.
"Everyone today can see the
urgent need for reform," he said, adding that any solution would have to
take into account the concerns over the bloc's powers raised by the
rejection by French and Dutch voters of the proposed constitution in
2005.
Germany, which assumed the rotating presidency of the bloc at
the start of the year, has made reviving the reform a top
priority.
Welcoming the EU's new members, Romania and Bulgaria,
Chirac said the 50th anniversary of the signing of the founding Treaty of
Rome, due to be celebrated in Berlin later this year, was a major
opportunity to reach a new consensus.
France is expected to
continue the work begun by Germany when it takes over the EU presidency in
2008, although by then Chirac is expected to have left the scene he has
helped shape over more than a decade in power.