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France considers security assistance to Iraq

PLA Daily 2004-01-17

PARIS, Jan. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- France is considering the possibility of answering to an eventual demand to join the security work in Iraq, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said Friday.

"We are already working on the possibility of responding in the area of security, in particular through the creation of a school for gendarmes or by training police," de Villepin said in his New Year's greetings to the press.

"We'll see what the Iraqi authorities are asking for in terms of security" once sovereignty has been handed over in June, the minister said.

"We will clarify our position once a government has been formed in Iraq," he added.

He said the deployment of French troops into Iraq is "not of actuality" now.

"For us, the issue of the current political void is at the heart of the Iraqi question," said de Villepin.

An accord signed by the Washington-sponsored Iraq's interim governing council, a provisional government will be named by the end of June and a Constitution and elections will be finished by December 2005.

The French daily Le Monde reported Thursday that Paris is incited to revise its policy on Iraq and President Jacques Chirac does not exclude the possibility of joining a UN-mandated and NATO-led stabilization force in Iraq.

The paper quoted an unnamed advisor to Chirac as saying that if the United Nations Security Council asks the NATO to send in a multinational stabilization force to Iraq similar to the force in Bosnia, France would not object and could well participate.

On Thursday, French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie flew to Washington for talks with her US counterpart Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Her spokesman said the meetings are to be held "in a positive spirit of cooperation."

"They are a sign that our American partners want to talk to us as much as we want to talk to them," said the spokesman. "In everything concerning security and defense, we are truly in a process of cooperation and absolutely not of confrontation."

However, any French deployment would depend on pre-conditions including clear request from a sovereign Iraqi government and willingness of the United Nations to play a key role in Iraq, said the paper.