Eying Postwar Iraq, Chirac to Meet With Putin and Schröder
By MICHAEL WINES
OSCOW, April 8 — A long-planned meeting of the leaders of Russia and Germany acquired a sudden new cast late today when President Jacques Chirac of France said he would attend the session this weekend, in St. Petersburg, and suggested that the situation in postwar Iraq would top the agenda.
The announcement raised the prospect of another bitter split over Iraq between the three nations and the United States and Britain, this time centering on whether the United Nations should take the lead in governing and rebuilding the country once the war has ended.
The potential for rancor was only underscored late today when the United Nations issued a cryptic denial of an earlier Kremlin announcement that Secretary General Kofi Annan would also meet with the leaders in St. Petersburg on Saturday.
Mr. Annan has struggled, amid what he has called one of his institution's most difficult moments, to maintain a semblance of unity in a crisis that has left the United Nations' oldest and most powerful members sharply divided over its role in settling global conflicts.
In remarks in Paris today, Mr. Chirac said the United Nations — "and it alone" — should be responsible for administering Iraq's reconstruction and governance.
"We are no longer in an era where one or two countries can control the fate of another country," he said pointedly at a news conference after meeting the United Nations' high commissioner for refugees.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany have also called for the United Nations to assume the lead role in rebuilding Iraq.
"The sooner it happens, the better it will be for all the countries involved in this conflict," Mr. Putin said last Wednesday.
Their statements appear at odds with the White House, which has signaled that the United States and Britain will assemble an interim government of Iraqis to take control when the war ends, and that many further decisions will lie with the Iraqis themselves.
At a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain today in Northern Ireland, President Bush said the United Nations "will have a vital role" in postwar Iraq's revival.
But he stopped well short of giving it carte blanche over Iraq's future, choosing instead to limit his explicit support for the United Nations to an advisory role in forming an interim government and to helping supply humanitarian aid.
Before today's announcement that Mr. Chirac would fly to St. Petersburg on Friday, the meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Schröder appeared to be as much a routine get-together of two friends as a forum on Iraq. Mr. Schröder is flying to Russia for the long-scheduled third annual session of the St. Petersburg Dialogue, a Russian-German forum aimed at promoting better political and business relations.
Mr. Chirac's addition recasts the meeting as an effort to further coordinate the three nations' effort to place postwar Iraq in the hands of international stewards. Just Friday, in Paris, the foreign ministers of all three nations called for the United Nations to take an early role in running postwar Iraq and expressed concern about a humanitarian emergency.
Mr. Putin met in the Kremlin on Monday with President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Russian involvement in postwar Iraq's reconstruction was one of the leading topics, according to a senior United States diplomat. But whether the two discussed the extent of United Nations control of the reconstruction effort was unclear.
In Moscow today, a United Nations official initially confirmed reports that Mr. Annan would join Mr. Putin and Mr. Schröder in St. Petersburg this weekend. The stopover was billed as part of a weekend trip to Europe that was also scheduled to include a meeting with Mr. Blair in London and Mr. Chirac in Paris.
But that announcement was later withdrawn without explanation by United Nations officials in New York, and the extent of Mr. Annan's travels this weekend were not clear.
In Paris today, after meeting with Mr. Annan's high commissioner for refugees, Rudd Lubbers, Mr. Chirac delivered a thinly disguised attack on the White House's position that the two nations fighting to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq should take the lead in the country's revival.
While saying he shared Mr. Bush's commitment to a "vital" role for the United Nations in Iraq, Mr. Chirac added, "It is up to the United Nations — and it alone — to take on the political, economic, humanitarian and administrative reconstruction of Iraq."
He announced that France would contribute one million euros to the United Nations' fund for refugee aid in Iraq.
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