EU leaders build bridges over Iraq divisions

European Union leaders vowed yesterday to put differences over the Iraq war behind them and said they were willing to work together and with the United States to rebuild the war-battered Arab country.

Meeting in Athens to sign a treaty opening their bloc to 10 new members, leaders of the 15 EU states also worked on a statement on how the United Nations and the European Union could work in Iraq in a way acceptable to Washington.

In a first step to greater cooperation, the EU will launch an airlift in the next few days to fly out wounded Iraqis - especially children - for urgent hospital treatment in Europe.

Several EU nations were also ready to commit peacekeepers to Iraq, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.

Washington has asked Denmark to provide staff to lead a unit of 3,000 personnel as part of US efforts to stabilise Iraq, a request that Copenhagen says it is considering.

Britain, Washington's ally in the Iraq campaign, and France, which bitterly opposed military action, sought to put aside their pre-war tensions.

Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Jacques Chirac met face-to-face for the first time since the war. They spent 20 minutes chatting in what a British official called a "perfectly amiable" conversation.

President Chirac said Paris, which until recently had demanded that the United Nations should be the sole body entitled to handle the Iraq issue, would be flexible in working with the US and British forces now running Iraq.

Washington has made clear it does not intend to let the United Nations take the leading role in rebuilding Iraq.

"Issue by issue, we have to find the right balance between the role of the United Nations, which must be the essential role, and the American and British forces present on the ground," President Chirac's spokeswoman Catherine Colonna said.

"We agree there should be respect for humanitarian issues, but also respect for political and reconstruction issues that arise... I would like to see the United States, ourselves, Europe working in partnership together to make that clear," Blair said.

The conciliatory signals built on statements in recent days from France and Germany, another leading anti-war campaigner, indicating they sought a compromise with the United States after long opposing Washington for waging war without U.N. backing.

The informal summit had not planned a statement on Iraq because of the split between the four EU members of the U.N. Security Council - Britain and Spain on one side, France and Germany on the other.

But the four managed to agree on a two-part statement calling for an "important" or "essential" role for the United Nations in rebuilding Iraq and for EU help to stabilise it after the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein, they said.

Chirac said the statement would be issued on Thursday. In the summit's most visible achievement, the 15 EU leaders and heads of the 10 acceding countries signed a treaty sealing the bloc's expansion, the largest in its history.

The 10 to join in May 2004 are Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta.

Senior officials from other candidate countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, and from future candidates such as Croatia and Serbia as well as Russia were also in Athens for the talks.

"This is a historic day. This is an achievement which creates new obligations on us to look to the future with optimism and creativity," Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis said.

In Nicosia, Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash said the accession by the Greek part of Cyprus sealed Cyprus's partition and reunification was only possible with Turkey's EU entry.

The internationally recognised Greek Cypriot government had signed on behalf of the whole island.

"With this signature, Cyprus has been partitioned into two," Denktash told private news channel CNN Turk. "If they want to reunite Cyprus... we need to prepare the foundation for us to enter the EU with Turkey," he said.