Paris snub deepens Nato leadership crisis

SARAH HELM

Bonn

CHRISTOPHER BELLAMY

Defence Correspondent

Nato's desperate search for a new secretary-general was looking even more frantic yesterday as the alliance plans for its biggest military operation yet, the peace-implementation force in the former Yugoslavia.

France snubbed the only current declared candidate, the former Danish foreign minister, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, in a gesture of thinly-disguised contempt, while the US and Germany put new pressure on Douglas Hurd, the former foreign secretary, to enter the ring. The French yesterday banned reporters from covering the Danish candidate's meeting with the French Foreign Minister, Herve de Charette, at the Quai d'Orsay. "We have never even spoken about Mr Ellemann-Jensen's candidacy," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman. Last week President Chirac's spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna, used a similarly dismissive turn of phrase. "We have no definite opinion of him," she said.

Mr Ellemann-Jensen does not live up to one the three French criteria for a new secretary-general: he does not speak French. The other two are that the candidate should support Nato enlargement and closer integration of Nato with the European Union through the Western European Union (WEU). France would have liked the former Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, but the US vetoed his candidacy last week. That decision had more to do with offence at the effrontery of the European failure to consult them sufficiently than with the quality of Mr Lubbers as a candidate.

Warren Christopher, the US Secretary of State, is understood to have obtained backing from Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor, for a Hurd bid. However, the allies have not obtained the backing of the prospective candidate himself, who remains adamant that he is not interested in the Nato job.

Washington has already tried to get Mr Hurd to change his mind but close advisers of the former foreign secretary said yesterday that he still had no intention of doing so.

The crisis following the resignation of the Belgian secretary-general, Willy Claes, over a financial scandal is the most important issue being discussed in the margins of the WEU ministerial meeting in Madrid which began yesterday.

Britain's Secretary of State for Defence, Michael Portillo, attended a meeting of the 13-nation West European Armaments Group. The main WEU meeting, between the foreign ministers of the 10 full WEU members, plus eight observers and associate members, takes place today. This afternoon they will be joined by ministers from the nine "associate partners" from Eastern Europe.

The meeting is the last before Britain takes over the presidency of the WEU at the end of the year. The main topics are Britain's presidency and the treatment of defence issues at next year's EU Inter-Governmental Conference.

Britain continues to press for the WEU to be the main forum for European defence cooperation in the field of crisis management, humanitarian aid and disaster relief, and intends to stress this throughout its presidency. Any more weighty military problem is likely to bring in the non-European members of Nato - the US and Canada.

The British position envisages reinforced partnership between an autonomous WEU and the EU which might include joint task forces of limited duration. But any usurpation of the WEU's defence function by the EU is strongly opposed.