NATO looked set on Sunday to strike a deal to break its deadlock over planning for the defence of Turkey in the event of a US-led war against Iraq, but deep divides remained after four weeks of wrangling. Arab foreign ministers were studying a draft declaration on Sunday which would call on Arab states to refuse Washington assistance and use of their facilities for a war against Iraq. It was not clear if the declaration would be agreed by the ministers, nor who had drawn up the draft or whether other proposed drafts were being circulated at the one-day meeting on the Iraq crisis. With Paris refusing to back a decision it sees as implicit acceptance that war is inevitable, the 19-nation alliance decided to take the crisis to its Defence Planning Committee (DPC), where France does not have a seat. ‘‘What the DPC is being asked is to agree to the package which has been on the table for four weeks,’’ a senior NATO diplomat said. ‘‘So I hope we will be back on good sense and that 18 countries will agree that we should do these measures.’’ The decision to call the meeting suggested that Belgium and Germany — which stuck by France through a crisis which has dealt a blow to NATO’s credibility — had backtracked. The measures under discussion include the deployment of AWACS surveillance planes, Patriot defence missiles and anti-chemical and anti-biological warfare units to NATO ally Turkey. Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt pointed to a compromise on Saturday. He said Belgium would be in favour of allowing NATO military aid to Turkey as long as it did not constitute an escalation of hostilities against Iraq. ‘‘What we want to prevent is that this decision may constitute the first step in the build-up to war,’’ he said. ‘‘It needs to be clear in this decision that it would not entail a NATO involvement in a military operation against Iraq.’’ France is not included on the Defence Planning Committee because it withdrew from the military structure of the alliance in 1966. A spokesman said there would be a meeting of the alliance’s 19 ambassadors immediately after the military committee session. But, in a sign of continued rancour at the veto wielded by France, Germany and Belgium, a diplomat said he would not back a ‘‘fig leaf’’ statement on solidarity with Turkey for Paris to stand behind. ‘‘I am not going to be party to some sort of framework shell of a.decision sheet which purports to show solidarity when actually the people who are drafting it have done everything in the last four weeks that demonstrates their claim to solidarity is totally empty,’’ he said. ‘‘So if they’re looking for a fig leaf, that doesn’t seem relevant to the experience of the last four weeks.’’ (Reuters)
