Chirac: EU's Solana Should Work Toward Lebanon Cease-fire
 
 
PARIS (AP)--President Jacques Chirac asked that the European Union charge its foreign policy chief with a diplomatic mission to obtain a cease-fire in Lebanon, the presidential office said Friday.
In a letter to Martti Vanhanen, Prime Minister of Finland who currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, Chirac asked that Javier Solana also be charged with a mission to defuse the crisis in Gaza.
"The crisis in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon make extremely grave and worrisome bounds from hour to hour," the letter said. The two theaters of crisis "place the security and political equilibrium of the entire region in danger," it said.
In the "two distinct crises," the E.U. "has weight and credibility" that could be used toward finding solutions, Chirac said in the letter, dated Thursday and made public Friday.
The letter noted that the president was reiterating a proposal made in June.
He suggested that Solana, who visited Beirut last weekend and was currently in Cairo, work in conjunction with the United Nations to meet with all figures necessary to "very quickly make proposals to reach conditions for a global and lasting cease-fire in the region."
 

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