Everything must be done to avoid the prospect of war with Iran, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Monday, a day after his foreign minister said the country should prepare for that possibility.
The United States, Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China have backed two rounds of UN sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment and other sensitive work that could potentially be used to make nuclear weapons. Washington is leading a drive in the Security Council for a third sanctions resolution to punish Iran over enrichment.
France has also called for more sanctions, and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner increased pressure on Tehran on Sunday, saying France had to prepare for the prospect of war with Iran, though that was not an immediate danger. "Everything must be done to avoid war," Fillon told reporters on a visit to the town of Angouleme in western France.
"France's role is to lead towards a peaceful solution of a situation that would be extremely dangerous for the rest of the world," he said. He added that Kouchner was right to say the situation was dangerous and should be taken seriously.
Kouchner said in an interview on LCI television and RTL radio on Sunday: "We must prepare for the worst," adding: "The worst, sir, is war." Iran denies it is secretly seeking nuclear weapons, saying it only wants atomic technology to generate electricity.
It has however, ignored the UN Security Council's demands that it suspend enrichment, and Washington has called a meeting of major powers on September 21 to discuss further sanctions. A senior Iranian spokesman accused Kouchner of stirring up a crisis with Iran.
"Using crisis-making words is against France's high historical and cultural position and is against France's civilisation," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said in a statement carried by the official IRNA news agency.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy raised the prospect of war last month, when he said a diplomatic push by the world's major powers was the only alternative to "the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran", which he said would be "catastrophic".
France has also said the European Union should consider imposing its own sanctions against Tehran, outside the UN framework, and Kouchner said Paris had asked companies including oil giant Total not to bid in Iranian tenders.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), appealed for calm. "We need to be cool and not hype the Iranian issue," he told reporters on the sidelines of the IAEA's annual conference in Vienna.
Without mentioning Kouchner by name, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said Germany refused to even think of war as a possibility, adding that the German government was strongly engaged in diplomacy. "All other options are not up for discussion," he said.
Germany has said further sanctions may not be necessary if Iran helps clear up all outstanding questions about its nuclear programme under an August 21 agreement with the IAEA. France has dismissed the agreement as insufficient because it does not address the issue of suspension, but Fillon said war would be a last resort. "A confrontation with Iran is the last extreme that any political leader can hope for," Fillon said. "We are in a situation of very great tension," he added.