EUROPEAN Union leaders yesterday reluctantly accepted a dominant role for the US and Britain in postwar Iraq as they sought to heal the wounds of recent months.

Bowing to the inevitable, President Chirac, of France, said at an EU summit in Athens that United Nations involvement should be determined “issue by issue”. He previously insisted that only the UN could legitimately oversee political change in Iraq.

Outside the summit the Greek capital saw its worst riots for 30 years as 7,000 anti-war protesters took to the streets and attempted to break police lines to reach the summit venue. After being turned back they pelted the British, French and Italian embassies with rocks, paint and petrol bombs.

Inside, EU leaders did their best to paper over their bitter prewar rifts.

Tony Blair and M Chirac held their first face-to-face meeting for nearly three months, chatting for 25 minutes in the grounds of the Athens’ EU summit venue at Zappeon Hall. An official described the meeting as “perfectly amiable”.

M Chirac announced that the European Commission is to organise an urgent airlift to bring wounded Iraqi civilians — particularly children — to Europe for treatment.

In further recognition that the situation in Iraq demanded immediate action, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands announced plans to send troops to the country to help keep the peace, rather than wait for UN wheels to turn. “We can’t wait for a UN resolution,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, said.

After the EU had formally welcomed ten new members to its ranks in a ceremony near the Acropolis, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, hailed a “new atmosphere”.

But there was still some behind-the-scenes wrangling, with the British blocking a joint statement seeking once again precisely to define the UN’s role.

“We will issue a statement when there is something to say,” one official said.

After the talks, M Chirac’s spokeswoman indicated that the French President had softened his line. “There are many projects we can work on together and progressively to find a way to put the UN at the heart of the action. Issue by issue, we have to find the right balance between the role of the UN, which must be the essential role, and the American and British forces on the ground,” she said.

The British, French, German and Spanish Foreign Ministers, whose countries all now have seats on the UN Security Council, discussed future resolutions authorising UN responsibilities in Iraq. They later met their counterparts from Russia and Bulgaria — also on the Security Council — to hammer out further details.

Mr Straw said that it was too early to come up with the wording of future UN resolutions, but told fellow EU members that the UN’s role would be limited at the outset.

“We are taking full account of our US partner in this. We have been saying to EU partners here that for the US, UK and Australia, who have put our young people’s lives in harm’s way, we have a profound responsibility to ensure their sacrifices have not been in vain.”

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