Europeans Meet Today on a Gulf Peace Mission : Diplomacy: But EC leaders deny seeking a separate deal. ‘There will be no negotiations,’ one says.

European leaders, denying that they are seeking a separate deal with Iraq, will try today to launch their own Persian Gulf peace initiative before the Jan. 15 U.N. deadline authorizing the use of force to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

The foreign ministers of the 12 European Community nations will meet in Luxembourg to consider sending their own emissaries to Iraq.

But Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jacques Poos, who is likely to be included in any mission to Iraq, insisted that the Europeans are determined to support the U.S. demand that Iraq pull out of Kuwait, which it has occupied since Aug. 2.

“There will be no negotiations,” Poos told a press conference in Luxembourg.

The Iraqi ambassador to the European Community in Brussels said that approach is doomed.

“We are not retreating one millimeter from Kuwait,” declared Ambassador Zaid Haidar. The Europeans will be wasting their time, he said, if they do not seek to negotiate an overall Middle East peace that addresses the Arab-Israeli conflict.

European foreign ministries said they will press ahead with their overture to Iraq despite President Bush’s announcement Thursday that he will make Secretary of State James A. Baker III available next week to meet with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz.

“The two initiatives are not in conflict with one another,” said a spokesman at the French Foreign Ministry.

Bush’s latest overture to Iraq seemed designed to mollify allies that have contributed forces to the multinational effort in the Persian Gulf but are disinclined to use them. Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens, for example, has said Belgian troops in the gulf would not participate in a war against Iraq.

Bush’s move was welcomed in European capitals. But a spokesman for German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who initiated today’s meeting of EC foreign ministers in Luxembourg, said the Europeans are determined “to pursue all avenues” toward a peaceful solution of the gulf crisis.

That represents a shift of position since last month. The EC foreign ministers decided on Dec. 18 not to seek a meeting with Aziz at a time when Baker was offering to meet with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at any time between then and Jan. 3. Hussein refused.

“But now time is running out,” said a spokesman in the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry. The Jan. 15 deadline would be less than a week away, he said, if the EC foreign ministers again waited to see if a U.S.-Iraqi meeting could be arranged.

Tiny Luxembourg (population 380,000) finds itself at the vortex of European diplomatic activity because it currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Community.

Poos, as Luxembourg’s foreign minister, might be deputized alone at today’s meeting to carry the EC’s message to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, according to another German Foreign Ministry spokesman. Or he might be joined by Foreign Ministers Gianni De Michelis of Italy, which held the EC presidency for the last six months of last year, and Hans van den Broek of the Netherlands, which will assume the presidency on July 1.

But a Western diplomat in Brussels said a decision to send a delegation at the foreign minister level was not a forgone conclusion. Today’s decision might be to send a lower-level delegation, he said, or possibly no delegation at all in light of the new U.S. effort for Baker to talk with Aziz.

The EC nations’ effort to act cohesively reflects their conviction that they will carry more international clout that way than individually.

“Europe can have a stronger voice united than divided,” said Jacques Vandamme, president of the Brussels-based Trans-European Political Studies Assn.

Iraqi officials hope that Europe’s involvement will increase the chances that Baghdad can link a solution of the Kuwait issue to international negotiations on the longstanding and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We want Europe to play a positive active role in this question,” Aziz said in a recent interview with The Times. “ . . . The Europeans have shown a policy of cooperation in the region which was agreeable to us.”

Iraq lost a well-placed advocate of talks on the Israeli-Palestinian question when Italy, which has major commercial ties with Iraq, turned over the EC presidency to Luxembourg on Jan. 1. Luxembourg does not even have an embassy in Baghdad.

Iraq has focused on France as its best bet in Europe for pressing for a break with the U.S. position that the invasion of Kuwait must not be linked with the Arab-Israeli issue. It was a French legislative leader, Michel Vauzelle, president of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Commission and a confidant of President Francois Mitterrand, who went to Baghdad on Wednesday on what he insisted was a private peace-seeking mission.

But French Foreign Ministry officials insist that Iraq’s hopes are misplaced.

“The French position is not to link these two very different issues,” said the Foreign Ministry spokesman. The world can eventually try to cope with the Arab-Israeli conflict, the spokesman added, but only after Iraq has pulled out of Kuwait and made restitution for the damage its invasion caused.

Haidar, the Iraqi ambassador in Brussels, clearly linked the two matters. He called the present Persian Gulf crisis “the tip of the iceberg,” with the “American-Zionist” alliance at its base.

“The first American shell that hits us, our first reply will be against Israel,” he promised.

Times staff writers Daniel Williams in Amman, Jordan, and Tamara Jones in Bonn contributed to this report.