Absent Ashton under fire from EU defence ministers

(PALMA DE MAJORCA) - Europe's top diplomat Catherine Ashton attracted more flak on Thursday for failing to attend a meeting of EU defence ministers.

French Defence Minister Herve Morin set the tone, berating the EU's High Representative for foreign and security affairs for opting out of her first chance to attend a get-together of the 27 European defence ministers.

"Isn't it rich that this morning, to display the ties between NATO and the EU, we have the NATO secretary general (Anders Fogh Rasmussen) here but not the high representative for the first meeting since the Lisbon treaty came into effect," said Morin, referring to the text which created Ashton's post as the EU's foreign affairs and security chief.

Ashton herself was in Moscow on Wednesday before representing the European Union at the swearing-in ceremony of the new Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych on Thursday in Kiev.

A total of 21 of the 27 EU nations are also NATO members and the two organisations cooperate over Afghanistan, Kosovo and Somalia.

At the end of two days of talks in Palma de Majorca, Spanish defence minister Carme Chacon repeated Ashton's "excuses."

But it appeared more will be needed to mend bridges between Ashton and the ministers she failed to meet.

Dutch counterpart Jack de Vries, in a Twitter comment, said "Madame Ashton was notable by her absence" adding that predecessor Javier Solana always managed to find space in his diary for the EU defence ministers' talks.

"In future she will have to organise her time better," one German diplomat said.

Another diplomat present at the closed-door defence talks said that several ministers had made cutting remarks about Ashton's absence.

Spain, which holds the EU's rotating presidency for the first half of the year, has made the relaunch of a European defence strategy one of the "fundamental" objectives of its six-month tenure.

Participants at the Spanish meeting had been hoping to hear her state her intentions as the first holder of the beefed-up foreign and defence job.

It's not the first controversy to dog the English baroness since she assumed the new job this year.

She was criticised for vague answers and a lack of diplomatic experience during her initial job interview in front of the European parliament.

She received further brickbats for failing to rush to Haiti after it suffered a devastating earthquake on Janury 12.

This week France and Sweden took exception to the way the EU's new envoy to Washington was picked.

Joao Vale de Almeida, a close ally of EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, secured the coveted post, though Ashton insisted she had picked him.

Daniel Korski, defence analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, was sympathetic to Ashton's plight.

"She has so much on her plate that it is frankly impossible for her to go everywhere and see everyone in the way that Javier Solana did," he told AFP.

He added though that "she hasn't really shown herself to be particularly interested in the defence portfolio."