After apparent uncertainty France has decided to send Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner to a France-Oceania summit in Noumea rather than its president or prime minister, officials said Tuesday.

Kouchner's participation was confirmed on the day of his departure for the Pacific and just three days before the start of the summit itself, although his spokesman denied that Paris had accorded little importance to the meeting.

After initial reports that President Nicolas Sarkozy or Prime Minister Francois Fillon might attend, officials from Noumea said on July 16 that Kouchner would in fact represent France at the forum.

As late as Friday, however, the French foreign ministry insisted that nothing had been decided, leading some observers to speculate that senior officials were in no hurry to undertake the long trip.

Ministry spokesman Frederic Desagneaux denied this, insisting: "This summit confirms the importance that France attaches to its relations with the states of the Pacific, with whom a bond of trust has been developed."

In previous decades, France's relationship with the island states of the Pacific has sometimes been literally explosive.

Many in the region were angered in 1995 and 1996 when then French president Jacques Chirac unilaterally resumed nuclear testing on the French Pacific atoll of Mururoa one year before a test ban treaty was signed.

Earlier, in 1985, French agents bombed the Greenpeace protest ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, killing one person on board and triggering a diplomatic spat with New Zealand.

More recently France, which has island territories of its own in the region, has attempted to build warmer ties. Chirac hosted the first France-Oceania summit in 2003 in French Polynesia and the second in 2006 in Paris.

According to the French spokesman, who warned that the list was provisional, Nauru, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands will send presidents to the weekend summit, while Samoa and the Cook Islands will send prime ministers.

Australia will be represented by its minister for relations with the Pacific and New Zealand by its defence minister, he said.