Paris - Former French international Liliam Thuram said, in an interview published Tuesday, that President Nicolas Sarkozy recently offered him a cabinet post, even though the two had bitterly quarreled about minority politics.

"I met Nicolas Sarkozy and (his advisor) Claude Gueant, and they offered me the position of minister for (ethnic) diversity," Thuram told the daily Le Monde. "We had a long discussion. But I had no choice but to turn them down, for obvious reasons."

According to Thuram, the meeting took place at the end of last year.

Active in the field of civil rights even when he was still playing, Thuram harshly criticized Sarkozy's strong law-and-order rhetoric regarding French ghetto youths.

When in 2005 then-interior minister Sarkozy threatened to "clean up the ghettos with a Kaercher (industrial vacuum cleaner)" and called ghetto youths "scum," Thuram accused him of using "racist language" and of "trivializing the rhetoric of the (anti-immigration) Front National" of Jean-Marie LePen.

Thuram also slammed Sarkozy's campaign proposal to establish a ministry for immigration and national identity, which he carried out after being elected president.

"It's dangerous. But it doesn't surprise me; I know him," he said of Sarkozy. "Now he says that immigration is a danger to national identity."

At the time Sarkozy did not remain silent in the dispute. He dismissed Thuram as a "billionaire who drives through the ghettos in his limousine."

Sarkozy also claimed to know the suburban ghettos better than Thuram did - although the suburb he had grown up in, Neuilly, is one the richest communities in France.

The 37-year-old Thuram was born in the French overseas territory of Guadeloupe and raised in one of the run-down ghetto suburbs of Paris. He earned a record 142 caps for France and was a member of the 1998 World Cup championship side.

He told Le Monde that he was not interested in a political career at the moment. "But one day, maybe," he added. (dpa)