Shiites Await Answer to Compromise Offer

08/26/2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - With Iraq’s constitutional talks at a decisive stage, the country’s majority Shiites awaited a response Friday from Sunni Arabs to what they said was a final compromise offer to break the impasse over the draft charter.

The Shiites submitted the offer after the personal intervention of President Bush, who faces rising criticism from the U.S. public and his own party about the conduct of the Iraq war.

Shiite negotiator Jawad al-Maliki reported progress in talks Friday with the Sunni Arabs and Kurds on federalism but problems on a Shiite proposal to ban members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party from public life.

“We will not be easy with this point at all,” al-Maliki said. He said the Sunnis were being tough in defending the rights of former Baath party members and “it is regrettable to us that the Sunnis and the Baath are in the same pot.”


Sunni negotiator Kamal Hamdoun said only that he and his Sunni colleagues were “studying the suggestions that we received.”

Asked when they would respond, he said: “Maybe tomorrow” and refused to say more.

Iraq’s Sunni Arab Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer said the current draft, submitted to parliament last Monday over Sunni objections, was written by Shiites and Kurds but that the country needs a constitution “that keeps the unity of Iraqi soil and gives rights to all Iraqis.”

At stake is a political process that the United States hopes will in time curb the Sunni-dominated insurgency, and along with a better-trained and equipped Iraqi security force, enable the Americans and their international partners to begin bringing home their troops next year.

With more than 1,800 U.S. deaths since the war began in 2003 and falling poll numbers, the White House needs to show something positive from Iraq to counter the depressing litany of car bombings, assassinations and American battle deaths.


The White House confirmed that Bush telephoned a top Shiite leader, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, and Shiite officials said the president urged them to make compromises with the Sunnis in the interest of national unity.

But the protracted negotiations appear to have already widened the gaps among the country’s religious and ethnic groups.

“We are trying to put forward the views of others,” al-Yawer, a former Iraqi president and a major tribal figure, said earlier Friday on Al-Jazeera television.

In offering concessions on the pivotal issues of federalism and Baath Party members, Shiite negotiator Abbas al-Bayati said: “We cannot offer more than that.”

According to al-Bayati, the Shiites had proposed that the parliament expected to be elected in December be given the right to issue a law on the mechanism of implementing federalism and to set a timetable for the work of the Supreme National Commission for de-Baathification.


He gave no further details. Sunnis had insisted that both issues be deferred to the next parliament, in which they hope to have more members. Sunni Arabs form an estimated 20 percent of the 27 million population but won only 17 of the 275 parliament seats because so many Sunnis boycotted the Jan. 30 election.

However, it was unclear if the proposals as offered would be enough to persuade the Sunnis to approve the charter. Unlike their Shiite and Kurdish partners, the Sunni Arab delegates are not elected officials but were appointed by community leaders and may lack negotiating room.

Some Sunni clerics also have condemned as anti-Islamic parts of the document their own negotiators have tacitly accepted.

Sadoun Zubaydi, a Sunni member of the drafting committee, said if the proposal does not make concessions on the principle of federalism but only the mechanism, this would not meet Sunni demands.

“Our position is that both the principle and mechanism should be deferred,” Zubaydi told The Associated Press. “Our policy is decentralization, but not political federalism with borders, division of resources, etc. That is separatism, not federalism.”


The constitution provides for a federal state, one in which provinces would have significant powers in contrast to Saddam’s regime in which Sunnis dominated a strong central government.

The charter will allow any number of provinces to combine and form a federal state with broader powers. The Sunnis have demanded a limit of three provinces, the number the Kurds have in their self-ruled region in the north. The Sunnis have publicly accepted the continued existence of the Kurdish regional administration but within its current boundaries.

Without limits, Sunnis fear not only a giant Shiite state in the south but also future bids by the Kurds to expand their region into northern oil-producing areas, as they have demanded. That would leave the Sunnis cut off from Iraq’s oil wealth in the north and south. More than a million Sunni Arabs live in areas dominated by Shiites.

“Don’t follow constitutions of the infidels,” influential Sunni cleric Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidaei told the congregation Friday at Baghdad’s Umm al-Qura mosque. “We don’t want a constitution that brings the curse of separation and division to this country.”

Sunni Arabs also resent attempts to ban former Baath Party members from government posts or political life, feeling that would deprive them of livelihood in the new Iraq and prevent the country from using the talents of thousands of professors, senior executives and others who joined the organization to advance their careers.

However, Shiites suffered under Saddam, and hatred for his Baath party runs deep. A move by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, to quietly reinstate some former Baath members in the security services cost him considerable Shiite support, and his party fared poorly in the election.