Posted on 04/05/2005 4:35:16 PM PDT by neverdem
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 5 - Iraq's major political parties agreed this evening to appoint a president and two vice presidents at a meeting of the national assembly on Wednesday, according to a senior assembly leader, breaking a two-month deadlock in negotiations to form a new government.
The main Shiite and Kurdish political blocs have agreed to name Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, as president; Adel Abdul Mahdi, a prominent Shiite Arab politician, as vice president; and Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, the Sunni Arab president of the interim government, as the other vice president, said Hussein al-Shahristani, a vice speaker of the assembly.
The three officials, who will make up the presidency council, will have two weeks from their appointment to name a prime minister, who would then select a cabinet. The new government would have to be approved by a majority vote of the assembly, according to the interim constitution.
The agreement breaks an impasse between the main parties that had threatened to wreck the confidence built up during the Jan. 30 elections, when Iraqis defied insurgent threats to walk in droves to polling stations.
Because a two-thirds vote of the 275-member assembly is needed to install the presidency council, the Shiite and Kurdish blocs, which together have enough seats to meet that requirement, haggled for weeks to try to use their leverage to its maximum. They debated issues ranging from control of oil revenues to the role of Islam in the new government. More recently, the two blocs argued with Sunni Arab parties over who should get the top jobs in the government.
The parties were unwilling to agree to vote in a presidency council until all those issues were settled or - in most cases - put off until after the installation of the government. The bickering has been eroding the trust of ordinary Iraqis who, amid the continuing violence and tough living conditions, have been demanding that a government be formed as soon as possible. American commanders have also been warning that the lack of a government could lead to a rise in violence.
Dr. Shahristani, a nuclear physicist and prominent member of the Shiite bloc, said the presidency council could officially appoint the prime minister as soon as Wednesday evening or Thursday. The leading candidate for that job is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the head of the Dawa Islamic Party, a religious Shiite party.
The political deadlock ended as American and Iraqi officials reported a wave of violence that resulted in the deaths of four American troops and at least one Iraqi Army officer.
Two of the Americans and the Iraqi officer were killed in a pitched battle on Monday with dozens of insurgents in eastern Iraq, the American military said. The battle began at 4 p.m., when two battalions of the Iraqi Army stumbled across the guerrillas during a search operation for weapons in a remote part of Diyala Province, the military said. American forces sent in air support and troops from the 278th Regimental Combat Team.
The battle was the most recent in a string of engagements in which American and Iraqi troops have fought large bands of insurgents. Last Saturday, 40 to 60 insurgents made a coordinated assault on Abu Ghraib prison, injuring at least two dozen Americans and 13 Iraqi prisoners. Iraqi and American forces last month raided a lakeside training camp that housed about 80 insurgents north of Baghdad. That came just days after an American convoy repelled an attack by dozens of insurgents in the town of Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad.
American military officials say it is unclear whether the insurgents have changed their tactics and begun organizing large-scale operations and setting up big encampments.
The military said a soldier with Task Force Baghdad died this morning when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb in the southern part of the capital. A marine died on Monday from an explosion in Anbar Province, the restive desert region dominated by Sunni Arabs west of Baghdad.
An Interior Ministry official said that about 50 armed Shiite Arabs blocked off a road southeast of Baghdad today and detained 40 Sunni Arabs in retaliation for a kidnapping incident the previous day, in which seven Shiites were abducted by extremist Sunnis. Someone reported the presence of the roadblock to the police, who sent officers to scour the area, the official said. The police found 13 of the detained Sunnis in nearby homes, he said.
The incident underscored the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence taking place across the country.
Officials in Babil Province, south of Baghdad, said today that police from the town of Musayyib had found a mass grave in their area. In the grave were the corpses of 10 police officers and Iraqi Army officers, all blindfolded and with their hands tied. They were killed with several bullets each to their heads, the officials said.
Two different insurgent groups posted Internet videos today showing the separate killings of an Iraqi soldier and an Iraqi man whom guerrillas had accused of being a spy for the Iraqi police, The Associated Press reported.
The Interior Ministry official said that gunmen in west Baghdad kidnapped an Iraqi commander, Brig. Gen. Jalal Muhammad Saleh, and several of his guards this morning.
Romanian officials in Bucharest said that three Romanian journalists kidnapped last week had been released, news agencies reported. A French journalist abducted in January, Florence Aubenas, is still missing.
Leaders of the main Shiite Arab and Kurdish political blocs have been saying it is crucial to bring the former governing Sunni Arabs into the political process in order to dampen the insurgency. The Sunni Arabs largely boycotted the elections and so have few seats in the assembly. In recent days, the Shiites and Kurds have been negotiating with the Sunnis Arab over who should take the vice presidential slot that the parties had agreed should go to a Sunni.
This evening, three Sunni groups each presented a list of three candidates to the Shiite and Kurdish blocs, and the one name that appeared on all the lists was that of Sheik Yawar, Dr. Shahristani said.
The Shiites and Kurds had already agreed more than a week ago that Mr. Talabani should be president and Mr. Mahdi should be one of the vice presidents. After reviewing the Sunni lists today, they settled on Sheik Yawar as the other vice president, finalizing the selection process, Dr. Shahristani said. "He was the common denominator, if you like, of all the lists," he added.
Adnan Pachachi, a prominent Sunni politician and former foreign minister, gave a somewhat different version of events. He said that this afternoon, a group of more than 80 Sunni Arab leaders met in Baghdad to decide whom they should nominate for vice president. Mr. Pachachi said most of them endorsed him, but decided in the end to present a list of three names to the Shiites and Kurds.
The two blocs then selected Sheik Yawar rather than Mr. Pachachi from the list, Mr. Pachachi said. The sheik "is not the choice of the Sunni Arabs," he said.
Last Sunday, at its third meeting, the national assembly appointed Hajim al-Hassani, an American-educated Sunni Arab politician, as its speaker. That step was more symbolic than substantive because the post of speaker is largely ceremonial. The major parties settled on Mr. Hassani after Sheik Yawar rejected the job, saying he wanted to be a vice president.
Democrats are saddened.
Yikes...all this infighting...behind closed doors meetings...secret agreements.
Sounds like normal politics to me!! Good for them:)
Keep it moving. They got a deadline to meet.
It's a quagmire!
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