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Mohammad Tawfiq, a leading
Kurdish official, said on Wednesday the government
of Iyad Allawi appeared to have no coherent plan to
improve security and that Mr Allawi was unlikely to
remain in office after the January 30 elections.
“For a lot of people in Iraq, the Iraqi government
exists only on television,” he said. Mr Tawfiq, a
leading member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
one of two main Kurdish parties, said Mr Allawi's
government had, with US support, fed violence by
reversing Washington's earlier policy of removing
known Ba'athists from official positions.
“De-Ba'athification went on seriously for only three
or four months,” he said. When it ended, in April,
Ba'athists began to plan violent actions to gain
further concessions, said Mr Tawfiq. Mr Allawi's
government and the previous US-led administration
had allowed the Ba'athists to gain “inside
information”, through penetrating the new Iraqi
police force, which the Americans had mistakenly
reconstituted “from the bottom up”, said Mr Tawfiq.
“Co-operation and co-ordination” between the
Ba'athists and radical Islamists was based on the
Ba'athists providing “money, weapons, transportation
and safe houses” while the Islamists provided
suicide bombers.
Mr Tawfiq said he expected the policy of
de-Ba'athification to resume under a new
Shia-dominated government after the elections.
“A Shia government may come up with a clear-cut
plan, but co-operation of the people in the [Sunni
Arab] region is still needed,” he said. “If we have
a plan to destroy the terrorist organisations, then
the population of that area will co-operate. These
organisations are frightening people.
“The Ba'athists are knocking on doors and telling
people not to vote, and there is no police force or
security people to fight them.”
Mr Tawfiq was cautious about predicting the result
of January 30 election, stressing the lack of
reliable polling data, and the possibility that
bombings, especially in Baghdad, would deter voters.
But he did not expect Mr Allawi's Iraq List to win
enough support for him to remain in office. “What I
can say is what I hear from people, from Baghdad,
the south, and Mosul,” he said. “The feeling is that
he will not get enough votes to form the new
government.”
The joint list of the two main Kurdish parties would
win between 75 and 85 out of 275 seats in the new
assembly, he predicted.
Although he predicted the largest block in
parliament would go to the main Shia list backed by
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential
Shia cleric, Mr Tawfiq said the secular Kurdish
parties did not expect Iraq's new prime minister to
be a cleric. Instead, the new assembly might choose
a layman such as Ibrahim al-Jaafari, of the Dawa
party, or Adil Abd al-Mahdi of Sciri, rather than
the Sciri leader, Abdulaziz al-Hakim. The Kurds were
also confident the Shia parties would support the
inclusion of a federal Kurdish region in the new
Iraqi constitution to be drawn up by the assembly
before a referendum.
http://www.ft.com
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