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BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraqi politicians set March 16
for the opening of the country's first
democratically elected parliament in modern history
as a deal hardened Sunday to name Jalal Talabani, a
leader of the minority Kurds, to the presidency.
The more powerful prime minister's job will go to
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a deeply conservative Shiite who
leads the Islamic Dawa party. His nomination, which
the Kurds have agreed to, has been endorsed by the
most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq - Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
"This was one of our firm demands and we agreed on
it previously," Talabani spokesman Azad Jundiyan
told The Associated Press. "The agreement states
that Jalal Talabani takes the presidential post and
one of the United Iraqi Alliance members takes the
prime minister's post."
He added that the clergy-backed United Iraqi
Alliance also reached a preliminary agreement with
the Kurds on their other conditions - including
extending their territories to include Kirkuk.
Jundiyan said they wanted the deal on paper before
going though with it, while alliance officials,
including Ahmad Chalabi, said those negotiations
were not over.
Baghdad's new Shiite governor, Ali Fadhil al-Imseer,
took office Sunday to become the city's first
democratically elected municipal official since the
fall of Saddam Hussein. Provincial and municipal
elections were held alongside national ones on Jan.
30.
In Mosul, 360 kilometres north of Baghdad, gunmen
killed a prominent Sunni Arab politician. Hana Abdul
Qader, a lawyer and former member of Mosul's
previous city council, was shot while leaving her
home, said Noor Al-Din Saied, spokesman for the
Iraqi Islamic party in Mosul.
U.S. soldiers assigned to the 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force and Iraqi forces arrested more
than 60 suspected insurgents in the city of Haswa,
50 kilometres south of Baghdad, on Saturday, the
U.S. military said Sunday.
State-run Al-Iraqiya television also reported that
Barham Saleh, a Kurd who is deputy prime minister
for national security affairs, confirmed that the
275-seat National Assembly elected in January would
convene March 16.
That is the anniversary of the 1988 Saddam-ordered
chemical attack on the northern Kurdish town of
Halabja, which killed 5,000 people. Saleh met with
alliance leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim on Saturday when
the alliance convened to discuss the issue.
"The United Iraqi Alliance proposed to convene on
March 15, but we proposed the 16th, the anniversary
of Halabja massacre when Saddam ordered his army in
1988 to kill Kurds with chemical weapons. On this
day we want to denounce this massacre as we
establish a new democratic parliament," Jundiyan
said.
Al-Jaafari and the alliance agreed on Talabani's
presidency during a March 3 meeting with Kurdish
leaders in northern Irbil. Kurds had long wanted the
job for Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan.
The alliance, which won 140 seats in the assembly,
needs the 75 seats held by a Kurdish coalition to
gain the two-thirds majority needed to elect a
president and two vice-presidents, the first step
toward setting up a government under a prime
minister.
Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who controls 40
seats in the assembly, also has been negotiating to
keep his job.
Officials have said the post of speaker probably
would go to a Sunni Arab - either interim President
Ghazi al-Yawer or interim Minister of Industry Hajim
al-Hassani.
A Sunni Arab speaker would go far toward appeasing
the minority, which is believed to make up the core
of the insurgency and, like the Kurds, represents
15-20 per cent of Iraq's estimated 26 million
people. But unlike the Kurds, Sunni Arabs largely
stayed away from the election to protest the U.S.
presence in the country.
Kurdish demands include an autonomous Kurdistan as
part of federal Iraq and a share of region's oil
revenues. They also want to maintain their peshmerga
militia and want a bigger share of the national
budget.
Their demand for a federal state, though, would
require redrawing the Kurds' current autonomous
state borders to include Kurdish areas - oil-rich
Kirkuk among them - that were dominated by Saddam
loyalists and Sunni Arabs.
© The Canadian Press 2005
http://www.canada.com
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