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BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 16 - The country's first
freely elected parliament in a half-century met for
the first time on Wednesday in the heart of the
capital, just after a volley of mortar rounds rained
down on the surrounding area.
The expectations raised by the meeting of the
national assembly, coming nearly seven weeks after
many Iraqis defied insurgent threats to cast their
ballots, were tempered somewhat by the continuing
failure to install a functioning government. As
talks have dragged on, the confidence of ordinary
Iraqis in their elected leaders has faded as
steadily as the campaign posters still lining the
streets.
The divisiveness of the negotiations was evident on
Wednesday, when the assembly failed to take even the
formal first step of appointing a president, two
vice presidents and a speaker of the assembly.
Nevertheless, members of the 275-seat assembly
marched into the fortresslike convention center in
the heavily fortified Green Zone with a solemnity
that bespoke the historic nature of the occasion and
the gravity of the task still at hand. They
submitted to body searches before picking up name
tags at a reception desk, then sat down in a vast
auditorium for more than an hour to listen to
speeches and take the oath of office.
They represented the full range of Iraqi society,
with elderly clerics in black turbans sitting
alongside Western-educated men in pinstriped suits
and women in full-length robes.
From the impassioned speeches it was evident that
the Iraqis saw themselves at a turning point, nearly
two years after the American-led invasion that
toppled Saddam Hussein. They will now assume more
responsibility for their affairs, beyond the
caretaker government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Their most powerful leaders will be drawn from the
groups that received the greatest and
second-greatest number of votes in the elections on
Jan. 30, the Shiite Arabs and the Kurds, who both
were oppressed by Mr. Hussein, a Sunni Arab.
After appointing a government, the assembly will
turn to its main job of drafting a constitution, a
task that will raise the thorniest political issues
facing the country: the legal role of Islam, the
definition of federal powers and the balance of
power among different ethnic groups and religious
sects.
In interviews before and after the assembly meeting,
Shiite and Kurdish leaders gave wildly varying
estimates of when they might strike a deal on a
government. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite nominee
for prime minister, said it would take one or two
weeks, while another senior Shiite politician,
Hussain al-Shahristani, said a deal would be reached
"in a few days' time."
The Kurds are pushing the Shiites to give specific
guarantees of the rapid restoration of Kurdish
property in the oil city of Kirkuk and the retention
of strong autonomous powers, including the right to
keep a militia. The Shiites would rather put off
such issues until the writing of the permanent
constitution, due by August, or even afterward.
The jockeying has left ordinary Iraqis feeling
increasingly disillusioned.
"I thought all our problems would be solved after
the elections, since those parties now in
disagreement pushed very hard to hold the
elections," said Sami Alwan, 27, a technology
graduate student in Baghdad. "But I didn't know the
differences among them were so deep. The only loser
in this dispute is the Iraqi people."
The Shiite bloc, called the United Iraqi Alliance,
has 140 seats in the assembly, followed by the
Kurdistan Alliance with 75 seats. Together they have
enough seats to get the two-thirds vote necessary to
install a president and two vice presidents, who
would then appoint a prime minister.
Almost all of the speakers on Wednesday called for
unity, saying full engagement of all groups in Iraq
- including the Sunni Arabs, who are leading the
insurgency - was needed to stabilize the country.
The Shiites and Kurds have in recent weeks spoken
with Sunni leaders about taking prominent positions
in the government.
"The national assembly must embody the will of the
Arabs and the Kurds as well as other minorities in
Iraq to build a country that is devoid of oppression
and sectarianism," said Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish
nominee for president.
Yet the speeches all revealed the deep ethnic or
sectarian loyalties of their speakers. Fuad Massum,
the head of the interim parliament under Dr. Allawi
and a senior Kurd, mentioned that the assembly
meeting was taking place on the anniversary of the
Halabja massacre of 1988, in which Mr. Hussein's
military used chemical weapons to kill thousands of
Kurds in the northern town of Halabja.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a
powerful Shiite party, invoked God throughout his
speech and praised Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,
the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, as "the
greatest supporter of Iraqis."
The day had opened on a grim note, as a suicide car
bomber attacked an Iraqi Army checkpoint at 9 a.m.
in the city of Baquba. The explosion killed at least
three soldiers and wounded another 11, an Iraqi Army
spokesman said.
The American military said a soldier had died of
wounds from a roadside bomb attack south of Baghdad.
Late Wednesday, an Interior Ministry official said
the police had discovered four decapitated male
bodies in western Baghdad.
The Iraqi police set up checkpoints throughout
central Baghdad on Wednesday, going so far as to bar
all motor vehicles from the streets around the Green
Zone, a heavily fortified area of government
buildings, snarling traffic for miles. People going
to the convention center were forced to walk, in a
scene reminiscent of Jan. 30, when a traffic ban
sent Iraqis to polling stations on foot. American
Apache attack helicopters swooped low over rooftops,
and soldiers loitered around Humvees outside the
convention center.
The meeting was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., and
at least three mortar rounds landed inside the Green
Zone about 11:15 a.m., rattling the windows of the
convention center. There were no reports of
casualties.
The meeting did not start until about 11:45 a.m. It
opened with a reading of Koranic verses, and the
eldest member of the assembly, Sheik Dhari al-Fayadh,
was named the temporary parliamentary head, in
accordance with Iraqi custom. Then came a steady
stream of speakers, including Ashraf Qazi, the head
of the United Nations mission here.
When Dr. Allawi took the stage, dressed in a black
suit and crimson tie, he tried to sound an upbeat
note, reflecting on what he considered to be
achievements under his watch.
"We have emerged victorious against the terrorists
in many confrontations," he said. "I would also like
to thank the Iraqi people, who challenged terrorism
when they went to the polls to cast their votes in
the first democratic elections in a free Iraq."
Shortly after 1 p.m., the head of the judiciary
council, Medhat al-Mahmoud, read aloud the oath of
office. The assembly members stood up together and
raised their right hands. Mr. Mahmoud charged them,
among other things, with upholding the country's
newfound freedoms.
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