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Washington’s new ambassador to Iraq paid his first
official visit to Baghdad yesterday, urging Iraqi
leaders to include all ethnic and sectarian groups
in the making of the country’s permanent
constitution.
The arrival of Zalmay Khalilzad, en route to a
conference in Brussels on Iraqi reconstruction,
comes as politicians struggle to work out the final
details of a deal to allow Sunni Arabs greater
participation in drafting of the document.
“I will support the efforts of Iraqis to develop a
unifying vision - a national compact for Iraq’s
future,” said Mr Khalilzad, who presented his
credentials to Iraqi president Jalal Talabani during
the stop-off.
“The process must be inclusive,” he said. “For Iraq
to achieve its full potential no community or sector
should be marginalised.”
Mr Khalilzad, previously ambassador to Afghanistan,
also vowed to help Iraq’s new government “break the
back” of an insurgency made up of “foreign
terrorists and hardline Ba’athists [who] want Iraq
to be in a civil war.”
Washington has pushed Iraq’s Shia- and
Kurdish-dominated parliament to give Sunni Arabs a
greater n expanded share in decision-making. The US
has been particularly anxious to expand
representation on the parliamentary committee
charged with drafting the constitution, upon which
Sunni Arabs originally held only two seats out of
55.
As part of a compromise reached at the weekend,
Sunni leaders over the weekend submitted 25 names -
13 full members, and 10 “consultants” - to be added
to a parallel committee which would take over the
main job of drafting the document.
Iraq’s parliament has yet to approve the final
arrangements, however, and some Sunni leaders have
called for the list of names to be ratified by the
country’s main Sunni Arab organizations.
According to the deal, the expanded committee will
produce a draft of a constitution by consensus - a
difficult task, given the wide gaps between the
Sunni Arab, Shia, and Kurdish blocs on sensitive
issues such as whether to allow role of the former
members of the ruling Ba’ath party to re-enter
politics and the future of the disputed province of
Kirkuk, claimed by Kurds as part of the Kurdish
region.
Saleh al-Mutlaq, one of the 13 new Sunni members on
the committee, said that the Sunni would not accept
provisions in the document which prevent many
high-ranking Baath members from entering parliament.
and otherwise participating in politics.
Many Shia and Kurdish politicians have insisted that
high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s former
party be excluded from politics in the future, but
Mr Mutlaq said that Sunnis could ‘’not accept
anything which could be used against any party or
any group in Iraq.’’
Mr Mutlaq however predicted that Sunni and Shia
Arabs would join together to block the Kurds from
pushing for a referendum to allow the Kirkuk to join
an autonomous region of Kurdistan.
The Kurdistan region’s newly-elected president
Massoud Barzani said on Sunday that all factions in
Iraq must accept the province’s ‘’Kurdish
identity,’’ and undo ‘’all demographic and political
changes’’ carried out under the regime’s policy of
ethnically cleansing non-Arabs from the province.
However, many Arabs and members of Iraq’s Turcoman
minority also press a claim to the country’s
northern oil capital.
’’If there is civil war in Iraq, then it will not be
between Sunni and Shia, but between Arabs and Kurds,
and it will be over Kirkuk,’’ Mr Mutlaq said.
http://news.ft.com
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