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BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 25 - Talks over the Iraqi
constitution reached a breaking point on Thursday,
with a parliamentary session to present the document
being canceled and President Bush personally calling
one of the country's most powerful Shiite leaders in
an effort to broker a last-minute deal.
Mr. Bush intervened when some senior Shiite leaders
said they had decided to bypass their Sunni
counterparts, as well as Iraqi lawmakers, and send
the document directly to Iraqi voters for their
approval.
The calls by Shiite leaders to ignore the Sunnis'
request for changes to the draft constitution
provoked threats from the Sunnis that they would
urge their people to reject the document when it
goes before voters in a national referendum in
October.
At day's end, American officials in Washington
declared that the Iraqis had made "substantial and
real progress" toward a deal on the constitution.
And senior Iraqi leaders said they would make a
last-ditch effort on Friday to strike a deal.
But after so many days of fruitless negotiations,
some senior political leaders here suggested that
time had run out.
"There are still some negotiations, but if we don't
have any compromise, then that's it," said Sheik
Khalid al-Atiyya, a Shiite negotiator. "We will go
to the election to vote on it."
A decision by the Shiites to move ahead without the
Sunnis would be a considerable blow to efforts by
the Bush administration to bring the leaders of the
Sunni minority into the negotiations over the
constitution.
Mr. Bush and American officials here have expressed
hope that bringing the Sunnis into the drafting of
the constitution could help coax them into the
political mainstream, and ultimately begin to
undercut support for the guerrilla insurgency. The
Sunnis largely boycotted the parliamentary elections
in January.
In recent weeks, Sunni leaders across north and
central Iraq have begun telling their communities to
register for and vote in the Oct. 15 referendum on
the constitution and in the parliamentary elections
scheduled for December. That trend could be
endangered if Sunni leaders are not part of a deal
on the constitution.
Indeed, the events of Thursday raised the prospect
that the Sunnis would try to reject the constitution
when it goes before the voters. Under the rules
agreed to last year, a two-thirds majority voting
against the constitution in any three of Iraq's 18
provinces would send the document down to defeat.
The Sunnis are thought to constitute a majority in
three provinces.
By Thursday night, Sunni leaders were declaring that
they had been victimized by the majority Shiites,
and they were already making plans to sink the
constitution at the polls.
"We will call on people to say no to this
constitution," said Kamal Hamdoun, a Sunni leader
who is head of the Iraqi Bar Association. "This
constitution was written by the powerful people, not
by the people."
"This constitution achieved the ambitions of the
people who are in power," he added.
The Sunni leaders adamantly oppose language in the
constitution that could allow the Shiites to create
a vast autonomous region in the oil-rich southern
part of the country. In the current draft, the
constitution says each province may form its own
federal region and join with others.
In the debate over autonomous regions, the Kurds,
who already have one such region in the north,
largely stood on the sidelines. But the Sunnis say
that such an arrangement could cripple the Iraqi
state, and that the Shiite autonomous region would
probably fall under the sway of their
Shiite-dominated neighbor, Iran.
Despites their protests, there are widespread doubts
about the sincerity of the Sunni negotiators. Most
of the 15 members of the Sunni negotiating committee
were members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and
there is a growing sense among Shiite leaders that
their primary goal is to block any agreement at all.
In any case, the Shiite leadership has been ardent
in its desire to set up a Shiite-dominated
autonomous region, particularly Abdul Aziz Hakim, a
cleric and the leader of the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq. As advocated by Mr.
Hakim, the Shiite region would comprise nine of
Iraq's 18 provinces, nearly half the nation's
population and its richest oil fields.
Mr. Hakim and many of the senior members of his
group, the Supreme Council, lived for many years in
Iran and even fought on the Iranian side during the
Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's. The Supreme Council is
suspected by American officials of receiving large
amounts of assistance from the Iranian government.
The effort by the Shiites to bypass the Sunnis began
Thursday afternoon, when they canceled a meeting of
the Iraqi National Assembly, which was set to
gather, and possibly vote, on the final draft
constitution. While many Iraqi leaders first
interpreted that decision as simply a delay, the
Shiites made it clear that they were considering
bypassing the Assembly altogether and of forgoing
any further changes to the document.
Because the majority Shiites dominate the National
Assembly, there is little the Sunnis can do to stop
them from writing whatever constitution they choose.
The concern that a deal on the constitution was
falling apart appeared to have to prompted Mr. Bush
to call Mr. Hakim to urge a comprise. One Iraqi
official, who was not authorized to speak publicly,
said the Americans, who have already expressed their
frustration with the Sunnis, have recently become
irritated with what they regard as the stubbornness
of the Shiites as well.
"The Americans are very angry that the Shia are not
agreeing on this," the Iraqi official said. "They
really want them to make these concessions to the
Sunnis to keep them on board."
"They think that without keeping the Sunnis on
board, many things will go wrong, including the
security," the official said.
The other outstanding issue was whether the
constitution would contain language banning any
remnants or symbols of the Baath Party, which was
dominated by Sunnis. The Sunnis are concerned that
this may lead to their exclusion from government
jobs and that they will be unfairly discriminated
against in public life.
While some Iraqi leaders expressed hope that more
negotiations would produce a breakthrough, there was
also evidence that the more they talked, the more
the distance between them grew.
When the negotiations began Thursday morning, Sunnis
came in with an ambitious list of demands on issues
like federalism and de-Baathification, both of which
they ardently oppose and would like to excise from
the constitution.
As the day wore on, no breakthrough materialized.
"We discussed all the articles that we have a
problem with, but we didn't find any solution," said
Haseeb Aref, one of the Sunni negotiators.
Meanwhile, some of the Sunnis maintained that after
all the missed deadlines, the current government had
lost its own legal standing.
Under the language of the interim constitution
currently in force, the National Assembly is
required to dissolve itself if it does not complete
a new constitution by the deadline, unless it amends
the constitution. It failed to do either one of
those on Thursday.
"The process was illegal," said Kamal Hamdoun, the
Sunni member of the committee. "They don't have a
right to extend."
At a news briefing late Thursday evening, Hachem al-Hassani,
the speaker of the National Assembly, felt compelled
to respond to those allegations. He said he believed
that the assembly had proceeded strictly according
to the law.
As common ground fell away, leaders of the majority
Shiites expressed confidence that the Sunnis would
fail to muster the necessary two-thirds majority in
three provinces to sink the constitution.
Ordinary Sunnis, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a Shiite
leader, "do not all have the same views and the same
ideas." As a result, he said, opponents of the
constitution "will not get 'no' in the referendum."
Mr. Hassani, a secular Sunni who has supported the
Shiite leaders, expressed hope that the talks on
Friday would produce the compromise that has eluded
negotiators so far.
"We think the door is still open to find a
solution," Mr. Hassani said.
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