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BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 28 - Iraqi leaders presented
a disputed constitution to the country's parliament
on Sunday, overriding the objections of Sunni
negotiators, sending the document to voters and
setting the stage here for a protracted period of
political conflict.
The Sunni negotiators, who included former members
of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein, publicly
denounced the constitution and called on Iraqis to
send it down to defeat when it goes for a vote on
Oct. 15. Some Sunnis said they expected guerrilla
violence to surge.
A Sunni member of the constitutional committee,
Mahmoud al-Mashadani, said, "We have reached a point
where this constitution contains the seeds of the
division of Iraq."
In the face of those developments, President Bush,
at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., praised the
constitution as a milestone in Iraqi history,
congratulating Iraqi leaders for "completing the
next step in their transition from dictatorship to
democracy." Mr. Bush emphasized what he described as
the charter's protections for individual rights, and
he tried to allay concerns about opposition from
Sunni leaders.
"Some Sunnis have expressed reservations about
various provisions of the constitution, and that's
their right as free individuals living in a free
society," he said. "There are strong beliefs among
other Sunnis that this constitution is good for all
Iraqis and that it adequately reflects compromises
suitable to all groups."
The Iraqi leaders, a group of mainly Shiite and
Kurdish representatives, said they had decided to
push ahead with the constitution after Sunni leaders
submitted a new list of demands.
The American ambassador here, Zalmay Khalilzad, who
had vigorously worked to bring the Sunnis into the
deal, said he, too, had given up in frustration.
The leaders entered the National Assembly chambers
in the early afternoon, read the 39-page document
aloud and urged them to go out and persuade the
people in their communities to vote for it in
October.
Then the group, made up of about 40 of the most
powerful political leaders, drove across the Green
Zone to the palace of the president, Jalal Talabani.
In a ceremony held in the courtyard, they declared
the constitution the embodiment of the nation.
Yet only four Sunni Arab leaders attended the event,
and all had been longtime exiles. There were some
noticeable absences: Adnan Pachachi, the former
foreign minister; Ghazi al-Yawar, the former
president; and Ayad Allawi, the former prime
minister and secular Shiite leader.
President Talabani, though casting a mostly positive
light on the day's events, expressed frustration
with the Sunni negotiating team, a group hastily
brought into the drafting process by Iraqi and
American officials after the Sunni boycott of the
elections in January.
The 15 Sunni representatives took such a tough
approach to the negotiations that several Shiite and
Kurdish leaders said privately that there was no
deal they would agree to.
"We didn't have elections that determined that these
people would actually represent the Sunni Arabs,"
said Mr. Talabani, a Kurd. "They say they talk in
the name of those who did not participate in the
elections."
The fractured outcome appeared to leave the Bush
administration's political strategy here in disarray
and to complicate its plans to reduce the number of
American troops. Since January, one of the principal
aims of America's policy here has been to bring the
Sunnis, who largely boycotted the polls in January,
into the political process, first by drafting them
to help write the constitution, and then hoping to
persuade them to go to the polls in parliamentary
elections set for December.
The hope of the Bush administration has been that
the Sunnis, who dominate the insurgency, would turn
away from violence once they saw the benefits of
political participation. In recent weeks, Sunni
leaders in towns north and west of Baghdad had begun
calling on people to register to vote and to take
part in the political process, with a cleric in
Falluja even issuing a fatwa, or holy injunction,
requiring voting.
All of that now seemed to be in danger. Indeed, the
likelihood of a divisive referendum raised the
prospect that the constitutional drafting process
was not uniting the country but helping drive it
further apart.
Under the constitution, the Kurdish region
[Kurdistan Region] would be given a degree of
autonomy that would divorce it in most respects from
the central government; in time, southern Iraq could
follow in a similar way.
In a news conference, Mr. Khalilzad, the American
ambassador, told reporters he was "disappointed" by
the Sunni representatives' decision to oppose the
constitution.
"I was hoping their reaction would be more
positive," he said.
Mr. Khalilzad acknowledged that it was possible the
document would be voted down in October, because
electoral law allows a defeat if a two-thirds
majority in 3 of Iraq's 18 provinces vote against
it.
Recognizing the difficult road head, he repeatedly
urged Sunnis to "read the document, and don't listen
to what others are saying about it."
Mr. Khalilzad and some Iraqis left open the
possibility that they might consider further changes
to the document. But with only six weeks to go until
the referendum, and plans in the works to distribute
five million copies of the constitution to the Iraqi
people, the likelihood seemed slim.
The possibility that the three Sunni-majority
provinces could bring down the constitution seemed,
at least for now, to be fairly remote. Sunnis are a
solid majority in two provinces, Anbar and
Salahuddin, but only a slim one in Nineveh, which
has a large Kurdish population.
But there seemed the possibility, at least for now,
that voters in Baghdad could cast the decisive
ballots against the constitution. Moktada al-Sadr, a
rebel Shiite cleric and anti-American firebrand, has
called out his followers to campaign against the
constitution, in defiance of the Shiite leaders who
wrote the charter. Sadr City, the sprawling district
that is the base of Mr. Sadr's support, makes up
nearly half the population of Baghdad, which is a
province unto itself.
If the constitution is defeated, the law calls for
new elections, after which yet another constitution
must be written.
The handful of Sunni leaders who decided to support
the constitution said they anticipated a difficult
job trying to persuade the Sunni community, deeply
embittered since the fall of Mr. Hussein, to vote
for it.
"It is not going to be an easy task," said Hachem
al-Hassani, a Sunni and the speaker of the National
Assembly, of persuading other Sunnis to support the
constitution. "They didn't get much of what they
wanted."
Ambassador Khalilzad suggested that some of the 15
Sunni negotiators supported the constitution, but
were afraid to say so publicly.
"There are threats of intimidation," he said. "Some
are afraid that if they support it their lives could
be at risk."
For at least a handful of the Sunni negotiators,
like Mr. Mashadani, the threat of death appeared to
play a role. Iraqi insurgent and terrorist groups,
including Al Qaeda, have promised to kill any Iraqi
who takes part in the constitutional drafting
process. Two Sunnis on the committee were killed
last month.
"The Iraqi street is dying, and if we approve this
document we might be accused of measures that we are
not guilty of," he said.
Sunni members of the constitutional panel said they
had held a final meeting at noon, where they agreed
to reject the draft constitution they had been
handed the day before. They cited longstanding
sources of disagreement, such as language that would
allow the majority Shiite community to allow Iraq to
be divided into autonomous regions.
The issue of Shiite autonomy highlighted the
Sunni-Shiite divide. The Sunnis said they feared
that allowing the Shiites to set up a huge
autonomous area in the oil-rich south could be the
first step in the dissolution of the country. Yet
for many Shiites and Kurds, the Sunni reluctance to
make a deal was really about their unwillingness to
relinquish their dream of ruling Iraq, something
they did almost without interruption from the
country's birth in 1920 until the American invasion
in 2003.
"The Sunnis must understand that they no longer have
a monopoly on power," said Masoud Barzani, the
Kurdish [Kurdistan Region's] leader.
For such a momentous occasion, the 40-odd leaders
who gathered in the courtyard of Mr. Talabani's
palace evinced noticeable restraint. The gathering
showcased the political elite of the new state: with
the exception of the Kurds, who spent years in their
American-protected enclave in northern Iraq, nearly
all of the senior leaders had spent many years
living outside Iraq. Some, like Ahmad Chalabi, wore
Western suits, while others, like Sheik Humam
Hamoudi, donned turbans and flowing robes.
The leaders praised the constitution they had
produced, saying it reflected the consensus of their
diverse country. The constitution would transform
what was a secular state with a strong central
government into what would probably evolve into a
loose federation with a heavily Islamic character.
"It is a constitution for Arabs, Sunni and Shiites,
for Kurds, for Caledonians [Chaldeans(?)],
Assyrians, [other] Christians and Muslims," said Mr.
Talabani, once a guerrilla leader. "We hope our
intelligent people will approve this constitution,
stressing at the same time that we don't deny the
deficiencies in it, and perfection is only for God."
Under the new constitution, Islam would become the
official religion of the Iraqi state, and be
regarded as "a main source of legislation." Clerics
would more than likely sit on the Supreme Court, and
judges would have broad latitude to strike down
legislation that conflicted with the religion.
Clerics would be given a broad, new role in
adjudicating family disputes like marriage, divorce
and inheritance. Under most interpretations of
Islamic law, women enjoy substantially fewer rights
than men.
The heavily Islamic cast of the constitution,
influenced by the Shiite religious parties who won
the January elections, has troubled many of Iraq's
women and secular leaders, even with the
constitution's many guarantees for religious freedom
and individual rights. Mr. Hassani, the Assembly
speaker and one of the few Sunnis to come out in
favor of the constitution, said Sunday that he was
quite unhappy with parts of it.
"This constitution has too much religion in it," Mr.
Hassani said. "The rights of women; they took away a
lot of the rights of women."
Even some Shiites and Kurds, for all their relief
that the constitution was finally complete,
expressed uneasiness about the way it was achieved.
"What is important for me is something that would
make Iraqis feel more united," said Mahmood Othman,
a Kurdish member of the constitutional panel. "That
didn't happen."
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