BAGHDAD,
August 23, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Iraq's
tentative efforts at consensus politics were pushed to breaking point
when the Shiites and Kurds forced late Monday, August 22, a draft
constitution into parliament in defiance of Sunni warnings that it
could ignite civil war.
Minutes
from a midnight deadline, Parliament Speaker Hajim Al-Hassani told
members of the National Assembly dominated by Shiites and Kurds that a
text of the document had been received but said the final wording
would have to be worked out within the coming three days, Reuters
reported.
Several
issues remained under negotiation, including the mechanism for
implementing federalism, the treatment of former Saddam Hussein regime
officials, and how to divide authority between the presidency,
parliament and the government.
Shiite
head of the drafting committee, Humam Hamoudi, said if there was no
consensus in three days "the constitution will keep moving".
Kurdish
lawmaker Ahmad Pinjwani conceded, however, that if the Sunnis could
not be won over "it will move with a limp".
The
White House praised what it termed "successful negotiations"
as "the essence of democracy."
"The
establishment of a democratic constitution will be a landmark event in
the history of Iraq and the history of the Middle East," US
President George W. Bush said in a speech in Salt Lake City.
Once
approved by the Iraqi legislature, the charter will be presented to
the people in an October referendum.
The
draft of the document was due to be presented by August 15, but
parliament voted to extend the deadline by one week.
Parliament
had faced dissolution if the deadline set in the US-sponsored
timetable had been missed. That would have sent the drafting of a
constitution back to the drawing board.
“Illegal”
 |
|
"If it passes, there will be an uprising in the streets," Mutlak said. (Reuters)
|
For
their part, representatives of the Sunni community, said they would
now fight the "illegal" constitution in a referendum in
October.
"If
it passes, there will be an uprising in the streets," Sunni
negotiator Saleh Al-Mutlaq said after a 10-minute sitting at which
Hassani declared the draft had been delivered on time.
Motlaq
further told CNN: "If the document does not have consensus, it is
illegal."
"The
document does not have a Sunni voice in it ... it does not have the
voice of Iraq. The document will be defeated in the referendum, not
just in the three Sunni provinces but all across Iraq."
"We
will campaign ... to tell both Sunnis and Shiites to reject the
constitution, which has elements that will lead to the break-up of
Iraq and civil war," Soha Allawi, another Sunni Arab on the
constitution-drafting committee, told Reuters.
Sunni
Arabs largely shunned the January election that produced the interim
National Assembly, giving them little clout in the drafting process.
The
Sunnis are a majority in Al-Anbar, Nineveh and Salaheddin provinces
and Iraq's interim law stipulates that the draft fails if two-thirds
of any three provinces vote against it during the planned referendum.
US
ambassador to Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad pledged that the United States
"will work together with the members of the commission to broaden
the support from the Sunni participants in the constitution
process."
The
15 Arab Sunni constitution framers appealed Sunday, August 21, to the
US and United Nations to stop Shiite and Kurdish hegemony over the
talks.
They
said they were only invited to a single meeting with the other
community negotiators since last Monday, August 15. That session was
held Friday, August 19.
