Iraqis wrangle over future president

Reuters ^ | 5/30/04 | Tom Perry

[Valin]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi leaders are wrangling over who should succeed Saddam Hussein as president after they agreed on other key posts in the new government that will take power next month from the U.S. occupation authority.

With the top post of prime minister filled and consensus on key ministries, Iraqi officials spoke on Sunday of sharp disagreement on the largely ceremonial choice of head of state between Adnan Pachachi, veteran scion of a pre-Saddam political dynasty, and Ghazi Yawar, a youthful engineer long based in Saudi Arabia.

U.S. and U.N. officials may now be ready to propose a third candidate to break the deadlock, one senior Iraqi official said.

Many of the 23-member Iraqi Governing Council meeting on Sunday favoured Yawar, said another senior politician. But U.S. administrator Paul Bremer and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi were putting the case for Pachachi, a former foreign minister.

Council member Yonadam Kanna said during a break in talks that Bremer and Brahimi were floating a compromise choice: "We hear from Bremer and the U.N. there is another candidate. We have not been informed who," Kanna, a Christian, told Reuters.

U.S. and U.N. officials are mediating among Iraq's religious and ethnic groups. Prime minister-designate Iyad Allawi is from the long oppressed Shi'ite majority. Governing Council members Pachachi and Yawar are, like Saddam, Sunni Arabs.

The non-Arab Kurds had pushed hard for the presidency and would be compensated with two key ministries, defence and foreign affairs, Iraqi politicians involved in the talks said.

Bremer's U.S.-run authority took power after U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam 14 months ago. It intends to hand over formal sovereignty to the interim government on June 30, although some 150,000 foreign troops, mostly American, will stay on in Iraq.

Saddam is in U.S. custody as a prisoner of war; his Iraqi successor may seek to try him for crimes against humanity.

Washington asked the United Nations to help form the government that will lead Iraq to its first free elections in the new year under a plan that the United States has submitted to the U.N. Security Council for international endorsement.

AGE VS YOUTH

The U.S.-appointed Governing Council caught Brahimi off guard on Friday in announcing its choice of Allawi, a secular Shi'ite with strong links to the CIA from his time in exile.

Pachachi, 81, was foreign minister in the 1960s, before Saddam came to power. His Baghdad-based family was a powerful force under the British-installed monarchy that fell in 1958. He has spent much of the time since in exile in Abu Dhabi.

Yawar, in his mid-40s, is a leader of a prominent Sunni tribe from the northern city of Mosul. A civil engineer, he left Iraq in 1990 and ran a telecoms firm in Saudi Arabia.

Senior members of the Governing Council told Reuters after talks on Saturday the 26 cabinet posts under Allawi were all but agreed but that there was a standoff over the presidency.

On Saturday, senior Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi said key ministers had been agreed. A second Governing Council member, who expressed reservations on Saturday about whether the list was final, confirmed the same names to Reuters on Sunday.

Both said Hoshiyar Zebari, now foreign minister in the U.S. supervised government, would be defence minister. Another Kurd, Barham Salih, would take his job at the Foreign Ministry.

Violence from sectarian militias and guerrilla groups, some with links to al Qaeda, poses the main threat to the elections.

Shi'ite fighters clashed with U.S. forces in the holy city of Najaf on Sunday, the latest in a series of skirmishes since a truce offer last week by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Militiamen exchanged gunfire with a U.S. tank and blasts from Iraqi rocket-propelled grenades or mortars were heard on two occasions near Najaf's ancient cemetery during the day.

But U.S. commanders say they are optimistic that, over the coming days, the truce will end an uprising by Sadr's Mehdi Army that has cost hundreds of Iraqi lives over the past two months.

The U.S. military said four more soldiers had been killed, bringing the 14-month combat death toll to at least 588.

[Defiant]

Reuters apparently thinks that Saddam was a legitimate president, and this exercise is to pick his "successor". He was a dictator who took power after a bloody coup, and then held power with the murder of hundreds of thousands. This process is to select a caretaker president pending elections of a president of Iraq, not the successor of a dictator.