Posted on 08/28/2005 4:35:09 PM PDT by Grendel9
28 August 2005 Khaleej Times Online
BAGHDAD - Iraq’s draft constitution is ready to be put to an October 15 referendum despite the objections of Sunni Arabs, President Jalal Talabani announced on Sunday, drawing a line under weeks of tortuous negotiations.
“The draft constitution is ready and will be presented to the Iraqi people, who are known for their intelligence, to give their verdict on October 15,” Talabani told reporters at a ceremony to mark the end of the drafting process.
“There are objections from our Sunni Arab brothers ... but nobody can claim that they represent the whole spectrum of Sunni Arabs,” said the president, who is a Kurd. “If the nation rejects it, we will write another one.”
After the final draft was formally presented to parliament, US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad called the charter “the most progressive document of the Muslim world”.
He said it reunited Kurdish northern Iraq with the rest of the country.
“The Kurdish leaders are bringing their region back into Iraq,” he said, noting Iraqi Kurdistan had been running its own affairs since the country’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait.
He also said the charter protected women’s rights.
“Iraqis from all communities should review the draft ... because there have been misinterpretations ... and they should decide for themselves on how to vote,” Khalilzad urged.
Negotiators agreed 11th-hour changes to the text in a bid to win endorsement from the alienated former Sunni Arab elite whose community has driven the anti-US insurgency.
But the changes appeared to have failed to bring the Sunnis on board.
“The constitution is a gift to the Iraqi people,” deputy parliament speaker Hussein Al-Shahristani said after the entire text of the charter was read out in front of lawmakers in the Shia and Kurdish dominated chamber.
The text was signed by Iraq’s three-man presidency, which includes Sunni former president Sheikh Ghazi Al Yawar. The parliament session ended without any vote on the text.
The ceremony ended weeks of talks to thrash out the text but paves the way toward the potentially even more awkward obstacle of the October 15 referendum on the draft that could see the process go back to square one.
Shia negotiator Khudair Al Khozai acknowledged that just three of the 15 Sunni Arab members had turned up for the final meeting of the drafting committee.
He said the 11th-hour concessions made to the Sunnis had been ”minor and do not affect the core” of the text.
The principal stumbling block throughout the protracted talks had been Shia demands for an autonomous region in Shia majority areas of the centre and south like that of the Kurds in the north.
Sunnis consistently opposed the demand amid fears they would lose out in the distribution of Iraq’s huge oil revenues under a fully federal system, given that the reserves lie almost entirely in the Kurdish north or Shia south.
The final draft said the political system of Iraq would be ”republican, parliamentary, democratic and federal”, and referred to Islam as “a main source of legislation”.
It also did not meet Sunni demands to describe Iraq as being part of the Arab world, sticking to the earlier version, which said that “Arab people in it (Iraq) are part of the Arab nation.”
Shia negotiators said they had moderated their position on an autonomous region, insisting only on the principle of federalism and leaving it to a new parliament to work out the details after elections due by mid-December.
Sunni delegates said they continued to oppose the text but would not abandon the political process ahead of the elections.
“There are disputed points which cannot be overlooked because they lead to the dismantling of the country,” they said in a joint statement.
“We decided to reject these points ... but this would not stop us from... taking part in the political process to reach a unified Iraq, starting with the elections.”
Washington had put huge pressure on the negotiators to come up with a text acceptable to as many Sunni representatives as possible amid warnings from field commanders that future US troop levels would largely depend on the community’s reaction to the new charter.
President George W. Bush intervened personally last week with a phone call to a top Shia politician from his Texas ranch urging more concessions.
Drafting committee member Sheikh Jalaleddin Al Saghir said a vote had not been necessary as parliament had already given its assent to an earlier draft last Monday.
Millions of copies of the text are to be distributed across the country ahead of the referendum in which the charter is expected to win a large majority in Shia and Kurdish areas.
But the rules for the referendum specify that two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces can vote down the charter, and at least three provinces are predominantly Sunni.
“The violence will go up, the hope among the people will go down. And the extremists will be the ones who are in control of the country,” Sunni negotiator Saleh Al Motlag told the New York Times when asked what would happen if a text were forced through against the minority community’s wishes.
In violence on the ground on Sunday, 11 Iraqis including four policemen were killed in insurgent attacks in Baghdad and to the north, while a detainee escaped from the notorious US run prison of Abu Ghraib outside the capital
[Here's the Same Story with Different Slant....]
Sunnis reject Iraq's new constitution: The Seattle Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi negotiators finished the new constitution Sunday and referred it to the voters but without the endorsement of Sunni Arabs, a major setback for the U.S. strategy to lure Sunnis away from the insurgency and hasten the day U.S. troops can go home.
The absence of Sunni Arab endorsement, after more than two months of intensive negotiations, raised fears of more violence and set the stage for a bitter political fight ahead of an Oct. 15 nationwide referendum on the document.
A political battle along religious and ethnic lines threatened to sharpen communal divisions at a time when relations among the Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds appear to be worsening.
Sunni negotiators delivered their rejection in a joint statement shortly after the draft was submitted to parliament. They branded the final version as "illegitimate" and asked the Arab League, the United Nations and "international organizations" to intervene against the document.
Intervention is unlikely, however, and no further amendments to the draft are possible under the law, said a legal expert on the drafting committee, Hussein Addab.
"I think if this constitution passes as it is, it will worsen everything in the country," said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni negotiator.
President Bush expressed disappointment that the Sunnis did not sign on but pinned his hopes on the referendum.
"Some Sunnis have expressed reservations about various provisions in the constitution and that's their right as free individuals in a free society," Bush said in Crawford, Texas.
He said the referendum was a chance for Iraqis to "set the foundation for a permanent Iraqi government."
But the depth of disillusionment over the charter in the Sunni establishment extended beyond the 15 negotiators, who were appointed to the constitutional committee in June under U.S. pressure.
The country's Sunni vice president, Ghazi al-Yawer, did not show up at a Sunday ceremony marking completion of the document. When President Jalal Talabani said that al-Yawer was ill, senior government officials including Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi howled with laughter.
"The constitution is left to our people to approve or reject it," said Talabani, a Kurd. "I hope that our people will accept it despite some flaws."
A top Sunni who did attend the ceremony, parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani, said he thought the final document contained "too much religion" and too little protection of womens' rights.
Despite last-minute concessions from the majority Shiites and Kurds, the Sunnis said the document threatened the unity of Iraq and its place in the Arab world.
Ibrahim al-Shammari, spokesman of a leading insurgent group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, said on Al-Jazeera television that the constitution "drafted under the supervision of the occupiers" would divide Iraq and benefit Israel.
Major deal-breaker issues included federalism, Iraq's identity in the Arab world and references to Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party.
Sunnis fear federalism would lead to the breakup of the country into a Kurdish north and Shiite south, deprive Sunnis of Iraq's vast oil wealth concentrated at the opposite ends of the country, and open the door to Iranian influence in the Shiite south.
Many key Shiite leaders took refuge in Shiite-dominated Iran during Saddam's rule. The constitution identifies Iraq as an Islamic - but not an Arab - country, a concession to the Kurds and other non-Arab minorities.
Sunnis also wanted no reference to Saddam's party, fearing that would lead to widespread purges of Sunnis from government jobs and public life.
The parliament speaker, who was not part of the Sunni negotiating team, said the Shiites and Kurds should have been more accommodating to the minority. The Shiite-Kurdish bloc won 221 of the 275 National Assembly seats because many Sunnis boycotted the Jan. 30 election.
"I think to them, they won the election ... so it is an opportunity to them to get whatever they want," al-Hassani told reporters. "If I was in their camp, I would have been more generous."
Although Sunnis account for only 20 percent of Iraq's estimated 27 million people, they still can derail the constitution in the referendum due to a concession made to the Kurds in the 2004 interim constitution. If two-thirds of voters in any three provinces reject the charter, the constitution will be defeated. Sunnis have the majority in at least four provinces.
Defeat of the constitution would force new elections for a parliament that would begin the drafting process from scratch. If the constitution is approved, elections for a fully constitutional parliament will be in December.
Communal tensions have risen since the Shiite-dominated government was announced April 28. Both Shiites and Sunnis accuse the other of assassinating members of the rival sect. Shiites and Kurds dominate the government security services, while most insurgents are believed to be Sunnis.
For the United States, one of the few silver linings in the bitter constitutional debate is to convince many Sunnis that they made a profound mistake by boycotting the Jan. 30 election and should take part in the political process.
So few Sunnis were elected that their constitution negotiators had to be appointed, reducing their influence on the committee. Al-Mutlaq called for an extension of Thursday's registration deadline so more Sunnis could participate.
Sunni clerics, who were at the forefront of the boycott campaign, are now urging their followers to register for the referendum and the December national election - although against the constitution.
The radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has considerable influence, has broken with other Shiites and spoken out against the constitution. Al-Sadr has been making overtures to hard-line Sunni clerics in a common front against the draft and the U.S. presence here.
The document included some relatively minor amendments that the Shiites offered after Bush urged compromise.
They included striking the word "party" from the phrase "Saddam's Baath Party," which could enable a future Baath Party to emerge, and letting a future parliament work out rules for implementing federalism.
Sheik Humam Hammoudi, a Shiite and chairman of the drafting committee, said 5 million copies of the constitution will be circulated nationwide in food allotments each Iraqi family receives monthly from the government. Unlike the January elections, Iraqis will not be allowed to vote outside the country because of the difficulty in applying the three-province veto.
___
Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Bassem Mroue, Sameer N. Yacoub, Slobodan Lekic and Omar Sinan contributed to this report.
do you have a link for this?
“There are objections from our Sunni Arab brothers ... but nobody can claim that they represent the whole spectrum of Sunni Arabs,”
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Just maybe they are getting the idea that the majority rules in a democracy, not a minority bunch of trouble-making thugs...very good !!!
IF ALL THE PEOPLE don't like the constitution, they can rework it...as it should be.
The media is just annoying in their coverage.
I'm betting the referendum sees the constitution pass. I think the Sunnis in the National Assembly don't represent the majority of the Sunnis, and that by the time the vote rolls around most Sunnis will be sick and tired of their leaders telling them they're too stupid to know how to vote on this.
I'd like to see the final version, but I'm betting it will pass. The average Sunni doesn't care if the constitution says they are part of the Arab world or not. Many of them even favor federalism because they want it for their own proviences. It's going to be interesting. If the violence flairs up, then fewer Sunni will be able to vote.
Which Senate Democrats are coaching the Sunnis?
Sunnis seem to be the Democrats of Iraq
You said it better
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