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Iraq parliament meets under heavy security
Iraq's new parliament met for the first time yesterday under extraordinary security after a delay of three months caused by political haggling over the formation of a government.

Fearing that the first meeting of the Council of Representatives could be a catalyst or target for violence, the interim government declared a holiday and imposed a day-long ban on vehicles in the capital. The driving curfew, from 8 p.m. Wednesday to 4 p.m. yesterday, has been used before - on national election days and more recently during a surge in sectarian violence - to discourage car bombings and similar attacks against markets, mosques, and other places where people gather.

Police reported no major outbreaks of violence in Baghdad as the parliament convened and was officially sworn-in for its four-year term in the so-called Green Zone - the heavily fortified, 16-square-mile area that is the headquarters of the American occupation and the Iraqi government.

But an Interior Ministry spokesman, Major Mohammed Sultan, said that police had discovered 25 bodies in the previous 24 hours, continuing an apparent cycle of sectarian killings that has gripped Iraq for three weeks.

Following Iraqi custom, parliament's oldest member, Adnan Pachachi, opened yesterday's meeting, which lasted about 40 minutes.

"The country is going through very difficult times," Mr. Pachachi told the assembly. "Sectarian tension has increased and it threatens national disaster."

Although the session was largely ceremonial, the long-awaited opening of parliament is significant because it begins a 60-day period during which the legislature must elect a new president and approve a prime minister and a cabinet, adding additional pressure to the country's political leadership to stop squabbling and get on with the nation's business.

The meeting was also important symbolically. The 275-member national assembly is Iraq's first permanent, democratically elected parliament since the 2003 American invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. A temporary legislature sat for most of last year, charged with crafting a new constitution and laying the ground for the December 15 elections that brought the current parliament to power.

Yesterday's opening session was delayed by intense wrangling over the formation of a national unity government that would include the main political factions: Shiite Muslims, who have the largest block of seats with 130; Kurds, who have 58 seats; Sunni Arabs, who have 55 seats, and secularists, who control 29 seats.

Negotiations over a new government are continuing and could last for weeks or even months, leaders say.

Acknowledging that the country's political chaos is contributing to its worsening security situation, particularly a rise in sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis, top political leaders from all the factions began marathon meetings this week to bridge their differences.

It remains unclear whether a broad coalition that includes all the main parties can be achieved. American and Iraqi officials hope that Sunni Arabs, in particular, can be persuaded to join the government, believing that their participation in the political leadership of the country will help defuse a deadly Sunni-led insurgency, spearheaded by Al Qaeda in Iraq, that has targeted coalition troops and Iraqi civilians alike.

Increasingly, political leaders also argue that Sunni participation is equally important to help prevent a slow descent into civil war, accentuated by the February 22 bombing of a revered Shiite Mosque in Samarra and the hundreds of deaths in sectarian attacks that followed. More than 1,000 people were killed in the days after the bombing, underscoring the dangerous divide that is growing between Iraq's Shiites, who make up about 60% of the country's 28 million people, and its Sunnis, who account for about 20%.

Forming a new government had been delayed by intense disagreement from Sunni Arabs and Kurds over the Shiite's nominee for prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jafari, who has served as interim prime minister for about a year. Sunnis and Kurds complain that Mr. Jafari has not done enough to control Iraq's spiraling violence or spur its reconstruction.

Those will be key challenges for the members of the new legislature as America and other coalition forces begin what many see as their inevitable withdrawal, and as reconstruction funds start to run out and Iraq begins having to do more for itself.

One of the most immediate challenges will be efforts to craft amendments to Iraq's new constitution. Sunnis are concerned that the constitution approved in a nationwide referendum last fall allows Shiites and Kurds to form resource-rich autonomous regions in the north and south of the county that would consign the Sunnis to the poor, largely desert areas in central Iraq. Sunni political parties agreed to participate in the December elections only if the next parliament would be empowered to amend the constitution.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-03-17
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=145748