IRAQI COUNCIL AGREES ON TERMS OF INTERIM CONSTITUTION

 

 Artículo de Rajiv Chandrasekaran  en “The Washington Post” del 01/03/2004


 BAGHDAD, March 1 -- Iraqi political leaders agreed early Monday on the terms of an interim constitution that strikes a compromise on the contentious issues of Kurdish autonomy and Islam's role in government.

The country's 25-member, U.S.-appointed Governing Council reached consensus on the 63rd and final article of the document at 4:20 a.m. local time, after more than 10 hours of almost nonstop negotiations mediated by the American administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, people involved in the meeting said.

"It's a historic document," said Faisal Istrabadi, one of the lead drafters and a senior aide to council member Adnan Pachachi. "Every single article, and each subparagraph, had the consensus of all 25 people in the room. . . . In the best tradition of democracies -- granted, we are an aspiring democracy -- we all compromised."

The document, which will provide a legal framework for Iraq until elections are held and a permanent constitution is drafted, grants broad protections for individual rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech, assembly and religion, and other liberties long denied by the Baath Party government of former president Saddam Hussein. In an unprecedented step toward gender equality in the Arab world, the document sets aside 25 percent of the seats in the provisional legislature for women, council aides said.

Attempts to draft the interim constitution had stalled over the past several days because of disputes about the role of Islam in forming legislation and the extent of autonomy that should be granted to ethnic Kurds.

Conservative Shiite Muslim leaders had demanded that the document enshrine Islam as the principal foundation for legislation, a position opposed by Sunni Muslims, liberal Shiites and the council's sole Christian. Kurdish leaders insisted on the right to maintain their militia in northern Iraq, expand areas under Kurdish control and receive a proportional share of the country's oil revenue.

The final draft calls for Islam to be the official religion but to be only "a source" of legislation, Istrabadi said. In an apparent effort to placate conservative Shiites while providing protections against religious domination, the document states that during the transition, legislation cannot be enacted that infringes upon the "universally agreed upon tenets of Islam," but also that legislation cannot contradict any of the rights stipulated in the bill of rights, Istrabadi said.

"No one has any intention of insulting Islam," he said. "Many of us who are deeply devout, but are liberal, are very pleased with the agreement we have worked with our brethren."

Shiite political leaders expressed support for the compromise language. "I think we got a very good law. I think everyone was very happy in the end," said Entifadh Qanbar, a senior aide to council member Ahmed Chalabi, a liberal Shiite who has allied himself with more conservative Shiites in recent days.

"We're happy with the wording," he said. "We got what we wanted, which is that there should be no laws that are against Islam."

On the issue of Kurdish autonomy, it appeared that the Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of the country's population and have lived outside the control of Iraq's central government since 1991, received some, but not all, of what they had been demanding from the country's Arab majority.

The Kurds won the right to retain their pesh merga militia as a national guard force in an autonomous swath of northern Iraq administered by a Kurdish regional government. Arabs as well as U.S. officials had wanted the militia to be integrated into the country's new army or other security services.

The document also endorsed the principle of a federal system of government with the right for extensive self-rule in Kurdish-administered areas.

But the Kurds did not get as much as they had hoped on other fronts. The document calls for the borders of the autonomous Kurdish region to remain static, pending mediation by the interim government. Kurdish leaders had wanted the council to redraw the map of Kurdistan to include Kurdish-dominated areas that were annexed to neighboring provinces under Hussein.

Although there was also compromise language on the sharing of oil revenue, Council members said several other issues related to Kurdish autonomy were to be addressed in a permanent constitution.

The council plans to sign the charter on Wednesday, after a Shiite Muslim holiday on Tuesday. The document, formally known as the Transitional Administrative Law, must be ratified by Bremer before it can take effect. Council aides said Bremer expressed satisfaction with the final draft and said he would approve it.

The document does not specify what type of transitional government Iraq will have when the civil occupation ends on June 30. That will be detailed in an addendum.

Initial attempts to agree on a draft constitution did not go well. On Friday, several Shiite members walked out of the council after a vote to overturn a Shiite-sponsored resolution to make Islamic law, or sharia, the basis for resolving issues such as divorce and inheritance.

Shiite and Sunni members held separate meetings on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. After spending Sunday morning huddling in small caucuses, the council gathered as a full group at 6 p.m.

"It required a lot of effort and hard work," Qanbar said. "Everyone had to explain his point of view in a manner that was transparent and honest. That's how people began to agree with each other."