U.S. WILLING TO ALTER STEPS TO IRAQI SELF-RULE, BREMER SAYS

  Informe de RICHARD W. STEVENSON en “The Washington Post” del 17.01.2004

 

WWASHINGTON, Jan. 16 — The top American administrator for Iraq said Friday that the United States was willing to consider changes to the way Iraqis would select an interim government in an effort to reassure the powerful Shiite cleric whose objections have threatened to derail the American plan for a return to Iraqi sovereignty. 

But the administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, and other Bush administration officials suggested that any changes would be limited and said the United States intended to stick by its basic approach of using caucuses rather than direct elections to choose interim rulers.

Mr. Bremer also said the administration remained committed to transferring the government back to Iraqis by June 30, a deadline that would allow the United States to begin reducing its profile in Iraq as the presidential campaign heats up at home.

The cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who holds considerable sway over Iraq's Shiite majority, has been pressing for direct elections, a step that administration officials have said would be logistically difficult to accomplish by June 30. His objections — and his ability to mobilize large demonstrations against the American-backed plan, as he did on Thursday — have left the administration scrambling two months after it settled on the approach after negotiations with the Iraqi Governing Council.

Some American officials have also expressed concern that elections this year could concentrate power with the Shiites, while the United States wants Iraq to adopt a constitution that guarantees the rights of the Kurdish and Sunni minorities.

The American-backed plan, which was agreed to on Nov. 15, calls for caucuses to be held this spring in all 18 of Iraq's states, some of which are predominantly populated by Sunnis or Kurds.

The caucuses would choose delegates to an interim national assembly, which would assume sovereignty from the American-led occupying force and sit while a permanent constitution is written. The plan calls for full elections in 2005.

After meeting with President Bush at the White House on Friday, Mr. Bremer said he would meet on Monday with the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. Administration officials said Mr. Bremer, accompanied by Adnan Pachachi, the chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, would seek to persuade Mr. Annan to put the United Nations' expertise in monitoring elections and writing constitutions to work in Iraq, in part to give an international imprimatur to the administration's plan to gradually establish a permanent Iraqi government.

Administration officials said Mr. Bremer was likely to urge Mr. Annan to have the United Nations take a role in trying to persuade Ayatollah Sistani to agree to the American-backed plan, but they played down the chances of any specific agreement on how to proceed emerging from the meeting.

The ayatollah has refused to speak directly to American officials, leading to a search for ways to improve communication with him and his followers.

"I think the president is clear, as are we all, that we want to implement the timeline and the processes that were laid out in the Nov. 15th agreement, including the handing of sovereignty back to the Iraqis on June 30th," Mr. Bremer told reporters outside the White House after his meeting with Mr. Bush.

But Mr. Bremer signaled some flexibility on the mechanism by which the voting for the interim government would take place.

"We have said that we are prepared to seek clarifications in the process that was laid out in the Nov. 15th agreement, the ways in which the selection of the transitional assembly is carried forward, and I think that's obviously one of the areas that we will obviously be talking to the secretary general and his colleagues about," Mr. Bremer said.

Mr. Bremer declined to specify what types of changes could be made to the proposed caucuses, which would involve a process so complex that even some of its supporters have difficulty explaining it.

"There are, if you talk to experts in these matters, all kinds of ways to organize partial elections and caucuses," he said. "I'm not an election expert, so I don't want to go into the details. But we have always said we're willing to consider refinements, and that's something that we will be willing to discuss at the appropriate time."

It is not clear how much cooperation the United States will get from the United Nations. Mr. Annan pulled his personnel out of Iraq after the bomb attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last summer that killed 22 people, including the mission chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and security remains a primary concern.

And despite the administration's insistence that it has always wanted the United Nations to play a "vital role" in Iraq, as Mr. Bush put it as the war was winding down last spring, the United States has so far been reluctant to cede any substantial authority over the occupation.

"We do think there is a role for the United Nations in this process," Mr. Bremer said. "The U.N. has a lot of expertise in organizing elections, electoral commissions, electoral laws; has a great deal of expertise it can bring to bear on the process of writing a constitution."

Administration officials said Ayatollah Sistani's call for direct popular elections was, among other problems, impractical, because Iraq lacks such basics as voter rolls. Conducting a fair national election in the next five and a half months, they said, could present insurmountable difficulties.

"We have doubts, as does the secretary general, that elections can in fact be called in the time frame of the return to sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30th," Mr. Bremer said.