U.S. REBUFFS CLERIC ON IRAQI VOTE PLAN

Informe de  Daniel Williams and Pamela Constable en “The Washington Post” del 13.01.2004

 BAGHDAD, Jan. 12 -- L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, on Monday rebuffed a demand from the country's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric for early elections that many analysts say would put power into the hands of the country's large and impoverished Shiite majority.

Bremer said that a plan devised last November for a transitional assembly created through a system of regional caucuses would proceed despite the opposition of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

The caucus system is "the best way forward before the return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people and to provide for elections in about a year now to a constituent assembly," Bremer told Radio Free Europe.

Sistani's opposition poses a serious challenge to American plans to cede authority in Iraq this summer to a transitional government. So far, the largely Shiite south has been relatively friendly to American-led occupation forces. But some violence has flared in recent days, giving a taste of the danger should Shiites resist en masse.

Since the fall of President Saddam Hussein last spring, violent opposition to the U.S.-led occupation has broken out mainly in the Sunni Muslim central regions, an area of bedrock support for Hussein. On Monday, another roadside bomb in Baghdad killed a U.S. soldier.

In his statement Sunday, Sistani alluded to the possibility of violence among fellow Shiites unless direct elections were held. He has yet to put his objections into the form of a fatwa, a religious edict that many Shiites would consider law.

A general Shiite uprising would sorely test the capabilities of the hodgepodge of international units in southern Iraq. About 10,000 British troops are stationed there, and thousands of others come from countries as varied as Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Spain, El Salvador and Thailand.

U.S. officials and Iraqi politicians on the U.S.-appointed Governing Council were handling the rejection of Sistani's demand carefully. Reactions to his statements were prefaced by expressions of "greatest respect" for the religious leader.

Bremer's spokesman, Dan Senor, said that the U.S. plan "celebrates" Iraq's "diversity." That language addresses fears of Iraq's two large minorities, the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds, of being overwhelmed by a sea of Shiite votes and conversion of Iraq into a Shiite state.

Over the past week, Shiite demonstrators demanding jobs and services have thrown stones and homemade explosives at British and European troops in three cities.

On Monday in Kut, a small city about 100 miles southeast of the capital, rioters surrounding a government building were dispersed by Ukrainian troops who fired shots into the air. Three members of the Iraqi and foreign security forces were reportedly wounded. The unrest came after two successive days of violent demonstrations in Amarah, another largely Shiite town farther south, and a day of violence in Basra.

But most Shiite areas remain quiet. In Qadimia, an old Shiite community in greater Baghdad, a variety of residents said Monday that they still strongly supported the U.S.-led effort that freed them from Hussein's repressive rule, but that they were becoming upset by what they called the prolonged and intrusive presence of U.S. troops.

"There are too many tanks out there, pointing their guns at people and running into cars without even stopping to see if they have done any damage," said Abu Amar, 48, who owns a small car-cushion workshop. "We are thankful to the Americans, but they don't feel what we feel, and people get enraged by how the troops treat them."

Amar and several other Shiite shop owners said their principal concern was not elections but crime and insecurity. They agreed that it would be unwise to hold elections in the near future unless Iraq became safer and more stable.

"We need a fair and democratic legal process," said Sahah Medhi Mohammed, 38, a lawyer. "They can select a group of people to write the constitution, or they can elect them. We are with both Sistani and the Americans. Whatever way is decided, our only hope is that it guarantees the right of all Iraqis."

Some urban Shiites who suffered particular hardships during the Hussein era say they are more concerned with seeking justice for those past wrongs than arguing the details of the political future.

"We want a fair government so these criminals, the people who caused these massacres, will be judged for their crimes," said Farhan Fadl Zaidan, 38, who runs a small family business making wooden doors.

On Monday, U.S. soldiers shot dead seven of about 40 members of an armed gang who were allegedly trying to steal oil from a pipeline south of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, the Army said, according to the Associated Press.