Iraqi officials bound for a key meeting at the United Nations said Thursday that they will ask the UN to return soon to Iraq and to help in the formation of an interim government.
“We have no idea to what extent the UN is prepared to go,” said Adnan Pachachi, the current president of the U.S.-appointed 25-member Iraqi Governing Council and one of several who will take part in next week’s talks at the UN.
U.S. administrator Paul Bremer will join the UN meetings. But first he will confer with President Bush and his advisers in Washington on Friday to discuss the plan to transfer power in Iraq by July.
The U.S. and the Governing Council agreed in November to have an interim government picked by a legislature that is chosen through regional caucuses. But some Shiites are calling for early and direct elections–a demand at the heart of a large anti-American demonstration Thursday in the southern city of Basra.
Iraqi officials said the UN’s return is crucial because of its experience in rebuilding troubled nations. The UN’s presence also would give “legitimacy” to the selection of an interim government that would take over from the U.S.-led occupation, the officials said.
Under intense criticism from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a highly influential Shiite cleric, the U.S. and the Governing Council have tried in recent days to come up with changes in the selection process to make it more open and democratic, said a senior Iraqi official.
Thousands of Shiites marched through Basra on Thursday, shouting out “No to America” and calling for direct elections to be held soon, the view taken by the 75-year-old Shiite religious leader. About 60 percent of Iraqis are Shiite Muslims, a group persecuted under the reign of Saddam Hussein, whose regime was dominated by Sunni Muslims.
The rally Thursday in Iraq’s second-largest city was the first major public demonstration on the issue since al-Sistani announced his rejection last year of the plan for indirect elections leading to a full election in 2005.
“The people must choose whom they want and the ones who represent them, and the authority must be you,” al-Sistani reportedly told a group of tribal leaders last week.
Al-Sistani also was quoted as saying that Iraqis should act like those “revolutionaries” who stood up to Britain’s colonial efforts at the start of the 20th Century.
But Pachachi, who met with al-Sistani on Sunday, described the cleric as willing to reach a compromise to allow interim, indirect elections but not yet convinced that direct elections are impossible.
“We agreed in theory and we said we would try to reach the best possible solution, so this is what we are trying to do,” Pachachi said.
Along with U.S. officials, Pachachi and other high-ranking Iraqis say that direct elections cannot be held within only a few months. They point to the lack of a proper census and a system to carry out an election.
Privately, some Iraqi officials also say they fear that if an election were held any time soon it would play into the hands of better-organized, hard-line religious groups and stymie democracy.
Under the current plan, parliament members would be selected in 18 regional caucuses. The legislature then would establish a new, sovereign administration to take office by July 1.
Pachachi said his country could either go through this process or postpone it and let the occupation continue as long as two years. But extending the occupation, he warned, would leave many Iraqis “disappointed and frustrated.”
Iraqi officials said the UN has signaled its willingness to play a “major role” after the U.S.-led occupation ends but they were unsure exactly what that meant.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan withdrew all the UN’s international staff from Iraq in October after attacks on relief workers and a bombing in August that took 22 lives. Several hundred Iraqi employees have kept up the organization’s work in Iraq.
In violence Thursday, a bus carrying university students was hit by a land mine near Tikrit, and three people were killed.
