Less than a week after arriving in Iraq, a senior UN envoy pointed the way Friday to resolving a standoff between the U.S.-led occupation and Iraqi leaders over the timing of elections.
Lakhdar Brahimi’s comments, coming after days of back-to-back meetings, struck a careful balance between the two sides. He suggested that holding elections this spring, as some Iraqi leaders have demanded, is unlikely to be workable, but he also raised the possibility that Iraqis could directly elect their first lawmakers, which the U.S. has opposed.
“The demand of the Iraqi street for elections is a legitimate request,” Brahimi said in Baghdad. “But the Iraqi street must know that elections are a very complicated process.”
What seems clear is that the U.S.-backed timetable is intact: Sovereignty in all likelihood will return to Iraq’s people by July 1. Maintaining that deadline is likely to please those Iraqis who are eager to see the U.S. presence recede as soon as possible and will allow the Bush administration to return political control to Iraqi hands months before the U.S. presidential election in November.
But Brahimi’s comments also hinted that major changes may be needed in the U.S. blueprint for Iraq’s new government to make it acceptable to Iraqi opponents, particularly Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most prominent Shiite leader.
One key detail under consideration is revising or scrapping a proposed series of regional caucuses that U.S. officials envisioned as a route to selecting the first Iraqi national assembly. Al-Sistani has dismissed the caucuses as the path to an “illegitimate” government.
Option: Expand council
Another consideration is who will run the government until elections can be held. A leading proposal, according to members of Iraq’s Governing Council and other Iraqi officials, calls for expanding the council from 25 members to 75 or more. The members would serve as a temporary legislature until elections could be held–something al-Sistani might be willing to accept, a representative in Baghdad said.
“He has a great deal of flexibility,” said al-Sistani aide Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer. “It is not necessary for the changeover to go to a national assembly. Perhaps the Governing Council can be enhanced to take over a sovereign Iraq.”
In a week in which Iraq was shaken by two car bomb attacks that killed at least 100 people, Brahimi also issued a warning over the country’s future.
“I am a little bit disturbed and a little bit uneasy because there are very serious dangers,” he said.
Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister, said he had appealed to Iraq’s leaders to work out a compromise on a new government, noting that civil wars are started “because people are reckless, people are selfish, because groups think more of themselves than they do of their country.”
Envoy has hope
He said he remained optimistic that there was a willingness among many “to find a middle ground to serve all the Iraqi people.”
Brahimi said that within 10 days he will report to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is expected to make recommendations on Iraq’s political future.
Brahimi’s spokesman said elections were unlikely to take place before July 1.
“The time between now and June is very short, and that makes it unlikely that you can put mechanisms in place,” UN spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told The Associated Press. “The elections don’t have to happen before then.”
But a Pentagon-backed Shiite member of the Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, told Al Jazeera television that elections could and should take place before the transition. Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesman for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, said his group would gather materials “to prove” an election “is doable before June 30.”
Under the U.S.-backed plan, caucuses would select a legislature to appoint a provisional government by the end of June.
Only after a constitution is written and ratified would Iraqis directly elect their government in 2005, according to the U.S. blueprint. Stumbling blocks to quick elections include security concerns and a lack of election laws, coalition officials have said.
But the U.S. plan also was imperiled by al-Sistani, who called for direct elections and mobilized thousands of supporters in nationwide protests to back the voting drive.
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UN called to mediate
That set the stage for the political standoff, and the UN was called in to bridge the gap.
Brahimi did not rule out the U.S. caucus plan but said, “I think the people who put it together realize that, at the very least, it needs to be improved considerably.”
Iraqi lawmakers said alternatives include direct elections held later this year or early next year. Such a move essentially would compress the U.S. timetable, with the elected legislature taking a dual role as a constitutional assembly.
Establishing a legal framework, electoral system, election boundaries and voter eligibility are among the issues that have to be resolved before elections can be held, Brahimi said.
As the political negotiations churned ahead, a U.S. soldier and was killed and two were wounded in an explosion in the capital, the military said Friday. The blast Thursday night in western Baghdad hit a military police patrol, a spokesman said.