By Alastair Macdonald
Reuters, 02 May 2006
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Political leaders of Iraq's Sunni minority staked their claim to steering constitutional change through parliament on Tuesday, on the eve of the new assembly's first day of normal business since an election in December.
Guerrilla rebels were also in action, targeting the governor of the most predominantly Sunni Arab province with a suicide car bomb. U.S. forces claimed new successes against the insurgency, saying more than 100 militants had been killed in recent days.
The governor was wounded and three bodyguards killed.
Two German engineers seized by gunmen in northern Iraq in January were the latest foreign hostages to be freed in recent weeks. Details of their release were not immediately available.
Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki, whose nomination to parliament 10 days ago ended four months of political stalemate, was still working through the complex business of naming a unity government that can stem violence among Iraq's competing ethnic and sectarian groups, mainly Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
The new speaker of parliament, Sunni politician Mahmoud al- Mashhadani, addressed Iraqis on television before Wednesday's session saying that forging a national consensus and building up armed forces that could take over from the U.S. military were vital to ending violence that threatens to become civil war.
"Continuing the dialogue among the national political powers to agree a national consensus with a common vision, along with accelerating the establishment of the security forces, is the way to deal with the security problem," Mashhadani said.
GERMANS
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the two men from Leipzig, Rene Braeunlich and Thomas Nitzschke, were unharmed, three months after they were snatched outside their workplace in the northern industrial city of Baiji on January 24.
They were expected home on Wednesday. There was no comment on the circumstances of their release or of any ransom payment of the kind Berlin is known to have paid in previous such cases.
American, Canadian and British hostages have been freed in Iraq in recent weeks. Two Kenyan engineers are among several foreigners and hundreds of Iraqis believed still to be captive.
Though there is still no government and Maliki says he needs some days yet to announce a cabinet, parliament will meet to begin addressing how to review the constitution ratified in October despite Sunni opposition that nearly vetoed it.
"It's a matter of logic that the Iraqi Accordance Front heads the committee that will revise the constitution in parliament because the demand of rewriting the constitution was a demand made by the Front," Iyad al-Samarrai, a senior official of the Front, the main Sunni parliamentary group, told Reuters.
Under a deal brokered by the U.S. ambassador to defuse Sunni opposition on the eve of the constitutional referendum, parliament must form a committee which will have four months to come up with recommendations on how to amend the constitution.
Since any changes must win both parliamentary and popular approval through a new referendum, it is not clear how far Sunni pressure for amendments will translate into a new charter.
The minority, generally estimated at about 20 percent of the population and dominant under
Saddam Hussein, fears provisions for sweeping regional autonomy within a new federal system could mean Kurds in the north and the majority Shi'ites in the south can cream off Iraq's oil wealth.
DIVISION
The poverty in natural resources of Sunni-dominated central Iraq was acknowledged in an article published on Monday by a prominent U.S. senator, Joe Biden of the opposition Democrats, urging
President George W. Bush to consider breaking up Iraq into three broad regions with a weaker central government.
A system would have to be devised to compensate Sunnis for their lack of direct access to oil, he and his co-author wrote.
The article has whipped up debate in Iraq, where Kurdish and some Shi'ite leaders have made no secret of their desire to see strongly autonomous regions.
An aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shi'ite cleric and a moderating force on the Islamist Alliance that has a near majority in parliament, said Sistani opposed division.
"The Shi'ites in the south cannot live on their own without their brothers from other sects and vice versa ... Even though a few people are demanding federalism, this does not mean that Iraq should be divided," Sistani aide Thafir Taqi said.
In Ramadi, violent capital of the western desert province of Anbar and a stronghold of the Sunni revolt against the U.S. occupation and Shi'ite majority rule it has brought, few details were confirmed about the attack on the regional governor.
Hospital officials said they had received the bodies of three of the official's bodyguards after the attack. Residents said they saw a car ram into the governor's motorcade and blow up in the center of Ramadi. The U.S. military, whose troops witnesses said were escorting the limousines, had no comment.
An aide to governor Maamoun Sami Rasheed said he was being treated for his wounds at a U.S. military clinic. One of his predecessors was kidnapped and killed last year. Two others quit after threats, one of them when two of his sons were kidnapped.
Additional reporting by Majed Hameed in Ramadi, Khaled Farhan in Najaf, Aseel Kami, Hiba Moussa, Omar al-Ibadi, Mussab Al-Khairalla, Ibon Villelabeitia, Terry Friel and Michael Georgy in Baghdad and Karin Strohecker in Berlin.
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Citation: Alastair Macdonald. "Sunnis eye Iraq charter changes, Germans freed," Reuters, 02 May 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060502/wl_nm/iraq_constitution_dc
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