Baghdad, Iraq – Iraqi leaders presented a disputed constitution to the country’s parliament Sunday, overriding the objections of angry Sunni negotiators and setting the stage for a protracted period of political conflict.
The Sunni negotiators, who included former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, publicly denounced the constitution and called on Iraqis to defeat it when it goes before voters Oct. 15.
Some of the Sunnis said they expected the guerrilla violence to surge.
A Sunni member of the constitutional committee, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, said, “We have reached a point where this constitution contains the seeds of the division of Iraq.”
The Iraqi leaders, mainly Shiite and Kurdish representatives, said they had decided to push ahead with the constitution after Sunni leaders submitted yet another list of demands.
The American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had vigorously worked to bring the Sunnis into the deal, said he, too, had given up in frustration.
The Iraqi leaders entered the National Assembly chambers in the early afternoon, read the 39-page document aloud to the representatives and urged them to go out and persuade the people in their communities to vote for it in October.
Then the group, made up of about 40 of the most powerful Iraqi political leaders, drove across the fortified Green Zone to the palace of the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani. In a ceremony held in the courtyard of Talabani’s sandstone palace, they declared the new constitution the embodiment of the Iraqi nation.
Only four Sunni Arab leaders attended, all longtime exiles who had only recently returned.
Talabani, though casting a mostly positive light on the day’s events, expressed frustration with the Sunni negotiating team, a group hastily brought into the drafting process by Iraqi and American officials following the Sunni boycott of the January elections.
The 15 Sunni representatives took such a tough approach to the negotiations that several Shiite and Kurdish leaders said privately that there was no deal they would agree to.
“We didn’t have elections that determined that these people would actually represent the Sunni Arabs,” said Talabani, a Kurd. “They say they talk in the name of those who did not participate in the elections.”
The fractured outcome appeared to leave the Bush administration’s Iraq political strategy in disarray and to damage its progress toward an exit strategy. Since January, one of the principal aims of America’s policy has been to bring the Sunnis, who largely boycotted the polls in January, into the political process.
If the constitution is defeated, the law calls for new elections, after which yet another constitution must be written.
The handful of Sunni leaders who supported the constitution said they anticipate difficulty trying to persuade the Sunni community, deeply embittered since the fall of Hussein, to vote for it.
Key points of the draft
Role of Islam: The official religion and “a basic source of legislation.” Establishes a Supreme Federal Court.
Hussein’s party: Bans organizations that “advocate, instigate, justify or propagate” racism, terrorism, the declaring of infidels, sectarian cleansing and “especially the Saddamist Baath in Iraq and its symbols, under any name.” A future Baath Party could emerge.
Iraq’s identity: Declared to be “an independent, sovereign nation, and the system of rule in it is a democratic, federal, representative republic.”
Federalism: Provinces can unite with other regions, enabling southern Shiite provinces to unite and could mean expansion of the Kurdish self-ruled region.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS