UNITED NATIONS, 15 October 2003 — UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has been pushing for a faster handover of power to Iraqis, said yesterday that a new US draft resolution on Iraq “does not represent a major shift” in the US position.
Annan said he was “grateful” that the United States had taken into consideration some of his concerns about the potential UN role in postwar Iraq but noted that the sequence of political development was unchanged.
The latest draft keeps the same sequence — writing a constitution first, with elections later and sovereignty last — that Annan and several key Security Council nations had criticized. The UN chief wants Iraqis to be given sovereignty first, a move which he has said could cut down on the fierce guerrilla resistance against the occupation, marked by another suicide bombing in Baghdad earlier yesterday.
“I have stated my views very clearly to the members of the Security Council over the last couple of weeks on the process in Iraq, including the constitutional and electoral aspects,” Annan said. “Obviously the current resolution does not represent a major shift in the thinking of the coalition,” he said. “However, I am grateful that they have taken into view, into account, some of my preoccupations.”
The council yesterday began closed-door talks on the proposal, which in effect sets a deadline to come up with another deadline for Iraqi self-rule but stops short of fixing a date to end the US occupation. A US official said before the meeting began that the United States could ask for a vote as early as today, while in Moscow a top Russian official was quoted saying that Moscow wanted to introduce changes to the proposal.
A suicide car bomb exploded outside the Turkish mission in Baghdad yesterday, killing the driver and wounding as many as seven other people, US and Iraqi officials said, while witnesses said a man driving nearby was also killed. Turkey strongly condemned the blast, which came after Ankara decided to send troops to join the US-led forces in its war-torn neighbor despite protests from members of Iraq’s Governing Council, and particularly the country’s Kurdish community.
“A car bomb exploded at the entrance of the Turkish Embassy” in the Al-Waziriyah neighborhood of central Baghdad, Col. Thamer Saadi told an AFP correspondent at the scene. The charred wreckage of a car could be seen outside the embassy building, which sustained some damage, including its windows being blown in. Shortly after the blast police fired in the air and detained at least one protester as several dozen people chanted slogans in support of ousted president Saddam Hussein near the scene, an AFP correspondent said.
One Iraqi police officer kicked a shirtless protester, yelling at him: “You want Saddam back? Take this,” before the man was handcuffed and led away.
The small crowd, which police said consisted of local residents and art students, chanted: “With our soul, with our blood we shall redeem you, Saddam”.
US troops later distributed leaflets at the scene saying “the terrorists are criminals” and urging Iraqis to help in tracking down the perpetrators of almost daily attacks. “They are a danger for all Iraqis and for all those who seek freedom all over the world,” said the pamphlet, written in Arabic. “This act reveals the true nature of terrorists and other criminal persons,” it said.
In the southern city of Karbala, one person was killed and 24 wounded, one seriously, in a shootout overnight between moderate and radical Shiite Muslims, Saleh Al-Hasnawi, assistant director of the city hospital, said. An AFP reporter at the scene said about 100 members of Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia tried to seize control of the mausoleums.
Sadr told a press conference in Najaf, 180 kilometers south of Baghdad, “There is absolutely no cooperation between the Mehdi Army and the occupation; there is no confrontation either, neither negatively nor positively.”
