BRUSSELS, 31 January 2004 — UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday he would send a team to Iraq within days to explore the feasibility of holding an early election, after he received security assurances from US-led occupation forces.
“The coalition has promised to do (the) maximum to protect the team... so I think in the coming days, the team will travel and start working,” he told journalists on a visit to Brussels.
Annan sent security experts to Iraq last weekend to examine whether it was safe for UN international staff to return to Baghdad, where they suffered two deadly bombings last August and September that killed special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and many other UN relief workers.
The United States has argued it is not practical to hold elections before it hands over sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.
However, the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has demanded the government be chosen in an election rather than by the regional caucuses Washington has suggested.
UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said in Washington on Tuesday that premature elections could do more harm than good.
“If you get your priorities wrong, elections are a very divisive process,” said Brahimi, who has been mentioned by diplomats as a possible new UN envoy on Iraq after completing two years as chief envoy in Afghanistan.
Iraq’s top Shiite scholars vowed yesterday to keep an “open mind” in dealing with the UN team. “The UN team should come visit the ‘marjaiya’,” or the leadership of Iraq’s Shiite clergy, said Sheikh Abdul Mehdi Karbalai, the representative of Sistani.
“It will have an open mind in discussing this issue and a big chance of succeeding,” Karbalai told worshippers at weekly prayers in Karbala.
He called on the UN team to “base its study on an objective and valid evaluation, far from the influence of others who oppose the ‘marjaiya’,” which is embodied by Sistani.
Meanwhile, an insurgent was killed and another injured in a firefight with Iraqi paramilitaries yesterday, while a separate attack on coalition troops left a US soldier with minor injuries.
Gen. Anwar Hamad Amin, head of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps in the northern oil center Kirkuk, said the insurgents in a pick-up truck tried to storm a checkpoint 80 km south of the city.
A US military spokesman said a US soldier suffered minor injuries when suspected insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a convoy near the northern town of Mosul yesterday morning.
