BAGHDAD, 14 March 2005 — Iraq’s leading parties said yesterday they had failed to reach a deal to form a new government before the first meeting of Parliament, crushing hopes a much-needed Cabinet would start to tackle relentless violence. Iraqi Deputy President Rowsch Shways said talks between the Shiite alliance that won landmark elections and Kurds who came second would resume after Parliament’s opening session on Wednesday to hammer out differences.
“The talks will continue and there are some important points that deserve more discussion,” Fouad Massoum, a Kurd and interim parliamentary speaker, said in the northern city of Arbil. Some of his party’s members were less optimistic. Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani’s chief aide said: “The negotiations between the two sides have hit a dead end.”
Parliament’s meeting on Wednesday will take place more than six weeks after polls that gave many in Iraq hope a new authority would clamp down on suicide attacks, car bombs and execution-style killings by mainly Sunni Arab insurgents.
Many Iraqis blame politicians, for whom they say they risked their lives to vote in the Jan. 30 elections, for prolonging a political vacuum while violence spirals. Officials said earlier the two sides had yet to agree on how to distribute top government posts and on extending the Kurds’ autonomous region in the north.
Ahmad Chalabi, a top member of the Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, returned empty-handed on Saturday from a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan to save the proposed Kurdish-Shiite alliance which has the two-thirds majority needed to form a government. “The meetings have collapsed. There was no deal,” an aide to Chalabi told Reuters.
Kurdish politicians were defiant, rejecting the Shiite alliance’s attempts to blame them for the deadlock.
“They want to lay the responsibility for the political equation solely on the Kurdish side,” Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd, told Al-Arabiya television.
