BEIRUT: An Iraqi panel that vetoed more than 500 election candidates was only doing its job of purging former Baathists from politics, not targeting Sunnis or any other group, its chairman Ahmed Chalabi said on Thursday.
The commission’s move this month upset some Sunnis, whose minority community dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s rule, raising tensions before the March 7 parliamentary poll.
In fact, more Shiite Muslims than Sunnis appeared on a list of 511 barred candidates and around 50 names were later removed because they were found to have been wrongly included.
“I didn’t make the law, the commission didn’t make the law.
We are implementing the law,” Chalabi told Reuters in Beirut, denying any political interference in winnowing the candidates.
He said the Supreme National Commission for Accountability and Justice had a legal mandate to bar certain categories of ex-Baathists, members of Saddam’s security agencies and others.
But questions about the commission’s legality and its opaque workings have generated fears that the election may deepen Iraq’s sectarian divide, even as violence begins to fade. Chalabi, 65, said there was no political storm in Iraq over the panel’s work, accusing the Western media of exaggerating. He said Iraqis did not view the anti-Baathist law as sectarian. “People talk about the rule of law. Why should it be discarded just because of the conception of some foreign parties that the law is not fair?” the secular Shiite politician asked.
US Vice President Joe Biden said in Baghdad last week his country had no problem holding Baath party loyalists accountable and denied he was trying to mediate in the dispute.
Chalabi, an American favorite before the invasion, later fell from favor in Washington. Adept at political maneuvering, he has nurtured ties with Iran and is now an election candidate on a slate led by Iraq’s largest Shiite religious party.
He said Iraq had decided former Baathists should be barred from public life in the same way as Nazis in post-war Germany.
If the law was considered too harsh, it should be changed.
Chalabi said stability in Iraq had improved in the sense that there were no more no-go areas for the government, but argued that subversives had penetrated the security forces.
“The people who are blowing things up have infiltrated the security system,” he said. “They are inimical to the government and they facilitate the work of the terrorists.”
