BAGHDAD, 20 July 2003 — Iraq’s American-backed administration failed in its first week to choose a president, abandoning that mission in favor of a weak, three-man rotating leadership. The top US official in Iraq — who hand-picked the governing council — returned to Washington while a violent insurgency killed yet another American soldier yesterday.
The council, agonizingly shepherded into existence by Paul Bremer, the US administrator for Iraq, was announced last Sunday, saying its first order of business was the election of a president. When that did not happen after six days in session, officials of the Iraqi government said yesterday that it would share the leadership job among at least three of 25 members.
A Western diplomat who works closely with the council said the decision to establish a rotating presidency did not reflect political divisions among members of the governing body, who, he said, were cooperating well despite their religious and ethnic differences. The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the move to a joint presidency meant the job would be largely symbolic.
The move clearly reflected an unwillingness among council members to vest too much authority in any one of them.
Big demonstrations were staged in the capital yesterday with Shiites marching on the US military and political headquarters in a former Saddam palace. They were protesting because they said the US military briefly surrounded the house of a Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf after he issued an incendiary anti-American sermon during Friday prayers.
The military said it was checking whether they had taken any action against Moqtada Sadr.
Leaders of the protest said they would provide transportation today so thousands of Baghdad residents could demonstrate at Sadr’s house.
Bremer, meantime, left Baghdad unannounced Friday and was expected to be in Washington for about a week. His Baghdad office said the 61-year-old former diplomat and counterterrorism expert would be in the US capital for consultations.
He also was scheduled to appear on three weekly US television interview programs today. In Baghdad this week, Bremer nearly disappeared from public view after the council was announced, an apparent bid to diminish the widely held perception among Iraqis and the rest of the world that the new governing council was an American puppet.
Bremer’s office did not respond to requests for an assessment of the council’s first week in business, but a spokesman for one council member issued a short statement.
“There is a general agreement that the presidency should be on a rotational basis because each political group in the council should shoulder an equal role and equal responsibility,” said Ali Abdul-Amir, spokesman for council-member Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord.
A council source said on condition of anonymity that the three likely members of the rotating presidency would be a leading Shiite politician, a highly respected Shiite cleric and former Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi.
The 80-year-old Pachachi, a Sunni Muslim, served in the government that Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party ousted in a 1968 coup. He will be joined in the leadership troika by 78-year-old Mohammed Bahr Ul-Uloom, a cleric who returned from London after the 1991 Gulf War. He served as the council president during its first week in session.
The leadership group will be rounded out by Abdel-Aziz Al-Hakim, who is in his early 50s, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and also a Shiite cleric. He opposes the US presence in the country but has close ties to US-backed Kurds and Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi, who left Iraq as a teenager, has been touted in some US government circles as Iraq’s likely first post-Saddam leader. But many in Iraq are distrustful of his close ties to Washington.
— With input from Agencies
