BAGHDAD, 22 January 2004 — Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani is likely to drop his demand for early elections if the United Nations concludes they would not be feasible, a Shiite political leader said yesterday.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is considering sending a team to Iraq at the request of the occupying powers and the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council to study whether it would be possible to hold a national election in the next few months.
Washington poured scorn on the United Nations for failing to back the war to topple Saddam Hussein and long resisted any role for the organization in postwar Iraq. But it now wants UN help to salvage its own plan to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis.
The original plan was for regional caucuses to select a transitional assembly by the end of May, and for this assembly to pick an interim government that would take back sovereignty at the end of June. Full elections would follow in 2005.
But Sistani, revered by many among Iraq’s 60 percent Shiite majority, has insisted on elections to choose a sovereign government. Mass demonstrations have been held in several cities to back his demand.
Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, a leading member of the Governing Council and head of Iraq’s Shiite Dawa party, said he believed Sistani would accept the findings of any UN team.
“If there is a UN delegation that has a background in electoral and census matters, and has an open dialogue...one side may be convinced by what the other says,” Jaafari said.
“Whatever the result, if it comes to an agreement, I believe Sayyid Sistani will accept that.”
Jaafari said there was agreement that elections were preferable. The question was whether they were feasible now.
“Elections for us are a principle on which there is no disagreement,” he said. “The question now is about the suitability of the circumstances for elections for a transitional government over the next few months.”
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said the occupying powers were also in favor of elections as soon as they could be held.
“We have to work with great respect for him (Sistani) and similar leaders...We want elections as soon as it is feasible to hold them,” he said.
“The discussion which has been stimulated by Ayatollah Sistani is whether there could be an element of elections injected into the earlier part of the process,” Straw said.
“A large part of this comes down to...technical issues,” he said, citing insecurity in parts of Iraq and the absence of electoral registers. “This needs to be discussed through.”
In his State of the Union address to the US Congress on Tuesday, President George W. Bush vowed the handover of power in Iraq would not be derailed by guerrillas who have inflicted hundreds of casualties on US-led forces.
“We are dealing with these thugs in Iraq just as surely as we dealt with Saddam Hussein’s evil regime,” he said, urging Americans to stick with his leadership on Iraq.But in Baghdad, many Iraqis blamed Bush for the current instability, saying that at least under Saddam they did not have to fear bomb attacks or the crime now rife in the Iraqi capital.
— Additional input from agencies
