BAGHDAD, 9 February 2004 — The United Nations will do “everything possible” to help Iraq regain its sovereignty, the head of a UN team said after meeting with Iraqi leaders yesterday to discuss the feasibility of holding early legislative elections.
Also yesterday, insurgents attacked US Army convoys in three areas, killing one soldier and injuring three, witnesses and the US command said. About 90 Japanese soldiers arrived in a southeastern town yesterday on a controversial humanitarian mission.
Prince Charles made a surprise visit to British troops in the southern city of Basra yesterday amid tight security, the first member of the royal family to visit the country since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Charles — wearing desert camouflage combats, sturdy boots and a black beret — met more than 200 soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment and thanked them for their work in Iraq.
Elsewhere, Iraqi workers unearthed a mass grave containing the remains of at least 50 people. A bomb planted inside a police station killed three Iraqi policemen and injured 11 others on Saturday, officials said.
UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and his team held talks for about two hours with members of the US-installed Governing Council on the second day of a mission to break the impasse between the United States and the country’s influential Shiite clergy on the blueprint for transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis.
“The UN can only emphasize its wish to do everything possible to help the Iraqi people with all their sects and components to come out from their long plight and to help them regain independence and sovereignty,” said Brahimi, who is Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special adviser on Iraq.
Annan said in a statement Saturday that the UN experts would hold “intensive consultations” with Iraqi leaders and members of the US-led coalition and listen to the views of all Iraqi constituencies.
A senior Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the team would stay here about 10 days.
“We are here to see what kind of mechanism the Iraqis feel is more appropriate to their country,” the team’s spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi, said.
The United Nations withdrew its international staff from Iraq last year following two attacks against their headquarters, one the devastating Aug. 19 truck bombing that killed 22 people, including the top envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The team members were expected to travel to Najaf to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Husseini Al-Sistani, whose demand for early elections threatens to torpedo US plans for transferring power to Iraqis.
Al-Sistani is opposed to the Americans plan to appoint the legislature through 18 regional caucuses. The legislature will choose a new sovereign government that will take office by July 1.
Also yesterday, Ahmad Chalabi, a Westernized Shiite politician with close Pentagon links, met with Al-Sistani for about 90 minutes in Najaf, and said the UN team could be persuaded that early elections were possible.
Although the Shiites are pressing for an early ballot, many leading Sunnis fear an election under US occupation would produce a government dominated by majority Shiites, who were suppressed for generations by Iraq’s Sunni minority.
The Governing Council president, Mohsen Abdel-Hamid, told reporters that yesterday’s talks with the UN team covered “all forms of an election that are adequate to bring about a representative government.”
The United States and its Governing Council allies say elections cannot be held under the current unstable security conditions. They also cite the lack of proper census or electoral rolls.
In the latest violence, a US soldier was killed yesterday by a roadside bomb near Mahmudiyah, 20 miles (30 kilometers) south of Baghdad, a military spokesman said. No other details were available.
Another roadside bomb in Fallujah west of Baghdad injured two soldiers, witnesses said. In the northern city of Mosul, a US convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade yesterday, wounding one soldier, witnesses said.
— Additional input from agencies
