BAGHDAD, 10 March 2004 — A bomb killed a US soldier and grenades wounded seven Iraqis as Shiite lawmakers said yesterday they want a quick end to the US-led occupation of Iraq even if it means enduring a flawed interim constitution.
After signing the new constitution Monday, Iraq’s US-picked Governing Council must now decide who will run the country from July and establish a system for democratic elections by year’s end, said Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
“The most important thing is to whom authority should be transferred” on June 30, when the US-led coalition is due to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi caretaker government, Hakim told reporters.
An annex to the interim constitution to be drawn up in the coming weeks will specify the form of caretaker government that will assume control.
Hakim and other Shiite leaders still had problems with the freshly inked basic law, but said they were united in a desire to prevent Iraq from foundering either because of political turf wars or the violence unleashed by armed opponents and the remnants of ousted President Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“We are working in defiance of what the terrorists want,” Hakim said.
Council members have accused those fighting the US-led forces and Iraqi security of trying to derail Iraq’s transition to democracy and incite civil war with a wave of anti-Shiite attacks such as the deadly bombings which killed more than 180 people in Baghdad and Karbala one week ago.
But it was politics rather than violence that posed the most immediate threat to Iraq’s democratic future.
Minutes after signing the interim law Monday, the council’s Shiite faction declared they still had concerns with a veto clause that gave what they said was unfair power to the Kurdish north. They also opposed the fact a law written by an unelected body could bind a future elected Parliament.
However, all sides said they agreed that contentious points in the charter could be revisited by a national assembly due to be elected by the end of January 2005.
It marked a relatively happy ending to the signing ceremony after political hiccups over the weekend raised doubts about the whole process.
“We had to choose between stopping the political process or continuing it and trying to correct it later,” Hakim told a news conference in Baghdad.
Putting the final legal touches to the process, US overseer in Iraq Paul Bremer wrote a letter on Monday to the current president of the governing council, Mohammed Bahr Al-Uloom, formally approving the basic law.
“Its adoption inspires all who share our common goal of forging a free, democratic and unified Iraq,” a copy of the letter released yesterday said.
Hakim and the rest of the Shiite bloc were now looking toward the best way of organizing the next interim government and then holding elections.
