29 April 2003
About 300 Iraqis — most of them exiles until the recent fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime — met in Baghdad on Monday under the leadership of US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and began debating the process of setting up an interim Iraqi government.
The Baghdad session is the fourth in a series that started in London in mid-December with a meeting of most political groupings of Iraqi exiles and was followed by another in Iraqi Kurdistan earlier this year. In mid-April, a third meeting was held in Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq.
It has yet to be decided who will lead the interim government of Iraq, and the group has agreed to meet again in a month. But in battered Baghdad, where long queues in front of filling stations paralyze major streets and where shots are fired almost daily, security issues have increased the sense of urgency.
All of the meetings so far have been headed by Khalilzad, the US special envoy to the Iraqi opposition and a major figure in setting up an Afghani interim government led by Hamid Karzai at the end of the US war to oust the Taliban. Who will be made the “Hamid Karzai” of Iraq remains to be seen. The search might be on for an insider, judging by the participation from old dignitaries such as Hdeib al-Haj Hmoud, who served as minister before the Baath party came to power in 1968. Iraqis are considered more likely to accept such a candidate than they would a figure imported by the US occupation.
Invitations to the meeting, held in a congress hall in Baghdad under heavy security, were issued by formerly exiled Iraqi leaders. Nasseer al-Jadirji, a lawyer whose father was the founder of the National Democratic Party, dismantled in 1963 following the ousting of the monarchy, told Energy Intelligence that he was invited both by Ghassan al-Attiyah, an active figure among the London-based exiles, and by a group led by Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister living in Abu Dhabi who launched a movement in exile that called for handing postwar affairs in Iraq to the United Nations instead of the US.
The major parties present included the two main Kurdish parties, the Shia Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the Sunni al-Wifaq party, as well as local — and sometimes newly created — Turkoman, Assyrian, and Islamic parties. Tribal chiefs and independent intellectuals also participated.
At the meeting — addressed by the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance Jay Garner, his British deputy Tim Cross, and British Foreign Office Minister Mike O’Brien — all stressed “that the Iraqi future government would be democratic and that the constitution will be drafted by the Iraqis themselves,” al-Jadirji said.
But with shots being fired on a regular basis — either at US soldiers or by robbers trying to loot any bank branch still untapped by looters — security was a major issue. In previous meetings, Garner promised Iraqi officials that he would talk to the US land forces commander about stepping up security. Now Iraqis are getting impatient. Comparisons between the uncertainty and fear during the Saddam Hussein regime and now, during the US occupation, can be heard on the street.
As a result, a sense of urgency emerged during the meeting for the setting up of an Iraqi authority as soon as possible. When it came to discussing the means of creating an interim Iraqi authority, al-Jadirji said the debate took place without a working paper. “There were all sorts of ideas thrown in on how to create this interim authority — and all ideas were contradictory,” he said.
US and British officials, who described themselves as “facilitators” of the meeting, told journalists at a briefing that the debate focused on the kind of interim government, its authority, the elements constituting it, and the time frame for setting it up.
Iraqi exiles have been meeting for several months under the auspices of the US State Department to prepare working papers on how the “new Iraq” should look, and it would not be surprising that the ideas and concepts already drafted during those meetings would lay the ground for the establishment of the new interim Iraqi government. With many Iraqis choosing to watch from a distance how the US, as the occupying power, is going to run the show and lead the political process, Iraqi exiles are expected to have the main role in shaping this process.
The officials admitted the gathering was “not sufficiently representative” for choosing a government. But, they explained, US and British officials moved to Iraq only a week ago and are still establishing relations with Iraqis inside, a process that will intensify in the four weeks leading up to their next meeting.
By Ruba Husari, Baghdad
(Published in International Oil Daily April 29, 2003)