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Iraq handover on course alliance insists { May 18 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1219449,00.htmlhttp://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1219449,00.html
12.30pm
Iraq handover on course, alliance insists
Agencies
Tuesday May 18, 2004
Senior British and US political figures today insisted the transfer of power to an interim Iraq authority would go ahead as planned next month despite the recent upsurge in violence.
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and the US governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer, said the US-led coalition would not change its course.
"Terrorists are trying to stop Iraq's march to sovereignty and peace," Mr Bremer told mourners at the funeral of Abdul Zahra Othman, the murdered president of the US-appointed governing council.
"They will not succeed. We must continue the political process leading to an interim government next month and to elections next year."
Othman, a former exile who used the name Izzadine Saleem during the years of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, was killed yesterday in a suicide attack as his car waited at a checkpoint near the coalition headquarters in Baghdad.
The killing was a major setback to American efforts to stabilise Iraq just six weeks before the handover.
In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 programme Today, Mr Straw said the transfer would go ahead but conceded that the situation in Iraq was tougher than the coalition had expected.
"It's palpable that the difficulties which we have faced have been more extensive than it was reasonable to assume nine months ago," he said.
As threats continue to politicians and other Iraqis, such as policemen working with the coalition, Washington and London are struggling to contain an insurgency in the Sunni areas to the north and west of Baghdad and an uprising in the Shia heartland, to the south.
US troops today killed nine militiamen in Kerbala, which is loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in an hour-long street battle close to the holy city's Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas mosques. There were similar scenes in Najaf, another Shia holy city.
Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, was quoted today in Spain's El País newspaper as saying that violence in Iraq could "get really bad" in the run-up to the June 30 handover.
"The closer we get to the handover, to the moment in which Iraqis have their political future in their hands, there will be more attempts to interrupt the process," she said.
"We have a letter from the Jordanian Zarqawi [an al-Qaida-linked figure blamed for a series of attacks including Othman's murder and the beheading of US hostage Nick Berg] in which he makes it clear that they must provoke a civil war before the transition, so there will be more attacks.
"The elements of the old regime are also going to try to do something. The occupation for them is an easier target than the beginning of an Iraqi political process, so I warn that things could get really bad in the coming weeks."
But six weeks before the handover, there is still no agreement between the US, the UN and Iraqi representatives about what structure the interim government will have or what powers it will yield. Full democratic elections are expected in early 2005.
An Iraqi delegation will travel to the UN tomorrow to demand full control of the country's oil revenues and a cut in the war reparations imposed on Iraq after it was driven out of Kuwait.
"We will negotiate on the basis that Iraq must be fully in charge of its resource wealth and the 5% of oil revenues we pay must be reduced further," deputy foreign minister Hamid Bayati told Reuters news agency.
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