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Delegates agree secret talks { April 29 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,945560,00.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,945560,00.html
Delegates agree new talks on government
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Tuesday April 29, 2003
The Guardian
Around 300 Iraqis accepted an American invitation to start the process of forming an interim government yesterday, surrounded by the tightest security since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
At the end of a chaotic 10 hours of rambling discussions in a Baghdad conference hall, delegates pledged by a show of hands to hold a new meeting within a month to select a transitional government.
The delegates gave no other details. American and British spokesmen talked up the conference, describing the "striking vibrancy and emotion" of the occasion, which had given people repressed by years of dictatorship their first chance to talk politics in public.
But they conceded that the meeting, which critics have called a gathering of US puppets, was "not sufficiently representative to establish an interim authority". About half the delegates were exiles, and the rest had remained in Iraq under the previous regime.
Apparently to disguise the poor attendance, officials refused to supply a list of those invited. Some delegates were afraid to have their names published, an official said.
The biggest Shia opposition group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has its headquarters in Iran, sent a low-level group but said it had come to discuss civil administration issues such as security, water, and electricity rather than the formation of a government.
The US adminstrator, former general Jay Garner, told the delegates the meeting was aimed at working towards "a democratic government which represents all people, all religions, all tribes".
His words were backed in Michigan by President George Bush who told Iraqi-Americans that democracy would flourish in Iraq. "There were some in our country who doubted the Iraqi people wanted freedom or they just couldn't imagine they would be welcoming a liberating force. They were mistaken," Mr Bush said. "We know why: the desire for freedom is not the property of one culture, it is the universal hope of human beings in every culture."
The Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien, who attended the Baghdad meeting, said the process to form an interim administration would be as quick as possible. "I believe that the process will deliver a result. It's fascinating to watch the birth of democracy."
US and UK officials would not say how they had worked out the invitation lists. The two parties which had the largest representation in Iraq before Saddam's Ba'ath party imposed one-party rule were excluded. Abdel Karim al-Anazi, a member of the political bureau of the Islamic Dawa party, told the Guardian: "We have no idea what they plan to do at today's meeting. We wish the United States would leave Iraq quickly. Even today would be good".
Faris Faris, for the Iraqi Communist party, said: "No one has invited us. We don't know who was invited."
There were no representatives from the powerful Shia clergy, who have called for an immediate withdrawal of US forces.
Apart from the two main Kurdish parties, which run separate administrations in northern Iraq, none of the parties attending the meeting has a solid following. Many were small, newly created parties.
Even the controversial US-backed exile groups such as the Iraqi National Congress did not send their top people.
In a sign of how sceptically other Arab governments view the process, King Abdullah of Jordan chose the eve of the meeting to criticise the INC's leader, Ahmed Chalabi.
"I would imagine that you would want somebody who suffered alongside the Iraqi people. This particular gentleman I think left Iraq when he was 11 or 7, what contact does he have with the people on the street?" he said in a US TV interview.
Jordanian courts convicted Mr Chalabi in absentia in 1992 of fraud and embezzlement after the failure of the Bank of Petra, which he founded and ran, and sentenced him to 22 years in prison.
US and British officials gave an optimistic view of the conference at a briefing at which they declined to be named, but the failure to organise a press conference further highlighted the meeting's lack of results.
"The ideas are inchoate. It was not the most disciplined occasion," one official said.
General Garner has been embarrassed by the increasingly vocal protests by Shia and Sunni crowds at mosques calling for an early end to the US occupation.
"Developing an interim authority has to be done by a process which is internally and externally credible", one official admitted.
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