By Patrick E. Tyler
New York TimesMay 6, 2003
The main Iraqi opposition groups have agreed to help put together a national assembly of more than 350 deputies that would meet this month to name an interim executive council or prime minister to run the country. Representatives of the opposition groups, which worked with the Bush administration for Saddam Hussein's downfall, have been meeting behind closed doors at the Republican Palace, the American headquarters for the enormous task of rebuilding Iraq. The outline of an agreement for a new government was described by opposition leaders in interviews over the last two days. In addition, Jay Garner, the former lieutenant general charged with administering Iraq, confirmed significant progress on the political front. "Next week, or by the second weekend in May, you'll see the beginning of a nucleus of a temporary Iraqi government, a government with an Iraqi face on it that is totally dealing with the coalition," he said during a visit to Basra, in the south. The goal of the former opposition groups is to create a provisional national assembly with two-thirds of the delegates chosen from inside Iraq, officials said. But it is the exiles and their allies among the country's Kurdish minority who are organizing the selection process.
"It doesn't have to be perfect, all it has to be is representative," an American official said today, adding, "The key word is interim." An elected government would be expected to follow in one to two years, officials said. While the heads of the opposition groups were meeting, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, formerly the opposition coalition, who has garnered the strongest support from Washington, went on the offensive. In an interview today, he said his supporters had seized as much as 60 tons of documents from the Baath Party and Iraqi secret police and intelligence services. The files document Mr. Hussein's relationship with Arab leaders and foreign governments, he said.
Armed with this incendiary material in a region where under-the-table payoffs to buy protection, loyalty or silence are the seamy side of political life, Mr. Chalabi and his aides have been sending out pointed warnings — that he can give as good as he has been getting — to Arab leaders who have dismissed him as a lackey financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, or as an accused embezzler from the bank he ran in Jordan during the 1980's. When Abu Dhabi television asked Mr. Chalabi last week to respond to reports that he was under arrest by the United States Central Command for embezzlement, Mr. Chalabi went on the air to respond. He brought files he said were taken from the Iraqi secret police. He asserted that they showed that a number of reporters for Al Jazeera television, the satellite channel that broadcast the accusation that he was under arrest, were working for Iraqi intelligence.
"We will not allow this channel to continue its destructive work, which might lead to civil war in Iraq, through their lies and the spreading of rumors, because rumors are worse than killing," Mr. Chalabi said. On the air, he held up documents and read from them, saying they were Iraqi intelligence reports on the successful recruitment of Al Jazeera journalists as informants. Al Jazeera has yet to respond to the charges. But current politics was the focus today. Teams drawn from the ranks of the former Iraqi opposition will be dispatched in coming days to each of Iraq's 28 provinces to invite local leaders to pick deputies from among tribal, professional and religious ranks and send them immediately to Baghdad to convene the assembly. While some Iraqis involved in the negotiations have spoken of creating a prime minister's post, General Garner indicated that the more likely outcome is a leadership council consisting of well-known opposition figures like Mr. Chalabi, Ayad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord, the Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Christians and other Sunni Muslims might also be added, he said.
General Garner said, "The five opposition leaders have begun having meetings, and they are going to bring in leaders from inside Iraq and see if we can't form a nucleus of leadership as we enter into June." The accelerated pace of efforts to put an interim Iraqi government in place reflects a growing recognition by American officials that they have been unable to create a nimble civil administration. They say an Iraqi government supported and assisted by the United States might better cope with mounting anger and frustration over the slow pace of reconstruction, rampant fuel and gasoline shortages, economic paralysis, lawlessness and the threat posed by the remnants of Baath Party cells salted throughout the country's institutions.
"Things are not going so well if you go and listen to the people," said Adel Abdel-Mahdi, who represents Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, the Supreme Council's spiritual leader and a Shiite cleric who is expected to return from Iran this week to visit Basra and the Shiite shrine in Najaf. "Security is getting worse, there are no public services and there are a lot of complaints." Mr. Abdel-Mahdi said frustration was rising with General Garner's administration, its inability to make decisions and its internal debates over whether to fully remove Mr. Hussein's Baath Party structure. "They are free," he said, referring to thousands of Baath Party loyalists of Mr. Hussein. "They are armed, but we are not armed and they know where our houses and offices are." Of the Americans, he said, "I am afraid" they are trying to keep some Baathists around "to frighten us."
United States officials said today that Izzat Ibrahim al-Dhouri, who served as Mr. Hussein's vice president and as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, was negotiating his surrender through intermediaries. The surrender of Mr. Dhouri, a stalwart of the Baath Party and of Mr. Hussein's inner circle, would be a significant blow to diehard Hussein supporters hoping for a return of the Baath leadership. One of Mr. Hussein's top bio-weapons experts, Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, was captured on Sunday, American officials announced. She was the American educated scientist known as "Mrs. Anthrax" and was 53rd on the list of the 55 most wanted. One of Mr. Chalabi's targets is King Abdullah II of Jordan, who has refused to drop the embezzlement charges lodged against Mr. Chalabi after the failure of Petra Bank, which he managed.
In a remarkable display of how much loyalty Mr. Chalabi commands among some Americans, one Pentagon official opened his laptop computer to display a photograph of Mr. Chalabi and King Abdullah to refute the recent statements by the king that he had never met Mr. Chalabi. "Does that look like they have never met?" the official asked. Mr. Chalabi's political aides and advisers, a number of American defense officials among them, are talking about producing files that show how the royal household in Jordan allegedly profited secretly and handsomely on transactions with Mr. Hussein and his family members, an assertion that has been made in the past about a number of Arab governments but never proved. Though Mr. Chalabi has yet to make any of the files public, he has allowed Defense Intelligence Agency officers to begin examining them. Simply by discussing their existence and their potential for scandal in dozens of capitals, Mr. Chalabi and his aides appeared to be flexing their political muscles as they edge closer to power in Iraq in the wake of Mr. Hussein's removal.
To the suggestion that he should be mending his fences with Arab leaders in the region, Mr. Chalabi bristled and said, "They should mend their ways." "We are a devastated country," he said. "We have fought their wars," and "those countries never stood up for the Iraqi people's human rights" when they were being repressed by the Hussein government. "We have some issues with those people who supported Saddam Hussein and tried their damnedest to dissuade the United States from going to war," he said. In the interview, Mr. Chalabi said Iraq would need a larger production quota in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and an immediate international debtor conference to calculate the country's obligations, cancel sanctions and prepare for a huge investment program. He said that he did not have a specific proposal yet for a debtor conference on Iraq but asserted that there was "moral and financial weight" behind the proposition that Iraq, now free of Mr. Hussein, deserves enormous concessions from the oil-producing nations and from the dozens of countries that hold hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraqi debts or claims for reparations.
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