Global Policy Forum

By Tom Allard

The United States has chosen a successor to Saddam Hussein from Iraq's notoriously fractious opposition groups, according to a former Iraqi diplomat who lives in Sydney.

Mohamed al-Jabiri, who has just returned from in talks with Washington, said the White House has given its "blessing" to the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, to lead a transitional coalition government in Iraq once Saddam has been deposed. Dr al-Jabiri, who talked to Mr Chalabi over the phone last month, said: "He told me that he would take over. He has the blessing of the White House and the State Department."

He said Mr Chalabi had been in talks with another major Iraqi opposition group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Iranian Government while in Tehran. Mr Chalabi moved to Sala-huddin in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq last week, ahead of an expected United States-led invasion. Opposition forces will hold a summit in northern Iraq on February 15.

Mr Chalabi, who is a progressive liberal, is far from universally popular among Iraqi exiles. However, successful talks in Tehran, and Iranian assistance in getting him into Iraq, shows he has galvanised considerable support from the Iraqi opposition.

Analysts believe disunity in the Iraqi opposition would make it near impossible to form a transitional government from its ranks, leading to speculation that the US will have to effectively occupy Iraq for a year or longer to maintain order. Dr al-Jabiri said the US was keen to avoid such a situation, aware that it would create resentment among the Iraqi people and in the Middle East.

Mr Chalabi, the 58-year old scion of an Iraqi financial dynasty, left Iraq aged 11, spending most of his exile in Britain and the US, where he studied mathematics. In 1996 he led an unsuccessful uprising against Saddam that resulted in hundreds of deaths. A sentence of 22 years hard labour hangs over him in Jordan where he was convicted in his absence in 1992 of fraud.

Dr al-Jabiri, who spent two years in solitary confinement before escaping to the US and then Australia, has been working with the US State Department and Iraqi exiles to draw up a political blueprint for Iraq after Saddam, developing plans for health, education, the media and judiciary. He said a new government would be in place three months after Saddam's removal and elections for a national parliament after one year. The aim is to have a new constitution that would adopt a federal structure to ease power-sharing among Iraq's different religious and ethnic groups.

Most Iraqis are Shi'ite Muslims but there is a substantial Kurdish community to the north. Sunni Muslims, Christians, Assyrians and Turks also make up the country's 22 million population. "We all agreed that a federation must be established," Dr al-Jabiri said. "We have drafted over 1000 pages of new rules and regulations. It's really quite a work. It's very impressive." A meeting in Washington on March 7 is scheduled to formally adopt the plan.

Dr al-Jabiri has been most involved in the "transitional justice working group", which is examining ways to prosecute Saddam and leading figures in the Iraqi regime. He said that they would be prosecuted in Iraqi courts, not in the International Court of Justice in the Hague. "We don't want to give Saddam the chance like [former Yugoslav leader Slobodan] Milosevic to use it for propaganda," he said. International jurists and the media would be invited to attend, he said.

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