WASHINGTON, Sept 27: Washington’s newly announced six-month time frame for the Iraqi government to write a new constitution is not a deadline, with the clock only beginning to run once Iraqis have convened a constitutional conference, the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, said.
“We don’t know how long it will take for them to write the constitution. Six months seems to me a reasonable guess, but there are no deadlines involved here,” Bremer told reporters in Washington late Friday.
Mr Bremer’s comments appeared to back away from remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell, published in The New York Times on Friday, proposing a six-month target for the Iraqi constitution in an apparent nod to countries insisting that the United States restore Iraqi self-government as soon as possible.
“I think if you read carefully what the secretary was talking about, he was talking about the period after the ... constitutional conference convention is assembled,” Bremer said.
“There is another unknown period which precedes that, which is when do we see the constitutional conference convened?” he added.
A committee appointed to study how to convene a such a conference is to report to the Iraqi Governing Council on Sept 30, he said.
“And the question, then, is how long does the Governing Council consider those recommendations, how complicated are they, what kind of consultations do they have to do and how long does it take them then to convene a constitutional conference? These are unknowns,” Bremer said.
The United States has insisted that it will hand over control to Iraqis after a constitution is written and elections are held, although other nations, notably France, have insisted it be done much sooner.
“We will work, as the president has said, there, until the job is done,” Bremer said.
“My job is to work myself out of a job. I now exercise sovereignty in Iraq, and I would like to pass that on to a sovereign Iraqi government as soon as it can reasonably be done. If it takes them longer than six months to write a constitution, then I’ll be there longer than that.”—AFP
