‘Insurgent groups’ to be offered talks: Iraqi PM finalises reconciliation plan
BAGHDAD, June 24: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will offer an amnesty to some guerilla groups and call for the disarmament of militias as part of a 28-point national reconciliation plan to stem violence, a lawmaker said on Saturday.
Mahmud Othman said the plan, to be presented to parliament on Sunday, aims to ‘offer amnesty to everyone except war criminals and those who have killed innocent Iraqis’.
“The plan aims to open dialogue with all insurgent groups except Al-Qaeda and Saddamists, and to disarm militias,” Mr Othman, a Kurd, said.
He said the plan demands a ‘timetable for the build-up of armed forces to control the security situation so that the role of coalition forces will come to an end’.
Mr Othman said the reconciliation plan would offer compensation to families of civilians killed by ‘coalition troops and those who have been wrongly detained, especially civil servants who lost out on career opportunities’.
The plan will also focus on improving Iraqis’ standard of living, he said.
Minister of State for National Security Shirwan al-Waili, a Shia close to Mr Maliki, welcomed the plan, calling it ‘a broad policy with political, social and economic ramifications’ and it ‘addressed the entire Iraqi society’.
Sunni MP Salim Abdullah also welcomed it, but said the ‘devil was in the details’. He said it would only work if the amnesty extends to as many armed groups willing to enter dialogue as possible.
“The opportunity is ripe to attract all national forces,” he said.
The plan, first mentioned by Mr Maliki on June 6, was inspired by post-apartheid South Africa. It aims to heal the rifts that have torn Iraq’s multi-confessional society apart since the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003.
Already, as a gesture of goodwill, Mr Maliki approved the release this month of some 2,500 prisoners held in US and Iraqi prisons, most of them Sunnis.
President Jalal Talabani, who announced his backing for Mr Maliki’s plan on Wednesday, had said an amnesty for those who had borne arms against the government will be offered provided they rejoin the political mainstream.
“National reconciliation will be open to everyone and this will be explicitly stated by the prime minister when he presents it,” Mr Talabani said.
Since taking office in April last year, Mr Talabani, a Kurd, has repeatedly called for an amnesty to be offered to Sunni guerillas.
But his calls have previously gone unheeded because of opposition from the US military and Shia hardliners who dominate parliament.
So far the strongest opposition to Mr Maliki’s plan has come from hardliners in his own camp.
“We reject this project completely — no dialogue with Saddamists and ‘takfiris’,” Falah Shanshal, a lawmaker close to radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said in reference to Saddam loyalists and Sunni extremists.
Earlier Qassem Dawood, another MP from Mr Maliki’s bloc, met Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf and declared afterwards: “No reconciliation with terrorists. This plan may or may not pass. There is no way the government can cut deals without parliamentary oversight.”
The biggest obstacle to reconciliation is ‘severe lack of confidence’ among the country’s feuding factions, the head of the Arab League mission to Baghdad Mokhtar Lamani said on Thursday.
In violence on Saturday, nine people were killed, including five in separate shootings in Baquba, north of Baghdad.
The head of intelligence services in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, Brigadier General Musa al-Hadidi, his deputy and a bodyguard were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.
In Baghdad guerilla attacks on police patrols killed one civilian. —AFP
