ARBIL, Dec 27: Leaders of the Shia and Kurdish blocs that emerged triumphant in this month’s Iraqi election agreed on Tuesday to push ahead with efforts to bring Sunni and other parties into a grand coalition government. The visit of Abdul Aziz al Hakim of the Islamist Alliance to the Kurdish capital Arbil opened a series of planned meetings among rival factions intended to ease friction over election results which Sunni and secular parties say have been rigged and to begin building a consensus administration.
“We agreed on the principle of forming a government involving all the parties with a wide popular base,” Kurdish regional leader Masoud Barzani told a joint news conference after talks with Mr Hakim, the dominant force in the Alliance.
Mr Hakim, whose bloc has run the interim government for the past year in coalition with the Kurds, was due to meet the other main Kurdish leader, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, on Wednesday, launching a series of bilateral meetings that will include Sunni and secular leaders disappointed in the vote.
In Baghdad, several thousand supporters of former prime minister Iyad Allawi marched in the latest street protest against the results of the Dec 15 ballot. They want a rerun of a vote that handed close to a majority to the Alliance, whose armed supporters they accuse of forming death squads.
Privately, however, many disappointed leaders acknowledge the results will stand and say they will negotiate a coalition.
After meeting Mr Hakim, President Talabani will see, among others, Mr Allawi, a secular Shia, and Sunnis Adnan al Dulaimi and Tariq Al Hashemi of the Accordance Front, Planning Minister Barham Saleh, a senior official in Mr Talabani’s party, said.
PROCESS STARTING: “The Kurdish Alliance is making contacts with the political blocs to prepare for a national unity government,” Mr Saleh said.
“These are preliminary and bilateral discussions between the Kurds and other groups ... There are expectation that at the beginning of next year there will be bigger meetings.”
Sounding a cautious note before negotiations that no one expects to produce a government for many weeks, Jawad al Maliki of SCIRI ally Dawa, said: “(Hakim) is not there to negotiate about forming a government ... They might, in general, talk about the new government and the results of the election.
“The Kurdish bloc will remain our strongest ally.”
A provisional estimate, based on preliminary results, puts the Alliance on 130 seats in the 275-seat assembly, just short of its current slim majority, with the Kurds on 52, the main Sunni group the Accordance Front on 41 and Mr Allawi’s list on 24, well short of his present 40 seats. The secular Sunni National Dialogue Front would have nine seats.
There is general agreement, supported with emphasis by the United States, that a ‘national unity’ government is required to address sharply opposing interests among the armed communities.
In a reminder of the grievances and tensions underlying the process, police in Kerbala rushed to announce the discovery of some 150 bodies in a mass grave dating from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led oppression of Shi’ites in 1991.
But, after confusion, officials said the number found was 31.
HELICOPTER CRASH: At least three people were killed and six wounded in attacks in the northern oil city of Kirkuk and the town of Mahaweel, 75kms south of Baghdad.
The US military said four Americans died on Monday, two of them in a helicopter crash in western Baghdad.
Police in the capital found three corpses bearing marks of torture and bullet wounds, while in Samarra, 100kms north of Baghdad, gunmen abducted the head of a pharmaceuticals factory and six of his bodyguards.
Quelling such violence will be the main task of the incoming government, expected to emerge over the coming weeks or possibly months once the election results are finalized.
—Reuters
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