LONDON, Dec 14: Opponents of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein met in London on Saturday to map out a future for the country and call for a federal, tolerant Iraq in the event Saddam is ousted from power.

Up to 1,000 people, including 330 delegates and scores of reporters and security guards, gathered at a plush hotel on the invitation of a committee representing six opposition groups recognised by the United States.

Washington has modelled this meeting on one staged in Germany a year ago to forge an interim government in Afghanistan following the collapse of the Taliban government.

The extent to which the Iraqi delegates have support in their homeland is unclear. Saddam has now been in power for 30 years and most of the delegates have been in exile for decades.

The meeting, which had been postponed three times due to arguments about who should control it, heard calls for a federal Iraq, liberated from Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, and for an Iraq free of extremism or foreign domination.

Ahmad Chalabi, who has the best connections in Washington of all the Iraqi exiles, said the plight of the Iraqi people had largely been ignored.

“The nations that equipped Saddam with his weapons of mass destruction are punishing the Iraqi people for having them,” he told the conference, referring to 12 years of U.N. sanctions on Iraq that have destroyed its economy but left Saddam in power.

“The United States have let us down many times, but I am proud to say that President George W. Bush has adopted the opposition’s programme for democracy in Iraq,” Chalabi added.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s special envoy to “free Iraqis”, told the conference the United States supported a democratic future for Iraq. “The Iraqi people will find the US standing with them to make a better future.”

He added that the United States did not want “Saddamism without Saddam”, or another strongman in Iraq.

Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan — one of two Kurdish parties which control northern Iraq — said the Kurds wanted a federal state as part of a unified Iraq.—Reuters