Prime minister backs constitution
Failure to mention document in U.N. resolution concerns Kurds
BAGHDAD (CNN) -- The Iraqi prime minister's office said Wednesday it is committed to Transitional Administrative Law, a document backed by Kurdish leaders and opposed by the country's top Shiite cleric in a dispute that could lead to a governmental crisis.
The U.N. Security Council made no actual mention of the law in its resolution, passed Tuesday, which endorsed the June 30 transfer of sovereignty in Iraq and gave authorization for a U.S.-led multinational force to stabilize the country.
The two top Iraqi Kurdish leaders have informed President Bush that if the law, or TAL, is scrapped down the road, the autonomous Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq will stop participating with the Iraqi interim government.
Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani sent a letter to Bush raising concerns about Kurdish representation in the interim governmental structure and the future of the TAL, approved in March by the now-dissolved Iraqi Governing Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Written last week but publicized Wednesday, the Kurdish letter is raising concern among officials.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's office issued a statement Wednesday saying, "the tasks and powers of the president of the republic, his vice presidents, prime minister and ministers of the interim government have been defined by the state administrative law, endorsed by the former Governing Council and the coalition authority. Therefore the interim Iraqi government announces its full commitment to this law in the interim and transitional phase."
The law is embraced by the Kurds because it embraces federalism and modern democratic principles, and it provides veto power for Kurds over the drafting of a permanent constitution.
Shiites long have had issues about the law, and its passage was almost derailed over those concerns.
This week, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite in Iraq, raised objections to the document. He sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan saying the law is unacceptable because it "was passed by a Governing Council that was not elected and was under occupation and directly influenced by it. This law will have a direct effect on Iraq."
But Barzani and Talabani had asked that the TAL "be incorporated into the new U.N. Security Council Resolution or otherwise recognized as law binding on the transitional government, both before and after elections."
"If the TAL is abrogated, the Kurdistan Regional Government will have no choice but to refrain from participating in the central government and its institutions, not to take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of the central government from Kurdistan," said Barzani of the Kurdish Democratic Party and Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
The letter noted that the autonomous Kurdish region "remains the only secure and stable part of Iraq. We note that, in contrast to the Arab areas of Iraq, no coalition soldier has been killed in the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government."
It said the Kurds were "bitterly disappointed when your special representative advised us that a Kurd could be neither prime minister nor president of Iraq. We were told that these positions must go to a Shiite Arab and Sunni Arab respectively."
One of the two deputy presidents, Rowsch Shaways, is Kurdish.
"We also believe the decision to use sectarian quotas for the top two jobs directly contradicts the coalition's repeatedly stated position that democratic Iraq's government should not be based on ethnic or religious criteria, a position the U.S. wrote into the Transitional Administrative Law.
