Shiites close on Cabinet
BAGHDAD, Iraq – After nearly three months of negotiations, Iraq’s major Shiite bloc has decided to form a Cabinet without members of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s Iraqi List party, lawmakers said Sunday.
The news comes amid reports that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, frustrated by the political deadlock in Iraq, were pushing top Kurdish and Shiite politicians to get together and form a government.
Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari could submit a list of ministers to Parliament as soon as today, Iraqi lawmakers said.
“There is a big expectation that tomorrow there will be an announcement of a new government without the participation of the Iraqi List,” Saad Jouawd Qandil, a member of al-Jaafari’s Shiite-dominated Iraqi United Alliance, said Sunday.
There were conflicting reports, however, when the allocation of seats would be final. Qandil thought the final list would be submitted to parliament on Tuesday. But Ali Adib, another alliance member, said al-Jaafari would make the announcement today.
“We weren’t able to succeed in our talks with Allawi’s group, and so we’ll go ahead with a government formed by the Kurds, Sunnis and the Shiites,” Adib told the Associated Press on Sunday. “Tomorrow we expect to announce to the assembly the government.”
Members of Allawi’s party could not immediately be reached for comment.
Nearly three months have passed since the Jan. 30 National Assembly elections, but the inability of the winning slates to form a government has frustrated ordinary Iraqis. Both Iraqi and Western observers say it has helped reinvigorate the nation’s insurgency.
On Sunday, two sets of coordinated car bombings in Baghdad and Tikrit killed at least 21 people and injured more than 70 as militants continued their campaign to sow civil unrest and destabilize the fledgling government.
Al-Jaafari’s alliance has repeatedly predicted he would soon announce a new Cabinet. So far each prediction since the Jan. 30 elections has proved wrong.
Many Shiites long have resented Allawi, himself a secular Shiite. They accuse his outgoing administration of having brought into the government and security forces former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, who had helped carry out policies that oppressed many Iraqis – especially Shiites and Kurds.
On Friday, Allawi’s Iraqi List alliance, which controls 40 seats in the 275-member interim National Assembly, accused Shiites of trying to keep all the party’s members out of the new Cabinet. But it said the party would continue to support the government, even if it is excluded.
The dispute with Allawi’s party is just one of a number of issues that have stalled the formation of a government. The alliance, which controls 148 seats, is also trying to balance the competing demands of Kurdish factions while drawing in members of the country’s Sunni minority.
The Sunnis, who largely stayed away from the Jan. 30 election either in boycott or out of fear of attacks at the polls, won only 17 seats and are widely believed to form the backbone of the insurgency.