IRAQ: Sunni officials and independent Iraqi politicians reacted with dismay yesterday at a move by the Shia and Kurdish majority to make it harder to defeat an October 15th referendum on a new constitution.
Analysts also questioned the fairness of the move by Iraq's parliament, which set electoral rules making it far simpler for the draft constitution to pass - as Shias and Kurds want - than for it to be defeated by Sunni opponents.
If the constitution is defeated, it would be a severe setback to the US-driven political process in Iraq, where a Sunni-led insurgency has caused chaos for more than two years.
"It is a clear forgery," said Saleh al-Mutlaq, spokesman for the Iraqi National Dialogue, a leading Sunni Arab group, and one of those who helped draw up the new draft constitution.
"They want this constitution to pass despite the will of the people." In a session on Sunday, Shias and Kurds, who hold more than three quarters of parliament's 275 seats, decided the existing interim constitution should be interpreted in such a way as to create two different thresholds for the referendum.
For it to pass, a majority of those who turn out to vote have to say "Yes", while for it to be defeated, two-thirds of registered voters in three or more provinces have to say "No".
What the interim constitution actually says is: "The general referendum will be successful and the draft constitution ratified if a majority of the voters in Iraq approve and if two-thirds of the voters in three or more governorates do not reject it."
The interim constitution's wording suggests "voters" means those who turn out to vote in both cases, not registered voters, which is a much higher benchmark. In elections in January, less than 60 per cent of Iraqis who registered actually voted.
"It's unfair and I didn't vote for it," Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of parliament, said. "It's a double standard and it shouldn't have happened." With just a handful of seats in parliament after a boycott of January's first post-Saddam Hussein polls, Sunnis were in no position to defeat the Shia-Kurdish proposal.
Meanwhile, Iraq's oil minister survived an apparent assassination attempt yesterday when a roadside bomb blasted his motorcade, the latest attack on the energy industry that is vital to rebuilding the country's beleaguered economy. A week ago, a suicide bomber drove a car into a bus carrying oil ministry employees, killing at least six people. It was the bloodiest attack on the industry since insurgents began blowing up pipelines and killing oil officials after the fall of Saddam in April 2003.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which claims many of the attacks in Iraq, posted a statement on the Internet saying two US soldiers had been killed in the west after US forces failed to free women prisoners as demanded on Sunday by the group.
The posting had no pictures and a US military spokesman dismissed it as "disgusting propaganda". "We have no reports of any deaths," Lieut Col Steven Boylan said.
In Siida, troops fired one tank round into a building, wounding five civilians, the military said, while in nearby Karabila at least eight insurgents were killed. - (Reuters)