UN/IRAQ: A United Nations team will be dispatched to Iraq to study the feasibility of early elections so long as the security situation permits it, the UN secretary general, Mr Kofi Annan, said yesterday in Paris.
Mr Annan said he would send a mission to assess whether direct polls would be possible before the US hands back power to Iraqis in mid-2004, as the most powerful and revered Shia cleric in Iraq has demanded.
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has challenged the US plan to let regional caucuses choose a transitional assembly, saying Iraqis should pick their leaders themselves. He has massive support across the country, where 60 percent are Shias.
Washington hopes the UN will agree that organising elections before the planned June 30th handover of power would be impossible due to a lack of security, electoral registers and laws in Iraq, and that Ayatollah Sistani will respect that verdict.
UN envoy Mr Lakhdar Brahimi said yesterday that premature elections in Iraq could do more harm than good, but he suggested he would not play the kind of leadership role there that the US has sought.
"If you get your priorities wrong, elections are a very divisive process," said Mr Brahimi, speaking at a luncheon sponsored by UN groups.
"They create tensions. They create competition. And in a country that is not stable enough to take that . . . one has to be certain it will not do more harm than good." He also said that he would be working on Iraq in his current role as an adviser to Mr Annan, but he said categorically: "To take responsibility for Iraq, no, that's not in the cards."
The US has been pressuring Mr Brahimi, who just finished a two-year stint as chief UN envoy in Afghanistan, to assume a central role in organizing a political transition to Iraqi self-rule, due in June.
Mr Annan, who pulled international staff out of Iraq in October after attacks on the UN's Baghdad headquarters, said in Paris the UN was already discussing with the US-led coalition in Iraq arrangements for the mission.
"As soon as we are given indications that the practical and security arrangements are in place . . . we are ready to send the mission," he told a briefing with President Jacques Chirac.
"Consensus amongst all Iraqi constituencies would be the best guarantee of a legitimate and credible transitional governance arrangement for Iraq," he said.
A small security team has arrived in Iraq to check whether it is safe for the UN electoral mission to operate, a UN spokeswoman said in New York. Diplomats say the electoral mission would have four or five members.
Amid the doubts about security, Ayatollah Sistani has left open a narrow window for compromise. He has hinted, through aides, that he would respect a UN verdict about elections.
His aides in Najaf said he met a group of Iraqi academics on Monday night who, they said, were likely to be involved in talks with the UN team.
Washington wants Mr Brahimi to play a lead role in the transition to self-rule.