BAGHDAD — Sunni Arab lawmakers on Tuesday listed a host of demands, varying from sweeping political reforms to amnesty for prisoners, in exchange for supporting a pact to keep U.S. forces in Iraq through 2011, dimming Iraqi leaders' hopes for a smooth victory when parliament votes on the measure.
The 275-member legislature was expected to vote today on the Status of Forces Agreement. The pact would alter the conditions under which the roughly 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq operate.
Proponents, led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, say the accord would put Iraq on the road to sovereignty by scaling back U.S. troops' autonomy beginning next year and by setting a Dec. 31, 2011, deadline for a full troop withdrawal. Opponents, led by Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, say it doesn't get rid of the U.S. forces soon enough and leaves loopholes for the Americans to do as they please.
The main Sunni bloc, Tawafiq, holds 44 seats in the parliament and falls somewhere in the middle. It does not oppose the pact, which took nearly nine months to negotiate, but says it cannot back it without changes.
Maliki's Shiite bloc and its Kurdish allies hold enough seats to propel the pact through parliament, but Maliki needs Sunni votes to prevent sharpening the country's sectarian and ethnic divides. In addition, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has said the pact should have national consensus. Sistani stays out of politics, but his approval of such important legislation is considered crucial because of the weight his words carry.
Rashid Azzawi, a parliament member with the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the Tawafiq parties, said members of the bloc would boycott today's session if they did not receive promises that their demands would be met.
"The most important demand is the political process reform. We have demanded the Iraqi government not allow any side to monopolize decision-making," he said, reflecting Sunni fear of being marginalized in the parliament by the majority Shiites and the Kurds.
Azzawi also said Sunni lawmakers wanted amnesty for detainees in U.S. custody, who number about 16,000 and are overwhelmingly Sunni. In addition, he said, Tawafiq wanted a national referendum on the pact, even if the parliament passed it. If the public voted against the pact, he said, the Iraqi government would be obliged to cancel it.
The demands were also spelled out on Tawafiq's website.
