Lawmakers make demands ahead of Iraq security pact vote
Sunnis want concerns including political reforms and amnesty for prisioners addressed before lending their support to a deal that would decide the fate of U.S. forces in Iraq.
Reporting from Baghdad — Sunni lawmakers today listed a host of demands, ranging 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 Wednesday 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 it 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 American 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 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, the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has said the pact should have national consensus. Sistani stays out of politics, but his approval of such an important piece of legislation is considered crucial because of the weight his words carry.
Rasheed Azzawi, a member of parliament from the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the parties within Tawafiq, said bloc members would boycott Wednesday's session if it did not receive promises its 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 concerns of marginalization by the majority Shiites and their Kurdish allies in parliament.
Azzawi also said Sunni lawmakers wanted amnesty for detainees held in U.S. custody, who number about 16,000 and are overwhelmingly Sunni. In addition, he said, Tawafiq wanted the pact to be voted on in a national referendum, even if it passed parliament. If the public voted against the pact, he said the Iraqi government would be obliged to cancel it.
