Doubts cast on Allawi's vow to unite the country

[IndianaGreen]

Doubts cast on Allawi's vow to unite the country
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
01 February 2005

The success or failure of the National Assembly depends on whether it can meet voters' high expectations, said Mahmoud Othman, who is sure to be a member of it because he is fourth on the list of Kurdish candidates.

Mr Othman, a veteran and highly respected politician, said a new government must be able to talk to the resistance, arrange a timetable for an American withdrawal and end the economic and social crisis in Iraq. He said: "If the new government is a photocopy of the old one, then that is not so good. The people expect change."

The make-up of the 275-member assembly will take time to establish. In the election, Iraq was treated as one constituency in which each party that submitted a slate of candidates will be allocated seats in proportion to the percentage of the vote it received. The three big winners are expected to be the Kurds, the Iyad Allawi list, which was expected to attract many secular voters, and the so-called Shia list, created under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shia spiritual leader.

Ghassan Attiyah, a political scientist and writer, said it would be highly polarising if the Shia and the Kurds were dominant. This would further alienate the Sunnis. The Kurds, themselves mostly Sunni, and the Shia have difficulty in agreeing common policies.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=606555