Team Expected to Look Into Possible Election Time Frame

The United Nations is committed to helping end the crisis over how to transfer political power in Iraq so the U.S.-led occupation can end as scheduled on June 30, Secretary General Kofi Annan said during a meeting with President Bush yesterday.

Annan is expected to dispatch a U.N. team to Iraq this week to determine whether elections are feasible before the occupation ends, U.S. and U.N. officials said.

In remarks in the Oval Office, Annan told reporters that he hopes the world body will help persuade Iraqis to come to some agreement about "finding the way forward" in choosing a provisional government to assume power.

"I hope this team I'm sending in will be able to play a role [in] getting the Iraqis to understand that if they could come to some consensus and some agreement on how to establish that government, we're halfway there," Annan said. "So we do have a chance to help break the impasse which exists at the moment and move forward."

The team will meet with the Iraqi Governing Council and "as many Iraqis as possible," Annan said. But U.N. and U.S. officials said it is still unclear whether the U.N. election specialists will talk with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Muslim cleric, who has not left his home in six years and has not met any occupation officials. Sistani's call for direct elections -- and his challenge of a U.S. plan calling instead for 18 regional caucuses to select a provisional Iraqi government -- precipitated the current crisis.

Uruguayan diplomat Carina Perelli, who will be part of the U.N. team, undertook a similar mission last August, when the United Nations concluded that elections were not feasible. The team is expected to be in Iraq for more than a week, although the timing and extent of travel around the country will depend on the security situation and availability to a cross section of Iraqis, U.N. officials said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States is open to "refinements" of the original U.S. plan, which was announced Nov. 15. But Annan told reporters that the Bush administration had pledged to accept the conclusions of the U.N. mission. "The stability of Iraq is in everyone's interest," Annan said.

The White House is pressing veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi to accept the job as U.N. special representative to Iraq, although he is resisting the idea. The post has been vacant since an August bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and more than 20 others. After a second suicide bombing at the same facility in October, the United Nations withdrew its staff.

The coalition has pledged to do "everything possible" to provide security for the U.N. team, Annan told reporters after the White House meeting.

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