News 2005

Shiite Jafari Is Named Iraqi Prime Minister
April 7, 2005

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Fred Barbash:

BAGHDAD, April 7 -- Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite politician and former exile who battled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, was named prime minister of Iraq Thursday after two months of old-fashioned political haggling.

Jafari's appointment to the country's most powerful job followed the swearing in of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani to the post of president, designed to be largely ceremonial under Iraq's interim set of laws. A council composed of Talabani and two vice presidents then invited Jafari to
form a government.

The formal beginning of a new democratically elected government was yet another landmark for this war-weary nation. Voters chose a national assembly in January, which paved the way for the naming of the leaders of government which, in turn, is to pave the way for a new constitution and another election next December.

The arrangement of power ratified Thursday gives Iraq's Kurdish minority and its Shiite Arab majority their greatest measure of political power in a half-century.

Shiite and Kurdish slates placed first and second in Iraq's January elections. Assembly members have been in agreement on making Talabani president for weeks, but behind-the-scenes horse-trading was required to fill the two vice presidencies Wednesday with Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite, and Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni. That cleared the way for Jafari.

The interim constitution calls for power-sharing among the Sunni Arab minority that monopolized power under Hussein, the now-dominant Shiite Arab majority and the enthusiastically ascendant Kurds, who are Sunnis.

Jafari is a soft-spoken physician and former exile who leads the Dawa party. He emerged as a surprise front-runner after the election. He returned from exile in London after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

His party, Dawa, has long advocated a religious government. But in a post-election interview with The Washington Post, he said Dawa had tempered that desire to accommodate secular and non-Muslim Iraqis. Jafari said Dawa did not "aim to establish an Islamic state to apply the Islamic sharia," or law. Instead, it would establish a government "respecting human rights and applying justice and respecting the rights of women."

Jafari also said in that interview that his new government would include all ethnic parties, including Sunnis who boycotted the election.

Shiite and Kurdish leaders say they are determined to continue divvying up power among the factions, seeing inclusion as the only way to end the Sunni-led insurgency and draw the independence-minded Kurds in northern Iraq into a federal nation.

Some politicians complain that such a quota system accentuates religious and ethnic divisions and want it abandoned in the next national elections, to be held after the incoming government drafts a new constitution.

The negotiations have been complicated by efforts to draw in the 40-seat parliamentary bloc led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite. Secular Iraqis want Allawi's alliance in the cabinet, working with the Kurds to counter potential Shiite religious extremism; Sunnis see Allawi as a strong leader, and his bloc as sympathetic, and want him in as well.

Allawi's bloc demanded five top cabinet jobs out of about 30 that the Shiites and Kurds had mostly split. By Wednesday, some Shiite politicians were no longer voicing determination to bring Allawi into the government, and his bloc appeared split on the matter.

Source Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33567-2005Apr7.html