IRAQ: The lack of transparency in filling senior positions could reduce the credibility of the new government in Iraq, writes Michael Jansen
The nine-week process of choosing a parliamentary speaker and a presidential council in Iraq shows that decision-making in the 275-member assembly takes place behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms rather than in the legislature's chamber.
The chief movers and shakers are former Shia and Kurdish members of the Governing Council appointed in July 2003 on the basis of ethnic and sectarian affiliation, giving rise to the charge that Washington has installed communal governance modelled on the Lebanese confessional system.
These figures have managed to perpetuate their dominance in successor bodies, including the outgoing interim government and the assembly elected on January 30th. They are now taking up senior posts.
Although Sunnis have been marginalised, the Shia United Iraqi Alliance with 147 seats and the Kurdish bloc with 77 have agreed that the Sunnis, with only 17 deputies, should be included in the triumvirates. They have been chosen to exercise the powers of the presidency and preside over parliament.
Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was favourite for the post of president even before the election. He joined the Kurdish separatist movement in 1961 and took up arms against the Iraqi government.
In 1975 his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, representing urban Kurds, broke away from the traditional tribal Kurdish Democratic Party now headed by Massud Barzani. Talabani is the first Kurd to become president of Iraq.
Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni who was president in the outgoing government, was appointed one of two vice presidents.
He is a US-trained tribal leader and businessman whose Iraqiyun list won five seats in the assembly. Sheikh Ghazi was the choice of the Shia Alliance rather than the 80 Sunni leaders who gathered in Baghdad early this week to nominate candidates they considered representative of the community.
Dr Adnan Pachachi, who convened this meeting, said Sheikh Ghazi was "not the choice" of the Sunni Arabs. The other vice president, Adel Abdul Mahdi, is a senior member of the Shia Alliance who served as minister of finance in the interim cabinet.
A French-educated economist with a colourful past, he began his political life as a Baathist, became a committed Maoist, then shifted to Shia Islamist activism.
Towards the end of last year he was tipped for the premiership.
These three men make up the presidency council which, according to the transitional administrative law adopted last April, "represents [ Iraq's] sovereignty and oversees the higher affairs of the country". The council is empowered to select a prime minister and has a veto on legislation.
The Shia and Kurdish blocs have agreed that the prime minister should be Dr Ibrahim Jaafari, a medical doctor who heads the Shia Islamist Dawa party. He is expected to be appointed today.
Dr Jaafari took his degree at Mosul university but fled to Iran and then Britain after the Baathist government cracked down on Dawa, a revolutionary movement formed in 1958 by the Shia clerical hierarchy to overthrow the secular republican regime.
The other triumvirate consists of the speaker of parliament and his two deputies. There was an unseemly wrangle over the speaker's post because Sheikh Ghazi Yawar, who had been expected to take up the post, refused to do so.
Eventually Hajem Hassani, a former minister of industry and minerals, was selected. He left Iraq in 1979, was educated in Nebraska and Connecticut and lived in Los Angeles until he returned in 2003. He is a member of the Yawar group in the assembly.
He and the sheikh are the only two Sunni deputies acceptable to the Shia bloc.
A close confidant of Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Dr Hussein Shahristani, a former nuclear scientist imprisoned by the ousted regime, is a deputy speaker, while the other is Arif Tayfur, an official in the Kurdish Democratic Party.
The lack of transparency in the process of filling senior positions and the fact that all the appointments so far have been taken by returnees could reduce the credibility of the new government.
Its standing with Sunnis has already been damaged by the way Sunni posts were allocated by the Shia Alliance. This could further alienate the already angry Sunnis, fuelling the insurgency.
Analysts have expressed concern that Iraq's new rulers will not break the communal mould and begin to think of the country as a whole before the drafting of the new constitution begins.