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Saturday, September 27, 2003
Powell gives hope for Iraq power handover; UN staff prepare to leave (10:36 am)
UNITED NATIONS -- In an olive branch to opponents of the US-led war in Iraq, the United States on Friday set a six-month deadline for a new constitution to be drawn up, as UN staff prepared to pull out of Baghdad amid mounting attacks.
And the US-installed administration in Baghdad buried its first assassinated official, remembering interim Governing Council member Akila al-Hashimi as a "martyr" for freedom and vowing to finish her work.
With France insisting on a short timeframe for handing power to the Iraqis, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington was anxious for the council to prepare a constitution with six months and hold elections next year.
"You have to have some sense of time on this and so six months is a good date to put out there," Powell told reporters in New York after a meeting of the so-called international diplomatic "quartet" on the Middle East.
In Washington, US Iraq administrator Paul Bremer said US forces in Iraq are currently holding 248 foreign fighters, including 19 members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
"About half of the foreigners in custody are Syrians," Bremer told a Pentagon press conference. "The next two countries are Iran and Yemen."
He said the foreign fighters in Iraq were infiltrating mainly from Syria, many of them what he called "terrorists for hire."
In Iraq, meanwhile, at least four Iraqi civilians were killed and eight wounded late Friday when US troops opened fire on cars at the entrance to the city of Fallujah, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses and hospital personnel said.
The US military said it had no information on the incident in Fallujah, a hotbed of support for ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the site of frequent clashes between locals and American troops.
Back at the UN, the United States pressed for a Security Council resolution that would create a multinational force for Iraq and share the financial burden of rebuilding the war-shattered Gulf state.
At the same time, Presidents Bush of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia began a two-day summit at Bush's Camp David retreat in Maryland, at which Iraqi reconstruction was said to be high on the agenda.
In the UN, Powell stressed that missing the six-month timeframe would not destroy plans for returning Iraq to self-rule.
"The term deadline suggests that something awful happens at the end of the six months, and I wouldn't want to convey the impression that it falls off the end of the earth at the end of six months," he said.
Powell has also raised the possibility the Iraqis themselves could soon set a timetable, adding that the US government has asked Iraqi leaders to estimate how long it would take them to write a constitution and conduct elections.
In an interview with the New York Times, he said the Constitution would spell out whether Iraq would be governed by a presidential or parliamentary system, clearing the way for elections and a new government in 2004.
Not until then, he insisted, would the United States transfer authority from the US-led occupation forces to Iraq itself.
But in Baghdad, more signs emerged that Iraq was far from stable.
With sadness and a vow to return, more UN staffers prepared to leave on the orders of their bosses in New York after two bomb attacks in a month rocked the world body's Baghdad offices.
UN spokeswoman Veronique Taveau said a third of the 86 international staff remaining in Iraq would pull out after the decision announced Thursday by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York.
She said that those leaving were dealing with mainly administrative chores and would carry on their work from Jordan or Cyprus. All the UN workers will return "as soon as security conditions improve," Taveau said.
"The United Nations is not evacuating Iraq," Taveau stressed. "We are simply in the process of reducing our international staffing level. Reduction does not mean evacuation."
The United Nations kept about 650 international personnel in Iraq before an August 19 bombing killed 22 people, including Annan's top envoy to Baghdad. A second bombing Monday killed an Iraqi security guard.
Major UN aid agencies said their emergency operations will continue in the war-torn country, but some admitted the exodus would hamper delivery of essential aid.
While eulogies poured in from Bush and other world leaders for the slain Hashimi, her burial in the Shiite Muslim city of Najaf was a discreet and sober affair attended by about 150 people, most of them police.
Hashimi, who died Thursday of gunshot wounds, was buried after a long funeral procession that made its way from Baghdad to Najaf, 160 kilometers (100 miles) to the north.
The Governing Council, where Hashimi was one of three women members and played a major role in promoting the fledgling pro-US leadership, hailed her as a "martyr on the path of struggle for freedom and democracy."
In other developments, American soldiers are facing disciplinary action for an incident last month in Baghdad when a helicopter tried to remove a religious flag and triggered a clash that left an Iraqi dead, the US military told AFP Friday.
The US military previously cleared its troops for wrongdoing in an incident earlier this month in Fallujah that left nine Iraqi security men and a Jordanian guard dead from US fire.
Amnesty International on Friday condemned what it claimed was a virtual license for GIs to kill in Iraq, with no proper probes into cases of civilians dying at the hands of US soldiers.
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