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Iraqi Prime Minister unveils reconciliation plan
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Iraqi Prime Minister unveils reconciliation plan
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented a national reconciliation plan to parliament yesterday to curb Iraq’s sectarian killing and the Sunni insurgency that has crippled post-war reconstruction. In a sign of US allies’ eagerness to disengage their forces from Iraq, Japanese transport trucks began moving armored vehicles out of their base in southern Iraq, signaling that a promised Japanese withdrawal had begun.
Stressing the “importance of national reconciliation and dialogue,” Maliki spent 15 minutes enumerating 24 points of his plan, following a last-minute meeting with the speaker of parliament, one of the most prominent Sunni Arabs in office. Maliki, a Shiite Islamist, has vowed to crush the Sunni insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and to reconcile Shiites with the once-dominant Sunni Muslim minority. Their mutual distrust has deepened amid sectarian bloodletting.
“We must put an end to this ugly picture,” Maliki said, saying he would crack down on supporters of Saddam Hussein but release detainees who had not committed major crimes. He also said he would try to improve public services in the most troubled areas and was urging US-led forces to observe human rights – a frequent complaint among the Sunni minority. He would also review previous laws barring members of Saddam’s Baath party from public office.
Since taking office on May 20 he has sought to arrest the political drift that developed while Shiite, Sunni and minority Kurdish parties wrangled for months over posts in the government and allowed a dangerous security vacuum to develop. Maliki scored a major victory when the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a US air strike on June 7. But fresh violence has put pressure on him to build on that success and take the sting out of the insurgency.
Sunni leader Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the parliament speaker, cautioned on Friday the plan was not a “magic solution” but an attempt to “mend the cracks” splitting apart Iraq. Maliki, a former exile, has long been a strong defender of the sacking of Baath members from the army, a US-engineered policy that critics say bolstered the insurgency.
The program also aims to tackle militias, which are seen as among the most destabilizing forces in Iraq but are difficult to disband because they are tied to political parties, notably the Shiites and Kurds that are the backbone of the government.
In Samawa, Reuters journalists saw at least 15 transporters leave the Japanese base carrying armored personnel carriers and other vehicles. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced on Tuesday that Japan would withdraw its roughly 550 soldiers, engaged in reconstruction and humanitarian work, from their base in Samawa in the southern province of Muthanna.
“This is the start of the pull-out”</B>
The mission, Japan’s first in a combat zone since World War Two, has been controversial at home but an indicator of Koizumi’s willingness to stand by his US ally. “This is the start of the pull-out,” said a spokesman at the Defense agency. “We moved only supplies today – no personnel.”
The contents of the convoy included armored vehicles and trucks and bulldozers used in Japan’s reconstruction activities, he said. “We don’t yet know officially how long the withdrawal will take to complete,” the spokesman added. A spokesman for the British-led force policing southern Iraq said there would be such withdrawals from the Samawa base.
US officials told the New York Times yesterday the US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, briefed officials in Washington last week on a plan to cut troop levels to less than half its present level by the end of next year.
By late 2007 the number of combat brigades would fall to five or six from 14 at present, the paper said. There are 127,000
US troops in Iraq at the moment and US officials have said that could fall to about 100,000 by late this year.
<B>Mussab Al-Khairalla</B>
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VIOLENCE
<B>US charges another soldier in killing</B>
■ The US military charged a soldier with voluntary manslaughter yesterday for shooting an unarmed Iraqi man in February, the latest of a number of such cases to come to light in recent weeks. The military said in a statement that Specialist Nathan Lynn was also charged with obstructing justice, along with a second soldier, for conspiring with a third who prosecutors say placed an assault rifle by the body in an apparent cover-up attempt. The third man had left the army since the incident near a US base at Ramadi, west of Baghdad, on Feb. 15 but the second, Sergeant Milton Ortiz, was charged with obstruction of justice as well as separate counts of assault and making threats. “Lynn was charged with one count of voluntary manslaughter for allegedly shooting an unarmed male Iraqi civilian on Feb. 15 in front of a home where Lynn was pulling security for members of his unit,” the military said in its statement. The Uniform Code of Military Justice distinguishes voluntary manslaughter from murder by saying the former is an unlawful killing “in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation” while murder is “without justification or excuse”. The announcement came after a week in which 12 Americans were charged with murdering Iraqis and on the day on which Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki promised that the occupying troops would respect Iraqis’ human rights. As part of a national plan for reconciliation, Maliki’s stance on the US troops is aimed partly at rallying support among the Sunni minority opposed to his Shi’ite-led government. The week’s previous murder charges relate to two cases of Iraqis being shot by US troops. Charges are expected but have yet to be brought in the case of 24 civilians killed in November at Haditha. The military is investigating the Marines involved.
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