Iraq’s executive council on Saturday ratified a much-debated bill that gives Iraqi religious minorities fewer guaranteed seats on provincial councils than the UN mission in Iraq had recommended.
The executive council — Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the country’s two vice presidents — agreed with parliament that the country’s religious minorities, which include three-quarters of a million Christians, should be guaranteed just six of the 440 seats on the provincial councils, half what the UN proposed.
An election for the councils is scheduled next year. Some Christian leaders are threatening a boycott, because they say the number of guaranteed seats will leave them underrepresented. Besides Christians, the country’s religious minorities include Yazidis, Sabeans and Shabaks.
Talabani on his Web site on Thursday had hinted that he might veto the bill. But it passed unanimously in the executive council, giving Christians one seat on councils in Baghdad, Nineveh and Basra, instead of the three seats in Baghdad, three in Nineveh and one in Basra that had been recommended by the UN. Yazidis will be given one guaranteed seat in Nineveh, instead of the three proposed by the UN. The Sabeans will get one seat in Baghdad, and the Shabaks will get one seat in Nineveh.
Although minorities can run for other seats, Iraqis have in the past voted along sectarian lines.
Younadim Kanna, one of two Christians in parliament, called the executive council’s decision “very disappointing.”
“Their sweet speeches to us turned out to be useless,” Kanna said. “We thought that they would compensate for what was done to us by other major political entities.”
A vast majority of Iraq’s approximately 28 million people are Muslim and many Christians have been persecuted and displaced over the last five years.
On Saturday, a suicide car bombing at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Ramadi in Anbar Province killed five people and wounded 10, an Iraqi Ministry official said. The checkpoint stands at the entrance to a joint Iraqi army and US Marine combat outpost, but a US military spokesman said he could not “disclose US casualty information at this time.”
The spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Hughes, said in an e-mailed response to questions that Iraqi forces guarding the outpost, which is along a major highway, had taken the brunt of the attack.
Two hours after the attack, a thin column of smoke was still rising from behind the blast wall around the checkpoint, and trucks and cars were backed up for at least a mile in both directions.
The area is inhabited by the Albu-Fahed tribe. Many tribal members had previously belonged to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a mostly homegrown Sunni insurgent group that US intelligence says is foreign-led. But last year, many tribesman joined the Awakening movement and turned against the insurgents.
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