Shiite Islamist leaders hammered home demands for an autonomous federal state for their people across oil-rich southern Iraq yesterday, four days before a deadline for agreeing a new constitution.
Minority Sunni Arab leaders, as well as a spokesman for the Shiite-led coalition government, rejected the idea and it was unclear whether the split would hold up delivery of a draft text that Washington hopes can help quell the Sunni insurgency.
At an impassioned mass rally in Najaf, heartland of Shiite Islam, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) Abdul Aziz al-Hakim turned up the pressure on his opponents as the head of his party's military wing derided the central government in Baghdad.
"Regarding federalism, we think that it is necessary to form one entire region in the south," said Hakim, leader of SCIRI, and a powerful force in the coalition that came to power in January's poll.
Shiites account for about 60 percent of Iraq's people and the issue of autonomy raises major concerns for the country's ability to hold together and for the division of its oil wealth.
Representatives of the Sunni Arab minority, dominant under former president Saddam Hussein, and some other minorities and secular Shiites wary of religious rule have been opposing the idea of drafting a constitution that would allow southern Shiites the kind of autonomy now enjoyed de facto by Kurds in the north.
"Federalism has to be in all of Iraq. They are trying to prevent the Shiites from enjoying their own federalism," said Hadi al-Amery, head of the Badr movement, a militia organisation formed by SCIRI when it was in Iranian exile.
"We have to persist in forming one region in the south or else we will regret it. What have we got from the central government except death?," Amery said, recalling the decades of oppression many southern Shiites have suffered at the hands of successive colonial and post-colonial rules in Baghdad.
Opponents accuse SCIRI and the Badr movement of fomenting religious vigilantism, charges they deny.
Hakim's rousing calls were greeted with wild enthusiasm by tens of thousands of supporters crying "Yes, yes to Islam!", "Yes, yes to Hakim!" among other slogans. The meeting was called to commemorate the assassination two years ago by a huge car bomb in Najaf of Hakim's brother, the former SCIRI leader.
In Baghdad, Laith Kubba, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, a Shiite Islamist from SCIRI rival Dawa, said: "The idea of a Shiite region ... is unacceptable to us."
Other participants in talks on the constitution have said that they expect precise rules on how federal regions like that of the Kurds can be formed to be left out of the draft presented next week, leaving the issue unresolved until later.
In other news, Saddam's trial could begin within the next two months, a source close to the Iraqi Special Tribunal that will try the former dictator said yesterday on charges of crimes against humanity.
"My best guess is that the trial could begin 45 days from the day the defence looks at the evidence," said a source close to the tribunal.
On Monday Saddam's family announced it sacked all members of his foreign defence team and would deal only with Khalil Dulaimi, his Iraqi lawyer.
In other developments, the government is investigating allegations by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that weapons have been smuggled into Iraq from Iran, Kubba said.
He said weapons with Iranian markings have previously been found inside Iraq but he said the allegation was being "discussed carefully because we all know that during complex wars sometimes one party tries to create sedition."
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