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Shiite Jafari Is Named Iraqi Prime Minister
By Ellen Knickmeyer and Fred Barbash
The Washington Post
Thursday 07 April 2005
Talabani sworn in as president.
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Ibrahim Jafari, a representative of Iraq's long-supressed Shiite majority, was named prime minister on Thursday.
(Photo: Reuters)
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Baghdad - Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite politician and former exile who
battled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, was named prime minister of Iraq Thursday
after two months of old-fashioned political haggling.
Jafari's appointment to the country's most powerful job followed the swearing
in of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani to the post of president, designed to be
largely ceremonial under Iraq's interim set of laws. A council composed of Talabani
and two vice presidents then invited Jafari to form a government.
The formal beginning of a new democratically elected government was yet another
landmark for this war-weary nation. Voters chose a national assembly in January,
which paved the way for the naming of the leaders of government which, in turn,
is to pave the way for a new constitution and another election next December.
The arrangement of power ratified Thursday gives Iraq's Kurdish minority and
its Shiite Arab majority their greatest measure of political power in a half-century.
Shiite and Kurdish slates placed first and second in Iraq's January elections.
Assembly members have been in agreement on making Talabani president for weeks,
but behind-the-scenes horse-trading was required to fill the two vice presidencies
Wednesday with Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite, and Ghazi Yawer, a Sunni. That cleared
the way for Jafari.
The interim constitution calls for power-sharing among the Sunni Arab minority
that monopolized power under Hussein, the now-dominant Shiite Arab majority
and the enthusiastically ascendant Kurds, who are Sunnis.
Jafari is a soft-spoken physician and former exile who leads the Dawa party.
He emerged as a surprise front-runner after the election. He returned from exile
in London after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
His party, Dawa, has long advocated a religious government. But in a post-election
interview with the Washington Post, he said Dawa had tempered that desire to
accommodate secular and non-Muslim Iraqis. Jafari said Dawa did not "aim
to establish an Islamic state to apply the Islamic sharia," or law. Instead,
it would establish a government "respecting human rights and applying justice
and respecting the rights of women."
Jafari also said in that interview that his new government would include all
ethnic parties, including Sunnis who boycotted the election.
Shiite and Kurdish leaders say they are determined to continue divvying up
power among the factions, seeing inclusion as the only way to end the Sunni-led
insurgency and draw the independence-minded Kurds in northern Iraq into a federal
nation.
Some politicians complain that such a quota system accentuates religious and
ethnic divisions and want it abandoned in the next national elections, to be
held after the incoming government drafts a new constitution.
The negotiations have been complicated by efforts to draw in the 40-seat parliamentary
bloc led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite. Secular Iraqis
want Allawi's alliance in the cabinet, working with the Kurds to counter potential
Shiite religious extremism; Sunnis see Allawi as a strong leader, and his bloc
as sympathetic, and want him in as well.
Allawi's bloc is demanding five top cabinet jobs out of about 30 that the Shiites
and Kurds had mostly split. By Wednesday, some Shiite politicians were no longer
voicing determination to bring Allawi into the government, and his bloc appeared
split on the matter.
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Fred Barbash reported from Washington. Staff writer Caryle Murphy
contributed to this report.
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