Iraqi Shi'ites agree on new nominee

BAGHDAD -- Hopes were raised yesterday for an imminent end to the two-month stalemate that has paralyzed politics and pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war after Shi'ite Muslim political leaders agreed on a new nominee for the post of prime minister.

The United Iraqi Alliance announced that it had chosen Jawad al-Maliki as its candidate to head the next government, replacing his boss, the incumbent Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose refusal to relinquish the post had emerged as the biggest obstacle to the formation of a new government.

Sunni and Kurdish political leaders who had strenuously opposed Jaafari's candidacy indicated they would accept Maliki, marking a potential breakthrough that could see the first posts in the government decided when the Iraqi parliament meets tomorrow.

''We will support his candidacy for prime minister and we have good relations with him," said Alaa Mekki, a top official in the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party.

Said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator: ''We have nothing against this choice and we are very happy that finally they have changed their candidate. This change will help the political process and very much help the formation of the new government."

Maliki was chosen by consensus at a succession of private meetings of legislators within the Shi'ite alliance, averting a potentially divisive vote within the coalition that won the most seats in the national legislature at December's elections.

It remains unclear, however, whether Maliki will be able to succeed where Jaafari has failed in uniting Iraqis behind their government, quelling the violence and reviving the stalled reconstruction effort.

US Representative Stephen F. Lynch, a South Boston Democrat who had traveled to Baghdad with a Congressional delegation to urge Iraqis to form a unity government, said the political agreement could be a major breakthrough in the political stalemate that has left Iraq drifting toward anarchy and sectarian division.

''It could very likely allow a unity government to be formed tomorrow," Lynch told The Boston Globe in a telephone interview during his fifth trip to Iraq. ''It can only help that there has been a political success in at least forming a government."

Maliki belongs to the same political party as Jaafari, shares his Shi'ite Islamist ideology, and has frequently acted as his spokesman.

Like Jaafari, Maliki went into exile in the first years of the Saddam Hussein era, fleeing the crackdown against the Islamist Dawa Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s in which tens of thousands of Shi'ites were executed or imprisoned. Hussein is now standing trial for crimes against humanity for one of those crackdowns, implemented after Dawa Party members tried to assassinate him in 1982.

Maliki, who claimed responsibility on behalf of Dawa for a 1996 assassination attempt against Hussein's son Uday, served as the party's political representative in Damascus, Syria, before returning after the US invasion of Iraq.

In contrast with the ineffectual Jaafari, known for delivering rambling speeches and quoting poetry, the plainspoken Maliki is regarded as a party apparatchik, a political operator who some officials say could prove a more effective leader.

Jaafari had secured the nomination of the Shi'ite coalition in February by one vote, after a bruising internal battle in which the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr emerged as kingmaker by instructing his supporters to vote for Jaafari. But after Sadr's militia began flexing its muscles on the streets of Baghdad, some feared Jaafari lacked the stamina and clout to take on the Shi'ite militias that are now considered as much a threat to Iraq's stability as the Sunni insurgency.

Farah Stockman of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington.