Amid protests, Iraq OK's quota bill

Minorities sought more council seats

An Iraqi police officer helped secure the area after a roadside bomb exploded yesterday in Baghdad. (Hadi Mizban/ Associated Press)

BAGHDAD - Iraqi leaders ratified a bill yesterday giving minorities a quota of seats on provincial governing councils, overriding protests by Christian lawmakers who said they had been cheated.

Christians had demanded that the country's three-member presidency council, which must ratify legislation passed by Parliament, veto the bill.

Last week, lawmakers approved the quota, which gives Christians and three other minorities a total of six seats split among the governing councils in Baghdad, Nineveh, and Basra provinces. The UN's special representative in Iraq had recommended 12 minority seats, a number Christian legislators had supported.

The three provincial councils have a total of 129 members.

In a statement released after the bill was ratified, the chief of staff for the presidency council, Naseer Ani, said its members had consulted with Vatican representatives and held "extensive discussion" about the bill. They considered the UN recommendations but decided to ratify the legislation unchanged out of respect for the parliamentarians' choice, he said.

"This comes as a recognition and respect for the Parliament judgment," Ani said.

The presidency council comprises the president, who is a Kurd, and two vice presidents, one a Shi'ite Muslim and the other a Sunni Arab.

Ani said another bill would be presented in the future to guarantee minority rights.

The new law governs only seats in provincial elections, which are scheduled to take place by Jan. 31. No date has been set for the vote, which is hoped will repair lopsided provincial power structures created by wide-scale boycotts of the 2005 elections.

Younadam Kanna, a leading Christian lawmaker, said yesterday that if the quota was not changed, the community would have "no choice but to boycott the elections." He expressed concerns that without greater representation for minorities on some councils, particularly in Nineveh, they would become caught in the middle of the Kurdish-Arab power struggle raging in that part of the country.

Under the UN proposal rejected by Parliament, Christian parties would have been guaranteed three seats on Nineveh's 37-seat provincial council, three on Baghdad's, and one on Basra's. Instead they got one seat on each of the three councils. The United Nations also proposed giving Yazidis, another sect, three seats on the Nineveh council, but they got only one. Of the two other groups, Shabaks got one seat in Nineveh, and Sabeans got one in Baghdad, as proposed.

Sunni Arabs are vying for power in the Nineveh region against Kurds, and they generally opposed the quota system on grounds that the minority groups could side with Kurds and bolster Kurdish goals to expand their influence and incorporate Mosul in their semiautonomous Kurdistan region.

In a sign that he wants to limit Kurdish aspirations, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spoke yesterday of the need for a "strong federal state" when the national constitution is revamped. A committee has been working for months on a number of amendments to the document, which Maliki said was drafted in haste in 2005.

In a televised speech, Maliki said the amended document, set to be completed by the end of the year, should put security in the central government's hands.

Also yesterday, police in western Anbar Province said a car bomb killed at least eight people and wounded seven at a checkpoint west of the city of Ramadi. A police official in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, said three of the dead were police manning the checkpoint and the rest were civilians. Seven other civilians were injured.

Three other people died in roadside bomb attacks in Baghdad and in Madian, south of the capital.