Iraq’s new Parliament has chosen former Kurdish rebel fighter Jalal Talabani as the country’s first freely elected President in history.
Shi’ite Islamist Adel Abdel Mahdi and outgoing Sunni president Ghazi al-Yawar were named as his two deputies.
The trio, who ran unopposed after weeks of bartering among the country’s Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis, was elected by 228 members of the 275-seat Parliament. Twenty-nine MPs cast absentee ballots, while 18 MPs did not attend.
The three names, picked nine weeks after national elections, broke the logjam that has prevented the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis from agreeing on a Cabinet line-up.
Iraqi MPs predicted that a government should now be in place by next week.
On Tuesday, the interim vice-president, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, said ousted dictator Saddam Hussein would be able to see the parliamentary session from his jail cell.
”This is a very important session because this is the first time in Iraq’s history that the president and his deputies are elected in a legitimate and democratic way by the Iraqi people,” he told The Associated Press. ”That’s why the Iraqi government thought it would be beneficial that the former dictator to see this unique process.”
On paper, the Iraqi presidency is a largely ceremonial post; executive power rests mainly with the prime minister. Yet the presence in Baghdad of Talabani, the 72-year-old leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and one of Iraq’s most powerful men, will prove influential.
The first task of his three-member presidency council will be to agree on the choice of prime minister. The favourite is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the candidate of the Shia-led alliance, which came first in January’s elections and with whom the Kurdish bloc, led by Talabani, plans to enter a coalition.
According to the interim law, Al-Jaafari will have two weeks to form a government that must be approved by a two-thirds vote in Parliament. If he cannot, the choice of another prime minister falls to the National Assembly, which must ratify the decision, again by a two-thirds majority.
Even if an administration can be named, the future of a Shia-Kurdish alliance looks shaky, critics say.
The Kurds are decidedly secular and are seeking to distance their region from the central government. The Shia-led alliance is backed by the religious establishment in Najaf and is dominated by Islamists, many of whom are natural centralisers.
”There is little common ground other than a shared past of resistance against Saddam Hussein,” said one Western observer in Baghdad. ”There does not seem to be any clarity about the future.”
Although Iraqi and United States officials report that the number of insurgent attacks has decreased since the elections, recent weeks have seen a number of battles between the countries’ troops and unusually large groups of militants.
On Tuesday, news emerged of a big firefight on Monday when Iraqi forces took on dozens of insurgents in eastern Diyala province. US forces sent in 100 troops with Bradley fighting vehicles backed by air support to help the Iraqi forces. The fighting killed two American soldiers and one Iraqi before the militants dispersed.
Elsewhere, a US soldier was killed and four wounded by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, while bombs killed four civilians in Salman Pak, south-east of the capital, and two police officers in the southern city of Basra. Insurgents also kidnapped a senior Iraqi military officer, Brigadier General Jalal Muhammad Saleh, in Baghdad. — Guardian Unlimited Â