Annan says UN election team to head to Iraq in days

4.30pm


BRUSSELS/BAGHDAD - A team of UN experts should arrive in Iraq within days to assess the feasibility of holding early elections in the U.S.-occupied country, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Friday.

The decision follows demands by Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric that US authorities hold direct elections ahead of a July 1 deadline to hand sovereignty back to Iraqis, rather than choose a government via a more complex system of committees.

Annan, speaking during a visit to Brussels, said he had received assurances from US forces in Iraq that the election team would be protected. The United Nations pulled out last October after deadly attacks on its staff.

"The coalition has promised to do (the) maximum to protect the team...so I think in the coming days, the team will travel and start working," he told reporters.

Annan sent security experts to Iraq earlier this month to examine if it would be safe for international staff to return following attacks on the UN headquarters in Baghdad. A truck bombing in August killed 22 staff and visitors, including mission chief Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Underlining the dangers in Iraq, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said two rocket-propelled grenades were fired on the Dutch embassy in Baghdad on Friday, but no one was hurt. After dark, a roadside bomb exploded at an intersection in the center of the capital, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

The UN electoral team is expected to spend several weeks traveling around the country looking at whether it would be possible to hold a nationwide poll within five months, addressing an issue that has become one of Iraq's most heated.

The United States has argued it is not practical to hold elections before the handover deadline with no electoral rolls and poor security.


CIVIL CONFLICT

Some officials have even said they fear civil conflict if a process of direct elections is pushed through too rapidly.

Instead, US authorities want to set up regional committees to pick a transitional assembly that would in turn select a transitional government to take power from July 1. A constitution would then be written and elections held in 2005.

Those plans are opposed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's foremost spiritual leader, whose words are listened to closely by the Shi'ite community, three fifths of Iraq's 26 million people.

However, some Iraqis who have held meetings with Sistani, who is seldom seen in public and speaks via intermediaries, say he has indicated that if the UN team determines elections are impossible before June 30, he will accept its conclusion.

Ross Mountain, named by Annan this month as his acting special representative for Iraq, said he foresaw problems for any UN monitoring of early polls.

"The practicality of the United Nations fielding staff in 18 provinces to monitor elections strikes me, without having the experts there, as looking pretty impossible," Mountain told Reuters in Amman, adding that the UN team would have the final word.

Mountain said the United Nations wanted to play a larger role, if security permitted, after a US handover of sovereignty to Iraqis. In Washington, NATO's new chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the alliance would also be prepared to play a greater role in Iraq if asked to do so by an Iraqi government.


SECURITY THREATS

While Annan may have received security assurances from US forces, the situation on the ground in Iraq remains dangerous.

More than 550 coalition troops and an estimated several thousand Iraqis have been killed since the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein was launched in March.

Insurgents carry out almost daily strikes against US and allied troops, Iraqi security forces and foreign contractors employed to help with reconstruction. Diplomats, journalists and aid workers have also been targeted.

This week, a suicide bomber detonated his car outside a hotel in an upmarket district of central Baghdad, killing a South African contractor and at least two Iraqis. A producer and a driver working for CNN were killed in a guerrilla ambush.

In the past two days, a series of attacks countrywide on the Iraqi police and the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC), who insurgents see as collaborating with the US-led occupation, killed one ICDC officer and wounded at least 12 others.

- REUTERS


Herald Feature: Iraq