Garner hosts second meeting on Iraq's future

Iraqi delegates in business suits and clerics’ robes gathered today in Baghdad behind a wall of US tanks to work on forming a government to replace Saddam Hussein.

One prominent exile said many delegates were discussing the idea of a “presidential council”, rather than naming a single leader.

The “all-faction” conference, the second in a series expected to extend well into next month, was presided over by the retired American general in charge of civil administration in Iraq, Jay Garner.

A top deputy to Garner, Barbara Bodine, said the Baghdad conference would begin to produce an “emerging leadership” for Iraq.

But the process remained murky. A list of participants – invited by US officials – was not immediately available. No agenda or timetable was published and no homegrown Iraqi news media exist to report developments.

Prominent exile Saad al-Bazzaz, a former Iraqi publisher, said he expected the conference to produce a “a sort of government, a sort of authority”.

“I am not expecting one person as president. I am expecting a presidential council” of three to six members, al-Bazzaz said. “We have been discussing this, many of us.”

Such a structure could accommodate, at least temporarily, the ethnic and religious divisions in Iraqi society.

Between 300 and 400 delegates from political organisations that opposed Saddam and from other Iraqi interest groups were expected at the meeting, Bodine said.

It was not immediately known if a key Shiite Muslim faction – the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq – was present for this second round of talks. The Iran-based group shunned a first session on April 15 in the southern city of Ur, but had indicated it was ready to participate now.

Fewer than 100 Iraqis, many of them exiles, took part in the earlier meeting, as some Shiites and others stayed away in protest at the potential US influence over the selection of a new Iraqi president.

In a sign of the disorganisation and communications problems that have plagued the US occupation in its first days, dozens of delegates drove in circles around traffic-jammed central Baghdad, repeatedly blocked by US army checkpoints from entering the conference site, a grand convention hall built by Saddam more than 20 years ago, but rarely used.

Also, the US military arrested Mohammed Mohsen al-Zubaidi, the self-proclaimed mayor of the capital, for “for exercising authority which was not his”.

Al-Zubaidi’s arrest yesterday showed that the US was determined to begin the political rebuilding process in Iraq with a clean slate. And it was a signal that Washington would allow no interference ahead of today’s high profile political meeting.

Al-Zubaidi is a returned exile associated with the opposition Iraqi National Congress. He declared himself mayor of Baghdad without sanction from American occupation forces, and the US Central Command accused him of “subversion”.