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'No deadline over Iraq constitution'
Jordan Times, Sunday, September 28, 2003
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Washington's newly announced six-month time frame for the Iraqi government to write a new constitution is not a deadline, with the clock only beginning to run once Iraqis have convened a constitutional conference, the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, said. "We don't know how long it will take for them to write the constitution. Six months seems to me a reasonable guess as to how long it will take, but there are no deadlines involved here," Bremer told reporters in Washington late Friday.
Bremer's comments appeared to back away from remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell, published in The New York Times Friday, proposing a six-month target for the Iraqi constitution in an apparent nod to countries insisting that the United States restore Iraqi self-government as soon as possible.
"I think if you read carefully what the secretary was talking about, he was talking about the period after the ... constitutional conference convention is assembled," Bremer said.
"There is another unknown period which precedes that, which is when do we see the constitutional conference convened?" he added.
A committee appointed to study how to convene a such a conference is to report to the Iraqi Governing Council on Sept. 30, he said.
"And the question, then, is how long does the Governing Council consider those recommendations, how complicated are they, what kind of consultations do they have to do and how long does it take them then to convene a constitutional conference? These are unknowns," Bremer said.
The United States has insisted that it will hand over control to Iraqis after a constitution is written and elections are held, although other nations, notably France, have insisted it be done much sooner.
"We will work, as the president has said, there, until the job is done," Bremer said.
"My job is to work myself out of a job. I now exercise sovereignty in Iraq, and I would like to pass that on to a sovereign Iraqi government as soon as it can reasonably be done. If it takes them longer than six months to write a constitution, then I'll be there longer than that."
Bremer said the United States would not object if the new Iraqi constitution makes Iraq an Islamic state, as long as it also enshrines religious freedom.
Past Iraqi constitutions have stated that Islam is the religion of the majority of Iraqis, he pointed out.
"If the Iraqis were to say Islam is the official religion of the state, we could not very well object to that, provided it also went on to say, as the 1925 Iraqi constitution did, that people have freedom of worship," Bremer said.
Although the constitution will be written by Iraqis, Iraq's US occupiers will be "insistent" in expressing views on certain issues, Bremer went on.
"There are certain issues on which we feel quite strongly. ... And we will be quite insistent that individual rights must be respected and must be established in the constitution.
"I'm not particularly worried about that. The Governing Council, in its political statement it issued after it took office, said it planned to respect individual rights, including women's rights and children's rights," he said.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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