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Iraq Sunnis Urge Charter Block, Mull Civil Disobedience
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The participants did not rule out civil disobedience to protest attacks against Sunni towns. (Reuters).
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CAIRO,
September 25, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Up to 200 Iraqi Sunni
politicians and scholars have pressed for voting down the draft
constitution in the October referendum and threatened to declare civil
disobedience if the US-led onslaughts on Sunni towns continue.
Wrapping
up a two-day meeting in the Jordanian capital Amman on Saturday,
September 24, Sunni leaders from Al-Anbar province sought the formation
of a committee to collect five million signatures to block the charter,
the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat reported
Sunday, September 25.
"We
are mobilizing Sunnis to vote down the draft if our demands were
ignored," by the Shiite and Kurdish blocs, Ali Al-Sadoun, a Sunni
politician and member of the Iraqi Council for National Dialogue (CND),
told the mass-circulation daily.
The
final draft of the new constitution has been handed over to the UN for
printing and distribution after being endorsed by the Shiites and Kurds,
who hold a sweeping majority in the parliament.
Sunnis
are basically opposed to the inclusion of federalism in the new charter
because they believe it will divide Iraq and exclude them from sharing
in oil wealth, as reserves are concentrated mainly in the Kurdish north
and Shiite south.
"I
firmly believe that the draft will be blocked in the referendum and we
are working for this," Sadoun said.
Sunnis
are a majority in Al-Anbar, Nineveh and Salahudin provinces and Iraq's
interim law stipulates that the text fails if two-thirds of any three
provinces vote against it during the referendum, scheduled for October
15.
Civil
Disobedience
The
Sunni leaders did not rule out declaring civil disobedience if the
US-Iraqi troops launched more "sectarian" attacks on Sunni
towns.
"If
our patience ran out, we would declare civil disobedience to protest
these massacres," said Saleh Al-Mutlaq, the CND spokesman.
"Sunnis
are the target of a genocide," he charged.
The
gathering demanded the government compensate the people of targeted
towns like Fallujah and Tal Afar for the damage they incurred in the
all-out onslaughts.
The
conferees slammed the destruction of entire cities like Fallujah, Al-Qaim
and Al-Haditha under the pretext of rooting out foreign fighters.
The
Iraqi army announced Thursday, September 22, the end of the
"successful" Tal Afar offensive, which involved 6,000 Iraqi
soldiers, backed by 4,000 US troops.
It
said 157 "rebels" had been killed and 683 suspects captured
during the three-week offensive.
Mohammad
Rashid, the governor of Tal Afar, has resigned his post protesting the
"sectarian operation" against battered northern town.
Timetable
The
Sunni leaders blasted "awkward" US policies in Iraq and
demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of US-led occupation troops to
be replaced with qualified Iraqi troops.
"The
people of Al-Anbar, whether men, women, children or elderly, will turn
out in numbers to resist the occupiers," threatened Abdel Latif
Hamim, one of the meeting’s organizers.
The
US army’s chief of staff said on August 20 that the army plans to keep
the current number of soldiers in Iraq, estimated at some 140,000, for
at least four more years.
The
American people, however, are showing more discontent with President
George W. Bush’s handling of Iraq, with high-profile protests and
calls for an exit strategy.
Hundreds
of thousands of American demonstrators took to the streets in several
major cities on Saturday to protest the Iraq invasion and demand the
withdrawal of US troops.
US
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has said that the longer the US stayed
bogged down in Iraq, the more the conflict looked like another Vietnam
War.
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