Iraqi Charter Panel

NYT reported Iraqi political leaders broke weeks of deadlock today, as Sunni Arabs accepted a compromise made by senior members of a Shiite-led parliamentary committee to include Sunnis in the drafting of Iraq's new constitution. The agreement marked a turnaround in Iraqi politics and opened a way for the Iraqi National Assembly to meet its Aug. 15 deadline for drafting the document.

This is very good news. Democracy is something new to the Middle East, but I think they are going to like it.

Legislators had been haggling with Sunni Arabs for weeks over the number of seats the Sunnis would be given on the 55-member Constitutional Committee. The compromise offer to Sunnis - 15 additional seats and 10 adviser positions - was made last week, but at the time it was rejected by many Sunnis, who said they wanted more seats with full voting powers.

Then they should have participated in the Elections rather than boycotting them.

Since then, Shiite committee members offered a sweetener, saying the committee would approve the new constitution by consensus and not by vote, making the precise number of seats less important. The offer was final, said a senior member of the Shiite-led committee, Bahaa al-Aaraji. "We told them, if you are late it's not good for you, because we start to work and we won't wait for you," he said in a telephone interview this evening.

Smart move

So on Tuesday night, a team of Sunni Arab negotiators met in one negotiator's house to discuss the offer. They decided, some with reservation, that it was one they must accept. Turning it down, they said, would mean permanent isolation from the political process. Today, they made their agreement public. "We've been squeezed, we had to agree," said Saleh Mutlak, a member of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni Arab group that has pressed for a greater Sunni role in politics. "There was no other alternative. Either we'd be in the political process or we'd be out of it." In many ways, today's agreement marked a new political beginning for Sunni Arabs, who make up about a fifth of this country's population.

If they are 1/5, then the most they should have expected is 1/5 or 55, or 11 positions, so 15 plus 10 advisor seats means they got more than their percentage of the population would have entitled them.

The Sunni Arabs had grown increasingly isolated in recent months since a majority of them refused to vote in national elections in January. Shiites, who account for about 60 percent of all Iraqis, swept to power in those elections and Sunni Arabs, the former ruling class, have chafed under that new rule. That tension was most stark in discussions on the makeup of the constitutional committee, with Sunni Arabs contending that they represented more than a fifth of the population and that they should be given more seats than Shiites were willing to offer. The argument threatened to further disrupt the political process, as Iraqi political leaders face tight deadlines for writing the constitution by Aug. 15, holding a nationwide referendum to approve it by October and staging new elections in December.

Gregory Djerejian blogged Some good Iraq news today with a deal struck so that the Sunni are on board (at least for now) on the Iraqi constitution-drafting exercise. This will be a hugely complex endeavour, and we're just at the very beginning of it, but let's at least be thankful that total stalemate (again, at least for now) has been averted.