From the Los Angeles Times

Secular Iraqi officials demand response from Maliki

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

10:59 AM PDT, August 7, 2007

BAGHDAD — Ministers with a secular political bloc boycotting the national government called on Prime Minister Nouri Maliki today to respond to a list of demands submitted earlier this year to remove what they labeled sectarian bias from his government.

The five present and former ministers with the Iraqi National List, part of the Iraqi National Accord bloc, or Iraqiya, announced their boycott Monday.

The bloc is led by former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite Muslim who has been accused of trying to undermine the Maliki government. Those boycotting include the ministers of communications, science and technology, human rights and state, along with the former justice minister.

Iyad Jamaluddin, a Shiite cleric and member of parliament who belongs to Iraqiya, announced at a news conference today in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone that the ministers would boycott Cabinet meetings and "not cooperate with the prime minister," but would continue to run the ministries and not withdraw from the Cabinet.

He said their decision was based on Maliki's unwillingness to consider a list of demands submitted by the bloc in a February memo. The demands include reconsidering the country's anti-terrorism law, removing militia elements from the security forces, pardoning former members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party regime who have not committed crimes against humanity and suspending laws that bar them from government, creating a plan for dealing with immigrants and preventing neighboring countries from intervening in national affairs.

Already, 17 out of 37 Cabinet members have left in protest, including six members of the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front, or Tawafiq, who withdrew last Wednesday.

But Jamaluddin said his party's demands were as different from Tawafiq's as "the sky and the earth," designed to strengthen the coalition government by making it less sectarian, not destroy it by pressuring Maliki for more power at a time of weakness.

"None of these points was for the benefit of the Iraqiya slate. They were for the correction of the political process and what we think is good for Iraq," Jamaluddin said.

Maliki's advisors have said he intends to replace the Sunni Tawafiq ministers soon, but it was unclear today how he planned to handle the other ministers' boycott. The prime minister is in Turkey, meeting with Prime Minister RecepTayyip Erdogan as part of a two-day trip that includes a stop Wednesday in Iran to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"This will not affect the government," he told the Associated Press in an interview aboard the plane en route to Ankara, the Turkish capital.

The U.S. military announced today that three American soldiers were killed when their convoy struck a roadside bomb south of the capital Saturday. The British military said a British soldier was shot and killed in the southern city of Basra on Monday night.

Police reported scattered violence across Iraq today. In east Baghdad, a mortar round struck the crowded Kamaliya market at 1:10 p.m., killing four people, including two women, police said.

The U.S. military said five people were killed and 10 injured Monday when a street-cleaning vehicle struck a roadside bomb at 7:30 a.m. in Baghdad's central Karada neighborhood.