Monday, August 22, 2005

Iraq's constitution: the second last chance...

The latest news coming from the National Assembly and the constitution drafting committee indicate that no agreement has been reached so far and probably the different blocks are now farther from reaching an agreement than they were a week ago.
The difference now is that they already asked for an extra week chance to get over their differences but they obviously failed in doing that and asking for further time will be unjustified and even if it's legal it won't be accepted by the people.

However there are some worrisome signs that surfaced this morning and were uncovered by members from the Sheat block; they're threatening that if they don't solve the differences with other blocks, mainly the Kurdish alliance they (the Sheat block) will submit their draft to the National Assembly for approval, ignoring the other components of the Assembly and I don't want to think of the consequences of such a move.

The major remaining obstacle right now is the issue of distributing the natural resources between the central government and the provinces/federal states; ironically this particular issue was said to have been solved at least three times before and we heard in the past few weeks that a deal was reached more than once and now they come and say that they still have differences regarding this issue!

I believe the national Assembly failed in accomplishing their mission because the people who shouldered the responsibility of writing the constitution have been giving partisan interests the priority instead of the nation's interests and since partisan interests are naturally in conflict with each other, I think that reaching a dead-end is inevitable.

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