Council Moves to Further ‘De-Baathify’ Iraq

A leading member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, made a bid Tuesday to assert the council’s independence from the American-led coalition, with his spokesman announcing a new and tougher policy for ridding the Iraqi government of former Baath Party members.

Chalabi, a longtime exile flown into Iraq by the U.S. military in April, appeared to be trying to distance himself from his patrons and raise his profile with Iraqis as the jockeying for power in the country begins in earnest.

U.S. officials hope elections for a permanent government can be held within a year. Several of the higher-profile members of the temporary governing body, including Chalabi, are expected to run for office.

Chalabi is the current president of the council, a position that rotates every month among the body’s 25 members.

The interim government, whose members were appointed in July after weeks of discussion with the U.S.-led coalition, is also preparing to play a role in the United Nations debate over a new resolution for the reconstruction of Iraq, set to start next week. The council will send four people to the meeting, including Chalabi and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

At a Baghdad news conference, Chalabi spokesman Entifahd Qanbar announced two council directives to prevent the government from including any former members of ex-President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party -- moves that he said go beyond those previously announced by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Chalabi has scheduled his own news conference today in Baghdad.

Under the first directive, which the council formally issued Sunday, any higher-level party members still in their jobs must quit immediately -- a provision similar to the order issued in May by L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator of the authority, which is estimated to have affected tens of thousands of Iraqis.

However, in this case, the several dozen exceptions to the rule approved by Bremer -- well under 50 earlier this summer -- would be nullified, Qanbar said.

The second Governing Council directive bans Iraqis from leadership positions in the new government if they ever worked as a director-general or higher in a state-owned company, as a town director, or as an advisor in Hussein’s regime.

The new rules would “have more depth and [affect] more people” than Bremer’s order, Qanbar said. He noted that criminals as well as cronies of Hussein would also be barred from office. Anyone who loses his job could appeal to a recently created Iraqi council committee on “de-Baathification.”

The coalition authority seemed unaware of the council’s plan to toughen Bremer’s order Tuesday, but Bremer has said from the time he first issued it that the Iraqis would ultimately decide how to implement it.

“We have said all along that de-Baathification should be the province of the Iraqis. They are the most qualified to make decisions about it,” said a senior advisor to Bremer, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In discussing the reason Iraq is sending its own delegation to the United Nations, Qanbar said, “It’s a demonstration of sovereignty, that there is an Iraqi government coming.”

He went on to praise the positions of France, Germany and Russia. France, in particular, is pushing to allow Iraq to form an independent government early next year -- far more rapidly than the United States believes is possible.

“There are many countries who share some positive stance, positive ideas, such as France, Germany, Russia, they’re all leaning toward the sovereignty of Iraq,” Qanbar said.

Chalabi, he said, would meet with President Bush when he visits the United States in coming weeks.

The leaders of Britain, Germany and France will hold an informal meeting Saturday in Berlin to discuss Iraq and other foreign policy issues, officials said Tuesday.

The mini-summit will bring together British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Bush administration’s strongest partner on Iraq, and two of the leading critics of the war: French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Like the Bush administration, Blair hopes to convince the French and Germans to approve a proposed U.N. resolution to increase international participation in Iraq’s reconstruction while leaving military and civilian power in U.S. hands. But the French, in particular, insist that the U.S. must speedily hand power over to Iraqi civilians and give the U.N. a greater role in Iraq.

Not all Iraqi Governing Council members agree with a swift timetable. In an interview with The Times, Zebari said Tuesday that the country was far from ready to hold elections early next year and that the general timetable that had been outlined by Bremer was the one the council was likely to try to follow. Under that framework, there would be elections sometime in the next 12 to 15 months, Zebari said.

When Qanbar was asked whether there were differences emerging between the council and the occupation authority that appointed it, he said there were no differences, but then appeared to aim a volley at British coalition staffers as neocolonialists. Britain is the other country playing a significant role in the Coalition Provisional Authority.

“I’m afraid that there are some people within the CPA that are not able to resist the temptation of being colonialists,” Qanbar said.

“Americans cannot be colonial. They don’t want to be colonial and they cannot even pretend to be colonial,” he said.

The Iraqi ministers will begin to establish Iraq’s new face at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, this week.

Among the council’s recent activities, it is the tougher de-Baathification policy that is likely to gain the most attention.

Longtime exile Chalabi has been the godfather of the policy, pushing hard to ensure that the new government does not contain Baathists.

Qanbar said the council also met Monday in Najaf, where a revered Shiite Muslim cleric was recently killed by a car bomb believed by some to have been set by Baath Party loyalists. The meeting seemed calculated to court the crucial Shiite majority. Shiites, who were discriminated against by Hussein, are strongly supportive of de-Baathification but have yet to embrace Chalabi, who is a Shiite but lived abroad for decades and is viewed by some as an outsider.

Many Iraqis who were not members of the Baath Party, or joined it to keep their jobs but never tried to advance in it, have welcomed the policy, seeing it as the first chance in years to return to a level playing field where skills rather than political connections would count.

Others say the policy unfairly penalizes some who stayed in the party to advance in managerial or technical jobs. Banning them without exception would deprive Iraq of sophisticated technocrats, they say. Furthermore, forcing out well-paid workers who had a secure place in society may boost resistance.

U.S. forces were holding six people who claimed to be Americans and two who said they were British in the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles outside Baghdad, a U.S. brigadier general said, according to an Associated Press report Tuesday.

A senior coalition official denied that there were any Americans in the prison.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference Tuesday that he had no information on the nationalities of the detainees.

“The truth is that the folks that we’ve scooped up have, on a number of occasions, multiple identifications from different countries,” Rumsfeld said.

The number of prisoners totals about 10,000, of whom about 4,400 are categorized as security detainees, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski told Associated Press.

Two mortar rounds were fired in the vicinity of a U.S. position in a former dormitory on Canal Street in the same neighborhood as the U.N.’s destroyed headquarters in Baghdad. The mortar missed its mark, but two people were injured, witnesses said.

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Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in Paris and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.

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New directives

A spokesman for Ahmad Chalabi announced two new directives by the Iraqi Governing Council to prevent the government from including members of former President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

Under the first directive, which the council formally issued Sunday, higher-level party members must quit their jobs immediately.

The second directive bans anyone from leadership positions in the new Iraqi government if they worked as a director-general or higher in a state-owned company, as a town director or as an advisor under Hussein’s government.