Sunni Arabs Halt Work on Constitution After Killings

The Iraqi National Assembly’s rush to finish a new constitution by mid-August ran into more trouble Wednesday when the drafting committee’s Sunni Muslims halted their work after the assassination of a colleague.

The suspension of Sunni Arab participation came on top of continuing deep divisions among committee members over such key issues as the independence of the governorates, control of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk and the status of women.

The National Assembly is to approve a constitution by Aug. 15 and then hold a nationwide referendum on the document. If assembly leaders decide the deadline can’t be met, they are supposed to inform the legislature by Aug. 1.

Humam Hamoodi, chairman of the constitutional committee and a member of the predominantly Shiite United Iraqi Alliance bloc, minimized the significance of the Sunni suspension and promised that the committee would complete its work on time.

“The aim behind the assassination ... is to prevent the Sunni Arabs from participating in the political process, and to keep Iraq in a state of instability by trying to make the Iraqi constitution a failure,” he said.

Mijbil Issa, a Sunni Arab law professor, was gunned down in his car Tuesday. Also killed were a legal advisor to Sunnis on the constitution-writing committee and a friend of Issa.

In the wake of the killing, other Sunnis on the panel said they had serious security concerns and complained about the lack of guards and accommodations for them in the capital’s heavily guarded Green Zone. Many government offices are in that area, and many high-ranking Iraqi officials are allowed to live there, along with international diplomats and other dignitaries.

“I just came back from the funeral of the two martyrs, and without security I am easily a target for attacks,” said Suha Azzawi, a Sunni member of the constitutional committee.

Azzawi and other Sunni Arabs on the panel say they have found themselves in a difficult position, rejected by some fellow Sunnis who see their participation in the new government as a betrayal and largely ignored by the Shiite- and Kurd-dominated National Assembly.

“We were invited to participate in drafting the constitution; after that we were subjected to pressure from the government ... and we received threats from the terrorists’ side and also from Sunnis accusing us of joining hands with the occupiers,” he said.

Issa was among 15 Sunni Arabs who joined the constitutional committee last month in a government effort to woo the disgruntled minority into the political process. Though a minority in Iraq, Sunni Arabs dominated the nation’s politics for decades until the ouster of President Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials, as well as many in Iraq’s government, believe that involving Sunnis is crucial to building legitimacy for the nation’s new institutions and to defusing the insurgency. But the killings Tuesday exacerbated an already high state of anxiety among the small group of Sunni Arabs in the government.

“We started feeling that there is a current and if we don’t go along with them, then we are in danger,” said Salman Jumeili, another of the 14 remaining Sunni members on the constitutional committee.

He predicted that Sunni members would withdraw altogether from the drafting process -- not just for security reasons but because their ideas were not being heard.

“When you feel that the power is not with you and there are other groups controlling the situation and forcing their points of view upon you, then you feel that you must leave,” he said.

Meanwhile, pressure began to build on the committee to reverse several moves that would make fundamental changes in the legal rights of Iraqi women.

Under a draft version of the constitution, women’s rights would be reduced by taking responsibility for domestic matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance away from civil courts and handing them back to religious courts.

Iraq placed domestic matters under the purview of civil courts in 1959, and unlike a number of other Arab countries, its legal and educational systems have promoted the status of women. A substantial number of Iraqi women work as engineers, college professors and doctors, as well as government managers.

Another proposal for the new constitution would in eight years eliminate a provision in the Temporary Administrative Law -- under which the country is now governed -- that requires that at least 25% of National Assembly members be women. Currently, women hold 31% of the seats in the assembly.

Maysoon Damluji, a women’s activist and the deputy culture minister, said that a coalition of women’s groups was organizing a lobbying campaign against the proposed changes. She said a forum on women’s rights in the constitution would be held Saturday. “We’re going to try to lobby the men of the National Assembly to vote against this provision and to go for the civil law,” she said.

One of her worries is that because there are several schools of thought on family law within each religious sect, handing domestic matters back to religious courts could further fracture Iraqi society, creating different rules for different subgroups.

“This would divide the society into sects and smaller sects as well as reducing women’s rights. We had come a long way since 1959, when the law was first enacted,” she said.

In the National Assembly, the Kurdish faction has been the one most supportive of women’s rights, but it has been largely absent from this latest debate. “They are preoccupied with the federalism issue,” said Damluji, referring to the Kurds’ top priority of ensuring that the constitution maintain their existing status as a semi-independent state in the north.

The Shiite plurality in the assembly, which includes several influential clerics, is pushing hard for the move back to religious law.

Not all women in the assembly object to giving at least some deference to Islamic teachings.

“It is a fact that we are an Islamic country, and we have to borrow our laws and legislation from that,” said Aida Obeidi, an assembly member from the United Iraqi Alliance.

She added that there was no better model than Islam, “and it does not only serve Muslims in this country, but it also serves all sects and segments of the Iraqi community. Who are the seculars after all? Aren’t they the Muslims of this country?”

U.S. officials are beginning to send signals that Iraqis should refrain from rolling back women’s rights. Iraqis would make “a terrible mistake” in adopting any constitution that sharply curbs women’s rights, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday.

“[This] is a matter the Department of State and the White House are worrying through with the Iraqi people,” he said.

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Times staff writers Zainab Hussain, Shamil Aziz and Suhail Affan contributed to this report.