Iraqi leaders meets Bremer about polls
AFP, Baghdad
Iraq's US-installed interim leadership met Paul Bremer yesterday for its first talks with the US overseer since the Shiite Muslim religious hierarchy rammed a huge hole through the coalition's plans for an accelerated transfer of power with a demand for prior elections. The talks opened at 10:00 am (0700 GMT) with just one or two absentees among the council's 25 members, a spokesman said. The Governing Council is deeply divided over Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's rejection of the coalition's blueprint for the handover of sovereignty by June next year. Representatives of the powerful Shiite religious parties support the demand from the majority community's top cleric for an elected caretaker administration, in line with the coalition's wartime promises of post-Saddam Hussein democracy. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, took over the rotating chairmanship of the interim council on Monday. But other members of the council, including Sunnis and secular Shiites, reject the ayatollah's insistence that immediate polls based on Iraq's longstanding ration card system would be a closer approximation of democracy than the arcane system of indirect selection by caucuses being proposed by the coalition.
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