Iraq’s main Sunni-backed bloc should help resolve the country’s political crisis within parliament rather than stage a boycott, the UN’s envoy to Baghdad told AFP on Sunday. His remarks came more than a month after a row broke out between the Shiite-led government and ex-premier Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc after authorities charged Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni and Iraqiya member, with running a death squad.
“The government should work, the parliament should work,” Martin Kobler said in an interview. “There is a separation of power in this country.” “I do not think that boycott is a good idea. People have to sit together and they have to fight their political differences in the parliament, on the basis of the constitution.”
He continued: “That is the place, parliament is the place where political disputes have to be solved.” Last month, Iraqiya began a boycott of parliament and cabinet to protest what it charged was Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s centralisation of power, and has since called for Maliki to respect a power-sharing deal or quit.
Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Hashemi while Maliki, a Shiite, has said his Sunni deputy Saleh al-Mutlak should be sacked after the latter said the premier was “worse than Saddam Hussein”. Hashemi, who denies the charges, has been holed up in the autonomous Kurdish region since the crisis flared and Kurdish officials have so far declined to hand him over to Baghdad. The flareup came just as US troops were completing their withdrawal.
