Critic of Maliki Is Chosen to Lead Iraq’s Parliament

Critic of Maliki Is Chosen to Lead Iraq’s Parliament
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/middleeast/20iraq.html?th&emc=th


BAGHDAD — Iraq’s Parliament chose a new speaker on Sunday after months of political infighting that stalled several major pieces of legislation.

Ayad al-Sammaraie was elected speaker of Parliament.

The election of the speaker, Ayad al-Sammaraie, a Sunni Arab lawmaker who has until now headed Parliament’s Finance Committee, is expected to break a legislative gridlock, but could also lead to new confrontations with the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The new speaker has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Maliki, whose party members cast blank ballots rather than vote for Mr. Sammaraie or a challenger. After the vote, however, Mr. Sammaraie pledged to cooperate with Mr. Maliki’s government.

“Parliament should be complementary to the executive system, not hold it up,” he said. “I will work with everyone, even the members who didn’t vote for me.”

The position of speaker, which under Iraq’s system of government is reserved for a Sunni Arab, has been vacant since the resignation of Mahmoud al-Mashhadani in late December.

Mr. Mashhadani had become a polarizing figure after frequent clashes with other legislators. After he resigned, he said he had been forced to do so as part of a plot by rival political groups, including the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is Mr. Sammaraie’s party.

Mr. Sammaraie, 63, was among the leading candidates for speaker for months, but in February he fell two votes short of the 138 required in the 275-member body, reflecting the sharp political and sectarian divisions that still consume Iraq.

On Sunday, he received 153 votes, compared with 36 for the runner-up, Mustafa al-Hiti. Eighty-six members, among them some from Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party, either did not vote or cast blank ballots.

Even as Parliament was voting, Mr. Maliki appeared before hundreds of uniformed commanders at the Interior Ministry and warned that factions within Iraq threatened national unity. As he has in recent days, he suggested that opponents — whom he did not identify — were seeking to undermine his government.

“Today we face a new war of subversion, sedition and suspicion,” he said. “We have to warn ourselves, myself and all you, of the sedition that was defeated in the battle and is being provoked in a certain problem here and another problem there.”

A spokesman for Mr. Maliki did not respond to a call seeking his reaction to Mr. Sammaraie’s election as speaker, but a lawmaker who is a member of Dawa pledged to cooperate with him.

“We will respect the choice of the members of Parliament and we will work and cooperate with the new speaker,” said the lawmaker, Kamal al-Sa’adi. “Even if members vote for someone we didn’t select, it won’t change our strategy in Parliament.”

During the four-month impasse over the speaker’s position, Parliament failed to reach agreements on important legislation, including proposals to regulate Iraq’s oil industry, the source of 90 percent of its revenue, and to offer compensation for widows and orphans.

Mr. Sammaraie, an engineer by training, fled Iraq in the 1980s during Saddam Hussein’s rule, but returned after the American invasion in 2003.

Violence continued sporadically across Iraq on Sunday, but the most brazen killings came in a series of robberies in the Tobchi neighborhood of Baghdad; they appeared to be the work of one group of gunmen. The men, using pistols with silencers, broke into several jewelry stores in the neighborhood, killing seven people and ransacking the shops.

Steven Lee Myers and Suadad al-Salhy contributed reporting.