No-show Iraqi MPs force parliament to stand still
Email Print Normal font Large font Damien Cave, Baghdad
January 26, 2007
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AdvertisementMAHMOUD al-Mashhadani, the Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, read a rollcall of the 275 elected members with the intention of shaming the no-shows.
Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister? Absent, living in Amman and London. Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian statesman? Also gone, in Abu Dhabi.
Others who failed to appear on Monday included Saleh Mutlaq, a senior Sunni legislator; several Shiites and Kurds; and Ayad al-Samaraei, chairman of the Finance Committee, whose absence led Dr Mashhadani to ask: "When will he be back? After we approve the budget?"
It was a joke barbed with outrage. Iraq's Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill.
Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $A154,000.
Part of the problem is security, but Iraqi officials said they also feared that members were losing confidence in the institution and in the country's fragile democracy. As chaos has deepened, the Parliament's relevance has gradually receded.
Deals on important legislation, most recently the oil law, now take place largely out of public view, with the Parliament — when it meets — rubber-stamping decisions. As a result, officials said, vital legislation involving the budget, provincial elections and amendments to the constitution remained trapped in a legislative process that processed almost nothing.
US officials long hoped that the Parliament could help foster talks between Iraq's increasingly fractured ethnic and religious groups, but that has not happened either.
Goaded by US leaders, frustrated and desperate to prove that Iraq can govern itself, senior Iraqi officials have clearly had enough. Dr Mashhadani said the Parliament would soon start fining members $A500 for every missed session and replace the absentees if they failed to attend more than a quarter of the time.
Some of Iraq's more seasoned leaders say attendance has been undermined by a widening sense of disillusionment about the Parliament's ability to improve Iraqis' daily life. The country's dominant issue, security, is controlled almost exclusively by the US military and the office of the Prime Minister.
Every bombing such as Monday's, which killed 88 people at a central market, suggests to some that the Parliament's laws are irrelevant in the face of sprawling chaos and the Government's inability to stop it.
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