Shi'ite opposition to boycott Iraq meeting

11.45am

TEHRAN - Iraq's main Shi'ite Muslim opposition group said on Monday it would boycott a US-sponsored meeting of Iraqi organisations in Iraq to map out the postwar political future of the country.

The Iranian-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which draws its support from Iraq's Shi'ite majority, said Tuesday's meeting in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya would not benefit the Iraqi people.

"We are not going to attend the Nassiriya meeting because it is not to the benefit of the Iraqi nation," Abdelaziz Hakim, a SCIRI leader, told a news conference.

"From the beginning, independence has been our manifesto. We don't accept a US umbrella or anybody else's," he said.

The Nassiriya meeting will be overseen by retired US General Jay Garner, head of a transitional administration charged with running Iraq immediately after the US-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein.

About 60 Iraqis are expected to attend Tuesday's talks, among them radical and mainstream Shi'ite and Sunni groups, Kurds and the former monarchy, overthrown in 1958. Shi'ites make up about 60 per cent of Iraq's 26 million people.

Hakim reiterated his group's view that Garner's administration, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, "is not the correct method" to run Iraq in the aftermath of the war.

Hakim said SCIRI had told US authorities of its intention not to participate in the Nassiriya meeting, but he said other opposition groups would send representatives.

However, SCIRI spokesman Mohsen Hakim, told Reuters later that, as far as he knew, most other groups would not take part or were just planning to send low-level representation.

He said the meeting should pick up from where one held in London in December left off, when some 330 delegates representing six Iraqi opposition groups agreed a political blueprint for the country's future.

"We have to have some clear and specific structure to go by," he said. "It is not correct to start from scratch. We have to continue the same process started in London and that has to be the basis," he said.

Asked at the news conference whether SCIRI risked being isolated at the start of efforts to rebuild Iraq, Abdelaziz Hakim said: "We want to participate in an Iraqi government, but based on the people's votes."

That position is similar to Shi'ite Iran's, which has offered political and financial backing to SCIRI and to its top religious leader, Ayatollah Mohammad Bakir Hakim, for years,

In recent days, Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has urged Iraqi opposition groups to shun Garner's administration and told US and British troops to quit Iraq now their main aim of overthrowing Saddam had been achieved.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq war