Iraqi leaders meet for national reconciliation
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2005-11-20 10:18

About 100 representatives of various Iraqi religious and ethnical groups started a three-day meeting in Cairo on Saturday in hope of moving toward reconciliation among the conflicting factions in the war-torn country.

The gathering, held under the auspices of the Arab League (AL), also brought together delegates from other Arab countries, Turkey, Iran, the United Nations, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and a number of regional and international organizations.

The high-profile meeting was designed to set the stage for a more comprehensive conference on Iraqi national reconciliation, probably to be held early next year in Iraq.

Addressing the opening session of the meeting, AL Secretary General Amr Moussa expressed hope that the meeting would usher in a national reconciliation process among the various religious, political and ethnic groups in Iraq.

"Today is a historic day for Iraq as all Iraqi factions are represented at a meeting that will pave the way for an all-out reconciliation conference with a view to attaining Iraq's unity," Moussa said.

The AL, which opposed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and had done little to assert its role in the war-torn country, has recently stepped up its diplomatic efforts in Iraq.

Moussa won support from various Iraqi groups for his proposal to hold a preparatory meeting on an Iraqi national reconciliation conference during his visit to Iraq in October.

However, the pan-Arab organization has played down the tune for a major breakthrough during the preliminary talks.

"It must be made clear that the meeting which kicked off on Saturday is not the national accord conference," Hesham Youssef, Moussa's chief of staff, was quoted as saying by the official Al Ahram English Weekly.

"This is a preparatory meeting to which the Arab League has invited key political forces to send representatives in order to agree on an agenda, venue and time for the national accord conference," he said, adding that a pact of national accord would be out of the question at the end of the meeting.

More than two years after the US-led war on Iraq which ousted former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the country is witnessing relentless sectarian violence.

Disaffected Sunni Iraqis, a minority group which once dominated Iraq under Saddam's rule, have launched an insurgent campaign against the US-backed Iraqi government dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

The differences among the Iraqis were highlighted at the Cairo meeting.

Shiites and their non-Arab Kurdish allies condemned insurgency while Sunnis asserted that resistance against foreign occupation was legitimate.

Shiite and Kurdish delegates temporarily walked out of the meeting in protest of a speech made by a Sunni representative who accused the Iraqi government officials of being "stooges" of the United States.

The meeting resumed only after the Sunni delegate apologized.

Shiite and Kurdish leaders also cast doubts over the role the AL can actually play in their country, suspecting the league, of which most member states are Sunni-dominated Arab countries, might be biased against them.

"We do have such worries," Muslih Sharkei, an advisor to the Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, told Xinhua on the sidelines of the meeting.

The AL hoped that the meeting could help bring the Sunni Arabs back into the Iraqi political mainstream as the community was largely marginalized by the last legislative elections in January, when most Sunnis boycotted or were scared away from voting centers by insurgent threats.

Iraq is scheduled to hold general elections on Dec. 15 and the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government as well as the United States is keen to bolster Sunni participation in a bid to restore stability in the violence-plagued country.