THE careful negotiations over the Iraqi constitution appeared last night to be leaning further towards making Islamic law the main source of law for the country rather than a source after US diplomats apparently gave way to the concerns of Iraqi officials.

We understand the Americans have sided with the Shi'ites. It's shocking. It doesn't fit American values. They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state. I can't believe that's what the Americans really want or what the American people want.

Sunni Arab negotiator Saleh al-Mutlak said a deal was struck which would mean parliament could pass no legislation that "contradicted Islamic principles".

Yesterday Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish negotiators, meeting with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani and US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, all said there was accord on a bigger role for Islamic law than Iraq had before.

One secular Kurdish politician said: "We understand the Americans have sided with the Shi'ites. It's shocking. It doesn't fit American values. They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state. I can't believe that's what the Americans really want or what the American people want."

He said Kurds opposed subjecting all legislation to a religious test. US diplomats, who have insisted that the constitution must enshrine ideals of equal rights and democracy, declined to comment on the progress of negotiations.

Al-Mutlaq added that negotiations had effectively stalled last night after "deep differences" emerged between the parties, who are frantically trying to reach an agreement on the constitution.

Al-Mutlaq said Shi'ites were demanding that the new charter explicitly states that the decrees of the Marjiyah - their religious leadership - were sacred, something both the Sunnis and Kurds oppose. "The Americans agreed, but on one condition: that the principles of democracy should be respected," Mutlak said.

He said Kurdish negotiators are demanding that provincial governments should have control over both "discovered and undiscovered resources", which would give their self-governing region a significant slice of Iraq's oil wealth.

US diplomats have long insisted the constitution must enshrine ideals of equal rights and democracy - the US still has some 140,000 troops in Iraq, and the White House has insisted that in the "new Iraq", Iraqis are free to govern themselves. President George Bush, however, has described the kind of clerical rule seen in Shi'ite Iran as "evil" and has made it clear that the US will not approve of such a construct for the constitution.

In a further sign of the growing unease over legal issues in Iraq, the UN representative to the country pleaded yesterday for the public executions of three men planned for next week to be cancelled.

A decree authorising the execution was signed last week by Iraqi vice-president Adel Abdel Mehdi after president Jalal Talabani refused on moral grounds. The death penalty has recently been reintroduced in Iraq, some say because of the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein.

Yesterday Ashraf Qazi, the UN envoy to Iraq, said he "deeply regretted" the reintroduction of the death penalty and asked that the three prisoners due to be hanged in the central city of Kut should be spared. "One should look at consolidating the right to life instead of imposing the death penalty, which has a very poor recognised effect in deterring crimes," he said in a statement. The three prisoners, a Kurd and two Sunni Arabs, would be the first prisoners to be executed since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The men are reported to be suspected members of the Al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Sunna, and were sentenced to death in May, a verdict that was later approved by the highest judicial authority in Iraq.

British officials said that they will continue to lobby for the abolition of the death penalty in Iraq.

Qazi pointed out in his statement, released by the New York office of the UN Mission for Iraq, that the Human Rights Commission in Geneva had "condemned the application of the death penalty" in April 2005.

Diplomats, clerics and officials working to finish the constitution are "frantic" to come up with a working framework or risk having to hold new elections in the coming weeks to resolve the legality of the new government.

The Iraqi parliament averted its own dissolution on Monday last week by giving constitution drafters a further seven days to resolve crucial differences over regional autonomy, the role of religion, the status of women and the division of oil revenues in Iraq.

US ambassador Khalilzad, who has previously said there will be "no compromise" on equal rights for women and minorities, helped draft a constitution in his native Afghanistan that declared it an "Islamic Republic" in which no law could contradict Islam. It also, however, contained language establishing equal rights for women and protecting religious minorities.

Ethnic tensions in the northern oil city of Kirkuk spilled on to the streets yesterday in protest at the constitution negotiations with hundreds demonstrating against federalism - code for Kurdish ambitions to annex Kirkuk. Gunmen damaged the office of a Kurdish political party for the second time in a month, wounding three guards.

In Baghdad, a US soldier was killed when his vehicle hit a road-side bomb, and four Iraqi soldiers were killed and three wounded when an insurgent hurled a hand-grenade at a passing Iraqi army patrol in Falluja, west of Baghdad, according to reports.

© Copyright 2005 Associated Press

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