By Xinhua,
Baghdad : The Iraqi parliament approved on Tuesday a key election bill, despite a walk-out by lawmakers from the Kurdish coalition bloc, Iraqi official television reported.
The Iraqi state-run television said that the parliament passed the controversial bill in a closed-session.
A source from the parliament anonymously said that 127 lawmakers backed the bill out of 140 lawmakers attended the session of the 275-seat parliament. The session was ordered to be a closed one by Parliamentary Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani.
The provincial election law is strongly backed by Washington, as U.S. officials see the voting as another key step in the Iraqi national reconciliation.
The law would shift more political powers to regions. The SunniArabs boycotted the election in 2005, only to see the Shiites and Kurds took control locally, even in some Sunni-populated regions.
A major Shiite political power led by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr also stayed away from those elections.
The newly proposed elections are widely expected to ease sectarian and factional resentment by redistributing power at the local level.
Yet, the dispute among Iraq’s Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen about the control of the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk has been the major stumbling block to the passage of the legislation, which should have been completed by June.
The Kurds, who are eager to merge the city into the neighboring Kurdish autonomous region, demanded a delay for the elections in Kirkuk, while the Arabs and Turkmen asked an equal division of the power.
Khalid al-Attiya and Aref Taiyfour, the first and second deputies of Mashhadani respectively, rejected Tuesday vote on the law which they said would lead to a political impasse.
The move of secret vote led to the withdrawal of the Kurds, which “would only lead to a political deadlock,” Attiya said.
The Kurds said passing the bill in manner of secrete vote was an illegal act.
The Kurds’ rejection to the election law would make the voting hard to be held as scheduled.
According to Iraq’s constitution, the draft law should be delivered to the president council, including President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, for an unanimous approval.
Earlier, a source from the Iraqi electoral commission in charge of elections in the country said that the commission would propose a delay in the provincial balloting scheduled to be held in October this year.
At the press conference, Attiya gave a still somber perspective, saying he does not “see any chance that the elections would be held this year.”
On the back of a dramatic security upturn and under increasing pressure at home ahead of the provincial elections which could be held in October, Maliki’s government is taking a stronger stance in the negotiations, including voicing a time limit for the presence of U.S. troops when the UN mandate expires at year’s end.
The two sides are also at odds over some other issues like whether Iraqi laws would apply to the U.S. service people and contractors in the future.
U.S. President George W. Bush opposes a specific timetable for pulling out the troops, insisting such a move hinge on situation evolvement on the ground.
In a video conference last week, Bush and Maliki agreed on a “time horizon” for reducing the troops.
Bush sent in five combat brigades last year to quell a growing wave of violence in Iraq. Now, violence here has dropped to a four-year low.
The last batch of reinforced American troops is expected to leave by the end of this month. U.S. military commanders are mulling on further cut of force according to an assessment of the local security situation.