By IRNA,
Baghdad : Iraqi Executive Council ratified on Saturday a much-debated bill that gives Iraqi religious minorities guaranteed seats on provincial councils as the United Nations mission in Iraq had recommended.
The Executive Council – President Jalal Talabani and the two vice presidents – agreed with Parliament that religious minorities, which include three-quarters of a million Christians, should be guaranteed six of the 440 seats on the provincial councils.
An election for the councils is scheduled to be held next year.
Some Christian leaders are threatening a boycott because they say the number of guaranteed seats will leave them underrepresented.
Besides Christians, the country’s religious minorities include Yazidis, Sabeans and Shabaks.
It gives Christians one seat each on councils in Baghdad, Nineveh and Basra, instead of the three seats in Baghdad, three in Nineveh and one in Basra that had been recommended by the United Nations.
Yazidis will be given one guaranteed seat in Nineveh, instead of the three proposed by the United Nations. The Sabeans will get one seat in Baghdad and the Shabaks will get one seat in Nineveh.
Although minorities can run for other seats, Iraqis have in the past voted along sectarian lines.
Younadim Kanna, one of two Christians in Parliament, called the Executive Council’s decision very disappointing.
“Their sweet speeches to us turned out to be useless,” Kanna said.
“We thought that they would compensate for what was done to us by other major political entities.”
A vast majority of Iraq’s approximately 28 million people are Muslim, and many Christians have been persecuted and displaced over the last five years.
On Saturday afternoon, a suicide car bombing at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Ramadi in Anbar Province killed eight people and wounded 17 others, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.
The checkpoint stands at the entrance to a joint Iraqi Army and United States Marine combat outpost, but an American military spokesman said he could not “disclose US casualty information at this time.”
The spokesman, Lt. Col. Chris Hughes said that Iraqi forces guarding the outpost, which is along a major highway, had taken the brunt of the attack.
Two hours after the attack, a thin column of smoke was still rising from behind the blast wall around the checkpoint, and trucks and cars were backed up for at least a mile in both directions.
The United States military also reported that an American soldier died and two others were wounded in Baghdad on Saturday after the vehicle they were traveling in was hit by a roadside bomb.
Violence in the capital has risen recently after several weeks of relative calm.
The area of the checkpoint attack is inhabited by the Albu-Fahed tribe. Many tribal members had previously belonged to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a mostly homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says is foreign-led. But last year, many tribesman joined the Awakening movement and turned against the insurgents.
The security situation in Anbar Province, once the most lethal place for Americans in Iraq, improved enough that American commanders returned responsibility for keeping order there to the Iraqi Army and police force in September. American troops continue to operate in the province.
Anbar province police chief Major General Tariq al-Youssef said that despite the marked improvement in the security situation in Anbar, there were still “sleeper cells” linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that were active.
Speaking at a conference on ‘Leadership’ at Baghdad’s Rasheed Hotel on Saturday, Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki called on Iraq’s leaders to grant more power to the central government.
The Iraqi Constitution, he said, had been signed at a time of great sectarian strife, and leaders had thus yielded to pressure to vest a lot of power in Iraq’s regions.
Leaders should take advantage of improved security, he said, to build a stronger central government and to clearly separate the responsibilities of the central government from those of the provinces.
“We must take advantage of the present to form a stable country according to a clear Constitution,” the prime minister said.