Iraqis wrangle over president to succeed Saddam

Iraqi leaders wrangled yesterday over who should succeed Saddam Hussein as president, after agreeing on other key posts in the government that will take power next month from the US occupation authority.

With the top post of prime minister filled and consensus on key ministries, Iraqi officials spoke of sharp disagreement on the choice of largely ceremonial head of state between Adnan Pachachi, veteran scion of a pre-Saddam political dynasty, and Ghazi Yawar, an engineer long based in Saudi Arabia.

Many of the 23-member Iraqi Governing Council meeting yesterday favoured Mr Yawar, said a senior politician. But US administrator Paul Bremer and UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi were putting the case for Mr Pachachi, a former foreign minister.

US spokesman Dan Senor denied, however, that the Council was under pressure: "We have not been leaning on anybody to support one candidate for the presidency over another."

One Iraqi Council member said US and UN officials might be ready to propose a third candidate to break the deadlock.

US and UN officials are mediating among Iraq's religious and ethnic groups. Prime minister-designate Iyad Allawi is from the long oppressed Shi'ite majority. Governing Council members Pachachi and Yawar are, like Saddam, Sunni Arabs.

The non-Arab Kurds had pushed hard for the presidency and would be compensated with two key ministries, defence and foreign affairs, Iraqi politicians involved in the talks said.

Mr Bremer's US-run authority took power after US-led forces toppled Saddam 14 months ago. It intends to hand over formal sovereignty to the interim government on June 30, although some 150,000 foreign troops, mostly American, will stay on in Iraq.

Saddam is in US custody as a prisoner of war; his Iraqi successor might seek to try him for crimes against humanity.

Washington asked the United Nations to help form the government that will lead Iraq to its first free elections in the new year, under a plan it has submitted to the UN Security Council for international endorsement.

The US-appointed Governing Council caught Mr Brahimi off guard on Friday in announcing its choice of Mr Allawi, a secular Shi'ite with strong links to the CIA from his time in exile.

Mr Pachachi, 81, was foreign minister in the 1960s, before Saddam came to power. His Baghdad-based family was a powerful force under the British-installed monarchy that fell in 1958. He has spent much of the time since in exile in Abu Dhabi.

Mr Yawar, in his mid-40s, is a leader of a prominent Sunni tribe from the northern city of Mosul. A civil engineer, he left Iraq in 1990 and ran a telecoms firm in Saudi Arabia. He has criticised the draft UN resolution proposed by Washington and has said Iraq must have the right to ask US troops to leave.

Senior members of the Governing Council told Reuters after talks on Saturday the 26 cabinet posts under Mr Allawi were all but agreed but that there was a standoff over the presidency.

Hoshiyar Zebari, now foreign minister in the US-supervised government, would be defence minister. Another Kurd, Barham Salih, would take his job at the Foreign Ministry.