BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government on Friday firmly rejected a Bosnia-style plan approved by the US Senate to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines, saying Iraqis will themselves decide their future.
"The government and its prime minister (Nuri al-Maliki) reject this vote," said government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh.
"It is the Iraqis who decide these sorts of issues, no one else," Dabbagh said on state-run Al-Iraqiya television.
"The Iraqi parliament too should express its total rejection of this plan."
The plan, touted by backers as the sole hope of forging a federal state out of sectarian strife, was approved by the US Senate on Wednesday in a vote of 75 to 23.
The non-binding resolution, offered as an amendment to a defence policy bill, would provide for decentralising Iraq in a federal system as permitted by Iraq's constitution to stop the country from becoming a failed state.
It proposes to separate Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni entities, with a federal government in Baghdad in charge of border security and oil revenues.
It also aims to defuse sectarian violence by offering Sunnis a share of oil revenues, boosting reconstruction aid and debt relief and launching an international diplomatic effort to rally the world's great powers and Iraq's neighbours to the new federation's cause.
Advocates say the plan, championed by Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Joseph Biden, offers a route to a political solution in Iraq that could allow US troops to eventually go home without leaving chaos behind.
am-bpz/db
09/28/2007 15:29 GMT