BAGHDAD - Outgoing president Ghazi al-Yawar said Monday he has formed a committee of leading Sunni Muslim figures to negotiate for posts in an eventual Shiite-Kurdish coalition government.
"In order to avoid multiple efforts, we have decided to form a committee that would preserve a role for Sunnis in the next government," he told reporters.
Apart from the symbolic position held by Yawar, Sunnis, who once dominated Saddam Hussein's former ruling Baath regime, currently have eight of the outgoing government's cabinet seats.
Sunnis garnered some 20 of the 275 seats in the newly-elected parliament due to a boycott by large segments of the community of the January 30 elections.
The Yawar bloc includes figures like elder statesman Adnan Pachachi and Tareq al-Hashemi, secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), which had officially pulled out of the elections.
The Shiites and Kurds who swept the elections are currently locked in hard bargaining over the composition of the next government.
Both have said they were eager to include the Sunnis and avoid alienating them, especially as most of the insurgency against the government and US troops is concentrated in Sunni areas like Mosul, Samarra and Anbar province.
A US official said Monday the problem with the Sunnis is that they are speaking with many voices and there is no single bloc that represents them.
"You got Sunni generals, IIP, ulemas (religious scholars), tribes, Pachachi and Ghazi," said the official on condition of anonymity.
He said several initiatives were under way by the election victors to reach out to Sunnis, citing efforts by the Shiites' United Iraqi Alliance to rally 1,000 tribal figures.
Separately, the monarchist movement headed by the once-exiled Sherif Ali bin al-Hussein, one of the heirs to the overthrown Iraqi monarchy, met Monday with the representatives of the influential Committee of Muslim Scholars.
"The committee maintains its position: we will not take part in the government as long as the country is under occupation," said its chief Harith al-Dhari.
"But we do not oppose those who want to take part to serve the country and pull it out of its misery."
The monarchists, who took part in the elections without winning seats, said they are willing to join the government. "I am willing to accept any post to serve the people," said Sherif Ali.
03/14/2005 17:32 GMT