BAGHDAD, Iraq – Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki is planning to present his new government to Iraq’s Council of Representatives on Saturday and to formalize his ministry appointments by Monday, U.S. and Iraqi sources said Wednesday.
A day after announcing that Iraq’s contentious political parties had agreed on a distribution of Cabinet posts, Iraqi politicians appeared to be coalescing around the names of several prominent candidates, the final step in the long-delayed formation of the government voted in five months ago.
Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear physicist who ran as an independent, will apparently be named Oil minister.
Current Oil Minister Ahmed Chalabi is a candidate to replace Interior Minister Bayan Jabr. Jabr is a candidate to lead the Finance Ministry. Sunni Arabs had accused Jabr of allowing Shiite militias and death squads to proliferate inside his police forces and vehemently opposed al-Maliki’s efforts to keep him at the head of Interior.
National security adviser Muwafak Rubaie, a moderate Shiite, and former parliament speaker Hachim Hassani, a moderate Sunni Arab, have been named as candidates for the Defense ministry, according to Ali Dabagh, a member of the leading Shiite bloc.
While politicians in Baghdad appeared to be making progress, thousands of demonstrators took the streets Wednesday in the southern city Basra in the wake of a series of killings that has led to calls for the ouster of Basra Gov. Muhammad Misbah Waili and deployment of Iraqi Army forces within the city.
In Saddam Hussein’s trial, the judge ruled Wednesday that the former Iraqi leader and his intelligence chief may testify on behalf of one of their co-defendants, who is accused of helping in a 1982 crackdown on Shiites in which some detainees, including women and children, died in prison and 148 Shiites were sentenced to death.
The defense wants Hussein and Barzan Ibrahim to testify on behalf of Taha Yassin Ramadan. It was not clear when the two men would take the stand to discuss Ramadan’s alleged role in the mass arrests in the Shiite town of Dujail.
Hussein and the upper-level defendants like Ibrahim have insisted the sweep of arrests was a justified response to a 1982 assassination attempt on Hussein in the town. Four other co-defendants have maintained they weren’t involved at all, and defense witnesses have insisted that the four were victims of the crackdown themselves.
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