Iraq parliament grinds to halt as MPs make for Mecca
BAGHDAD (AFP) — Large-scale absenteeism and a pilgrimage to Mecca by at least 70 MPs has brought work at Iraq's parliament to a halt, despite a heavy agenda that includes key national reconciliation laws.
Although no official announcement has been made, MPs told AFP it had been decided that the next session of the House of Representatives will be on December 29 to enable the annual budget to be passed before year's end.
The last session was on Thursday, when only 160 members of the 275-seat parliament turned up, MPs said.
The political inertia comes at a time when US officials are expressing frustration at a lack of progress by the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to reconcile the country's bitterly divided communities.
Washington regards two of the bills stalled before the parliament -- an oil law and legislation that would allow hundreds of members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to return to public life -- as "benchmarks" to measure progress towards reconciliation.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on a visit to Baghdad on Wednesday that he had urged the Iraqi government to use the space created by an improved security situation to make political progress.
Since the US-led invasion of March 2003, Iraq has plunged into an abyss of overlapping civil conflicts that have divided its rival religious and ethnic communities, leaving tens of thousands of civilians dead.
The decision of the MPs to travel to Mecca for the annual Muslim hajj pilgrimage and the widespread absenteeism has angered some MPs.
"We had hoped that our brothers would stay in Baghdad," Sunni MP Adnan al-Dulaimi told AFP. "Their decision to travel while we are discussing crucial laws amounts to negligence."
He said MPs should also be discussing a possible amnesty for certain categories of prisoners to coincide with the Islamic Eid al-Adha holy day around December 20 -- marking the end of the hajj -- and adjustments to the ration system for poorer families.
"The speaker of parliament ought to have prevented lawmakers from travelling because this is not an appropriate time to travel -- whether to Mecca or anywhere else," said Dulaimi, a member of the National Concord Front, the main Sunni bloc in parliament.
Abbas al-Bayati, member of parliament for the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), one of Iraq's most powerful Shiite factions, was equally scathing.
"The oil and de-Baathification laws and more importantly the annual budget are stalled," Bayati told AFP. "The absentees and the travelling lawmakers have done harm to Iraq's interests."
Even if the hajj pilgrims could be forgiven for their religious pursuits, he added, the other MPs could not.
"If 70 MPs went on pilgrimage where are the other 205 lawmakers? If 50 of them have acceptable reasons where are the rest of them? Their absence sends out a negative signal."
The assembly's deputy speaker Khalid al-Atiya said the MPs decided to take a short holiday after two successive weeks of work.
"As we had continuous sessions for two straight weeks, it was decided that the parliament would take a break for the next two weeks due to the pilgrimage season," Atiya said.
The US has been pressuring the government to speed up passage of the laws, some of which have been stalled for more than a year.
The controversial Hydrocarbon Framework Law, when approved, will open up Iraq's long state-dominated oil and gas sector to foreign investment and will stipulate that receipts be shared equally between Iraq's 18 provinces.
The Justice and Accountability Law, which will allow certain categories of former Baath party members back into public life, has had two acrimonious readings in parliament in the past two weeks but has yet to be put to the vote.
Hassan al-Sinaid, of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, castigated what he described as a "mass escape."
"The political blocs intentially blocked parliament, leaving many strategic and important laws behind them on their desks. This mass escape from responsibility will dearly cost the political process," he said.
