BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraq's Sunni vice president refused Friday to ratify a law supposed to reintegrate former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party into public life, saying it would instead worsen their exclusion.
Last month Shiite and Sunni MPs unanimously passed a bill to partly reverse a decree issued by Iraq's former US occupation authority which sacked hundreds of thousands of Baathists from government and the armed forces.
On Friday, however, Vice President Tareq Hashemi's office confirmed that he had asked for amendments to the law prior to approving its ratification by Iraq's three-man presidential council.
"We have worked for months to fundamentally amend the de-Baathification law, in order to make it part of the national reconciliation project," Hashemi said, in a television interview reproduced on his official website.
"This bill has a feel of retaliation. How will that help to stabilise the situation?" he asked.
Most of the Baathists expelled from their posts in the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion were members of Iraq's Sunni minority, and their exclusion from the new Shiite-led regime fed the ranks of the insurgency.
US officials decided they had made a mistake and President George W. Bush has pressured Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to pass the new law in a bid to reconcile Iraq's bitterly divided Sunni and Shiite communities.
The new law would reinstate or provide pensions for lower- and middle-ranking former Baathists but would ban more senior party members from security forces, the supreme judiciary council and the foreign and finance ministries.
This provision has angered many Sunni leaders, who see the law as an attempt by Maliki's Shiite-led government to further entrench their isolation from Iraq's real centres of power.
Hashemi said many articles in the Justice and Accountability Law are "in conflict with the constitution, human rights and the democracy of today's Iraq, through excluding people for their beliefs," according to his website.
He said Iraq needed the administrative expertise of former high-ranking Baathists, and warned that far from bringing more back to work it would lead to officers who had rejoined the service since the US decree being sacked again.
It was not immediately certain what would become of the law in the wake of Hashemi's refusal to append his signature.
A similar situation arose when he and President Jalal Talabani last October refused to sign the death warrants of former aides of Saddam Hussein, defence minister Sultan Hashim al-Tai; Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti, the former armed forces deputy chief of operations; and Ali Hassan al-Majid, widely known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of poisonous gases against ethnic Kurds.
The three condemned men are still in US military custody pending resolution of the matter, which is now before the Iraqi Supreme Court.
The court has been asked to rule on what procedures should follow when the three-man presidency council rejects bills and orders sent to it for approval.
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