As the scheduled June 30, 2004 handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis approaches, a general picture of how the United States and the United Nations intend to handle that transition has begun to emerge.

The transfer of authority to Iraqis takes its most critical step in January 2005 when Iraqis vote in their first national election. But before those ballots are cast, the United Nations intends to work with Iraqis to get an interim government in place.

While the exact shape and makeup of that government remains undefined, U.N. envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi did outline some "very tentative ideas" about the interim administration in mid-April.

"What the aim should be, at present, is to put in place a caretaker government that will be in charge from 1st July 2004 until the elections in January 2005," Brahimi told reporters.

He also said he was confident that it would be possible to form a government headed by a prime minister and overseen by a president and two vice-presidents during May.

Brahimi supports disbanding the U.S.-selected Iraqi Governing Council and replacing it with a temporary government made up nonpartisan experts and technocrats until the elections. To this end, "it is best if the members of the caretaker government, including the interim president, vice presidents and prime minister, were to choose not to stand for elections," he told the U.N. Security Council in late April.

Brahimi and Paul Bremer, civilian head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, have both stressed that the interim government "will not have the power to do anything which cannot be undone by the elected government which takes power early next year," as Bremer explained.

Another key component of Brahimi's plan is the creation of a large national conference that would "serve the all-important aim of promoting national dialogue, consensus building and national reconciliation in Iraq." He told the Security Council that an Iraqi Preparatory Committee made up of "a small number of reputable and distinguished Iraqis" who are not seeking political office should convene the conference. He added that the United Nations "is ready to facilitate consensus among Iraqis" on the question of who should sit on the committee.

Brahimi told the Security Council the conference would bring together "anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 people representing every province in the country, all political parties, tribal chiefs and leaders, trade and professional unions, universities, women's groups, youth organizations, writers, poets and artists, as well as religious leaders, among many others."

"For the last three decades, Iraqis were not communicating with one another inside their country. 'We were even afraid to talk in front of our children,' many of them told us. This conference would, to begin with, allow such a wide and representative sample of Iraqi society to talk to one another, to discuss their painful past as well as the future of their country," he added.

The conference "would elect a Consultative Assembly to serve alongside the government during the period leading to the elections of the National Assembly" in January 2005, Brahimi told the reporters.

Prospect for elections
In late April, the Iraqi Governing Council approved the creation of an independent commission to begin preparing for the January 2005 elections.

Brahimi has stressed the importance of Iraqi elections in his public statements.

"There is no substitute for the legitimacy that comes from free and fair elections. Therefore, Iraq will have a genuinely representative government only after January 2005," Brahimi said in mid-April.

Director of the U.N. Electoral Assistance Division Carina Perelli has urged Iraqi leaders to agree on a basic electoral framework by the end of May if they are to hold elections for a transitional assembly early next year, as Iraq's interim constitution stipulates.

"Before coming [to Iraq], we were very clear that the Iraqi elections need to be conducted by Iraqis and by Iraqi institutions," she said. "They should not be organized or conducted by the United Nations. But the United Nations is ready to provide a very strong technical assistance and very strong support to the Iraqi authorities that are going to be put in place."

While Brahimi has said that the security situation in Iraq must "improve significantly" for elections to take place, Perelli noted that elections have taken place in countries with violence before.

"In any post-conflict situation, the country has never stabilized so much when elections occur that violence is totally absent," she said, explaining that elections have been held in countries such as Colombia that are stable, but still contend with outbursts of violence.

Questions surrounding the U.S. military's role
Despite the plans for the Iraqi government after the handover, questions remain regarding the role the United States will play, since it will retain control of some 135,000 U.S. troops expected to remain in Iraq through at least the end of 2005.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told Reuters in late April that the government due to take power in Iraq on July 1 would have to forgo some of its sovereignty to U.S.-led military forces.

"Some of its sovereignty will have to be given back, if I can put it that way, or limited by them, (with an) understanding by them that it is important to let the multinational force be able to operate under its own command," he told the news agency.

At the confirmation hearing for John Negroponte, set to become the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, some senators were skeptical that Iraq will attain sovereignty with U.S. troops there.

"If a country doesn't have the sovereignty to make national security decisions for itself and military commitments, then I'm not sure I would define it as a sovereign government," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said at the hearing.

Throughout the hearing, Negroponte emphasized that Iraqis would have greater control over their internal affairs.

"On the 1st of July this transitional government will be in charge of ... 25 ministries," he said. "They will be managing their own revenues. They will be able to conduct international relations; they will have ambassadors around the world. They will be exercising all the normal attributes of sovereignty. And in fact there are models around the world of countries that might not fully exercise sovereignty but exercise the great preponderance of attributes of sovereignty. And that's going to be the situation with respect to Iraq. And but it's going to be a work in progress, and it's going to be evolutionary."

Negroponte also said his job would be "fundamentally different" from Bremer's, explaining that "the Coalition Provisional Authority is the ultimate political authority in Iraq, the embassy will be in a supportive, as opposed to a commanding role."

-- By Karen Schwartz for the Online NewsHour

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