Iraq national meet delayed: parliament speaker

BAGHDAD, April 4, 2012 (AFP) – A national reconciliation meeting scheduled for this week has been delayed as a result of political instability, Iraq’s parliament speaker said on Wednesday.
’If the conference is held in these circumstances, it would only succeed in increasing the crises, so it is delayed now, and I believe that the political powers will discuss their problems calmly and deliberately, without accusations to the media,’ Osama al-Nujaifi told a news conference.
’We must wait until … we reach a calming of the political situation, until we can get a positive result from the conference,’ Nujaifi said.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani called on March 25 for the national conference aimed at bridging sharp political differences in the country to be held on April 5.
The talks between Iraqi political leaders were originally to take place in December amid a standoff between Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite National Alliance coalition and the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc, which said he was centralising power, but were cancelled when the two sides refused to meet.
The dispute cooled off after Iraqiya ended parliament and cabinet boycotts, but a wealth of other issues remain.
Maliki is also rowing with Kurdish authorities, whose main parties are a crucial bloc in the national unity government, over oil revenues and Kurds’ sheltering of fugitive Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, wanted by Baghdad on charges of running a death squad since December
On Sunday, Kurdish officials allowed Hashemi to leave for Qatar.
The issue of Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak, whom Maliki wants to sack after the former described him as ’worse than Saddam Hussein,’ also remains unresolved.