Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Another matter about that draft of the provisional Iraqi constitution: it excludes from candidacy anybody convicted of a "crime that violates honor." What is that? Then it says that sessions of the new assembly will be public "unless necessity dictates otherwise." Why? Is that for the sessions when Bremer comes in to dictate to the members? Article 39, no. 2, talks about "guarantees of basic rights, both public and private." I do not want to bother the drafters, but could you be more specific. Could you define the "basic rights." But I have never read a more specific and rational solution to the Kurdish question: Article 39, no. 6 talks about: "organizing the present federal situation in Kurdistan and its relationship to the central authority." What was that? But the brilliant jurists went further in Article 39, no. 7: "the specification of decentralized prerogatives of the governorates that are not covered by federalism." Article 11: "The various nationalities are brotherly in the service of the homeland (which one?) within a unified Iraq." The last part of the last sentence has a tinge of Ba`thist phraseology.