World

Iraqis Reverse Vote Rule Changes

October 5, 2005 / 12:28 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Iraq's National Assembly voted on Wednesday to reverse last-minute changes it had made to rules for next week's referendum on a new constitution. The United Nations had criticized the change as unfair to Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, which had threatened to boycott the vote.

After a brief debate, the Assembly voted 119 to 28 to restore the original voting rules for the referendum, which will take place Oct. 15. Only about half of the 275-member legislative body turned up for the vote.

Washington hopes a majority "yes" vote in the referendum will unite Iraq's disparate factions and erode support for the country's bloody insurgency, paving the way to eventually begin withdrawing foreign troops.

U.S. and U.N. officials hope that restoring the original rules will avert a boycott of the referendum by the Sunni minority, would have deeply undermined the credibility of the vote and wreck efforts to bring Sunnis into the political process.

Many Sunnis oppose the charter and want it rewritten, believing it would divide Iraq and leave Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north with virtual autonomy and control over Iraq's oil wealth, while isolating Sunnis with little power or revenue in central and western areas.

The original rules, now restored, mean that Sunnis can veto the constitution by getting a two-thirds "no" vote in three provinces, even if the charter wins majority approval nationwide. Sunnis have a sufficient majority in four of Iraq's 18 provinces.

In other developments:

U.S. troops pushed through streets sown with bombs Tuesday in their biggest operation this year in western Iraq, seeking to retake three Euphrates River towns from al Qaeda insurgents. At least five U.S. service members have been killed in the fighting. Some 2,500 U.S. troops along with Iraqi forces launched their operation with a powerful air assault on Haditha, Haqlaniyah and Parwana, about 140 miles northwest of Baghdad.

An earlier U.S. offensive began Saturday, 93 miles upriver by the Syrian border, and continued Tuesday in the towns of Sadah, Karabilah and Rumana. A bomb killed a Marine in Karabilah, the first casualty of that operation.

In Baghdad, Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. helicopters fought about 40 gunmen house-to-house Tuesday in south Baghdad. More than three dozen insurgents were killed, wounded or detained, the U.S. military said. Three Iraqi soldiers were injured.

A suicide car bomb exploded at the main entrance to the heavily fortified Green Zone, a district of Iraqi government buildings and the U.S. and British embassies. The blast killed at least two policemen.

The leader of an extremist Islamic group that threatened to use chemical weapons against U.S. positions and the Iraqi government has also been killed in Iraq, according to an Internet statement posted Tuesday. Al-Haj Othman, the emir of the Mujahedeen of the Victorious Sect Brigades, was killed in fighting, said the statement. It did not provide any other details.

On Sunday, Iraq's Shiite- and Kurdish-controlled parliament effectively closed that loophole with their rule change. The legislature decided that a simple majority of those who cast votes means the constitution's victory — but that two-thirds of registered voters must cast "no" ballots in three provinces to defeat it.

That interpretation had raised the bar to a level almost impossible to meet. In a province of 1 million registered voters, for example, 660,000 would have to vote "no" — even if that many didn't even come to the polls.

In behind-the-scenes negotiations Tuesday, U.N. and U.S. officials pressed Iraqi legislators and government officials to reverse that change.

The U.N. said the change was a violation of international standards.

"Ultimately, this will be a sovereign decision by the Iraqis, and it's up to the Iraqi National Assembly to decide on the appropriate electoral framework," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in New York on Tuesday. "That being said, it is our duty in our role in Iraq to point out when the process does not meet international standards."

The Americans were talking separately with the Shiite-led government.

On Monday, U.N. officials began distributing 5 million copies of the constitution to voters across Iraq. The world body also will monitor the voting on Oct. 15.

After Wednesday's vote, the deputy speaker, Hussein al-Shahristani, said the parliament now agreed that the word "voter" throughout the election rules means someone "who did really cast his vote in the referendum" — both for the purposes of passing the referendum or for getting the two-thirds threshold needed to defeat.

"The government is completely keen to make the constitutional process legitimate and of high credibility and we are concerned about the success of this process rather than the results of the referendum," government spokesman Laith Kubba said after the vote.