NYT: Iraq's parliament 'stuck at a standstill:'
RAW STORY
Published:
Tuesday January 23, 2007
 On the morning after President Bush's State of the Union speech, Wednesday's New York Times reports on Iraq's "fragile democracy."
"Iraq’s Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill," Damien Cave reports. "Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $220,000."
Excerpts from article:
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Part of the problem is security, but Iraqi officials also said they feared that members were losing confidence in the institution and in the country’s fragile democracy. As chaos has deepened, Parliament’s relevance has gradually receded.
Deals on important legislation, most recently the oil law, now take place largely out of public view, with Parliament — when it meets — rubber-stamping the final decisions. As a result, officials said, vital legislation involving the budget, provincial elections and amendments to the Constitution remain trapped in a legislative process that processes nearly nothing. American officials long hoped that the Parliament could help foster dialogue between Iraq’s increasingly fractured ethnic and religious groups, but that has not happened, either.
Goaded by American leaders, frustrated and desperate to prove that Iraq can govern itself, senior Iraqi officials have clearly had enough. Mr. Mashadani said Parliament would soon start fining members $400 for every missed session and replace the absentees if they fail to attend a minimum amount of the time.
Some of Iraq’s more seasoned leaders say attendance has been undermined by a widening sense of disillusionment about Parliament’s ability to improve Iraqis’ daily life. The country’s dominant issue, security, is controlled almost exclusively by the American military and the office of the prime minister. Every bombing like Monday’s, which killed 88 people at a downtown market, suggest to some that Parliament’s laws are irrelevant in the face of sprawling chaos and the government’s inability to stop it.
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FULL ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT THIS LINK
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