Iraqi president will not sign Aziz death warrant

IRAQI PRESIDENT Jalal Talabani has said he will not sign the death warrant of former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, sentenced last month to hang for involvement in crushing a Shia rebellion in 1991.

Mr Talabani said: “I will sign no death sentence because, as a social democrat, I’m against the death penalty.” Mr Talabani, a Kurd, also said it was “time to turn the page on executions”, except for crimes targeting specific groups such as the recent al-Qaeda attack on a Catholic church in Baghdad in which 46 members of the congregation died.

The Vatican, Russia, Italy, France and Greece called on the Iraqi authorities not to execute Mr Aziz, a Chaldean Orthodox Christian who became the international spokesman of the ousted Baathist regime. Mr Aziz, who suffered a stroke last January, has until November 26th to appeal his sentence but it is not known if the court-appointed lawyer has taken action.

Before receiving the death sentence, Mr Aziz (74) had been sentenced to 22 years in prison on other charges. This prompted him to remark that he expected to die in detention.

If the yet to be formed government insists on his execution, Mr Talabani’s stand could cause a constitutional crisis because death warrants must be signed by the president. Although he did support the executions of former president Saddam Hussein and his chief lieutenants, Mr Talabani refused to endorse death warrants issued by the courts. These were signed by his two deputies, Sunni Tareq al-Hashemi and Shia Adel Abdel Malik, appointed under a communal arrangement adopted in 2006. These posts were abolished following the election in March of this year.

Shia religious fundamentalists and secessionist Kurds were repressed by the secular nationalist Baathist regime. Prime minister designate Nuri al-Maliki is a member of the Dawa party which was crushed after it mounted assassination attempts on Mr Aziz and the ousted president. Since the US occupation, Sunnis and secularists have accused the Shia-dominated authorities of persecution and denying them a role in governing postwar Iraq.

The execution of Mr Aziz, who was never a member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, could torpedo the deal designed to bring in Sunnis and secularists reached last week between non-sectarian Iraqiya, headed by Iyad Allawi, and Mr Maliki. Mr Allawi has, however, predicted that the new government will collapse because the “powersharing formula has been distorted”.