Amnesty Bill Stalls In Iraqi Parliament

Speaking of political benchmarks, Marc Lynch draws attention to another sad story on the Iraqi political front: that of amnesty for Sunni prisoners.

The floundering of another reconciliation legislative initiative has received less attention: an amnesty bill proposed by the Maliki government. The issue of Sunni prisoners gets little discussion in the US, but it ranks very high on the list of Sunni political concerns…. By most accounts, the number of prisoners has surged over the last year, along with other surges. The most commonly cited number of prisoners is 44,000, which includes 25,000 in US prisons, 83% of them Sunni; al-Jazeera used the figure 49,000 and some accounts exceed 50,000; nobody seems to know for sure.

In early December, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s people began talking of their intention of declaring a general amnesty for large numbers of prisoners on the occasion of the Eid. This was a hopeful sign. When it didn’t happen, on December 26 Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh announced that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki would soon submit a general amnesty bill, which he did. Even careful observers, including Ambassador Ryan Crocker, have offered this as evidence of momentum towards reconciliation - and, if implemented correctly, it really would be.

But then it got bogged down in Parliament, where so many ideas about Iraqi national reconciliation go to die or mutate.

How many times have we heard that last line? It’s the same old story. You start to wonder how many months we’ll have to wait for this next political benchmark to move past a deadlocked parliament - and, in the meantime, at what cost to American and Iraqi lives. Then, if it’s actually passed, we can only pray that it won’t be as Orwellian a national reconciliation measure as the much-condemned de-Baathification law. Pardon me if I’m not hopeful about the prospects.

Posted by Jeb KooglerSource Foreign Policy Watch

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