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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Ozeti archy. But if the sectarian war in Iraq worsened, the Saudis would be likely to line up with Sunni tribal leaders. The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who told his staff Monday that he was resigning his post, recently dismissed Nawaf Obaid, a consultant who wrote an opin~ ion piece in The Washington Post two weeks ago contending that "one of the first consequences" of a U.S. pullout from Iraq would "be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis." Obaid also suggested that Saudi Arabia could cut world oil priees in half by ical discrimination to Moscow tô embarrass Washington, Ahmadinejad enjoys pointing out that countries like Germany, France and Austria claim to champion free debate yet make Holocaust denial illegal. He has also repeatedly tried to draw !DoraI equivalency between questionmg the Holocaust and the decision in Europe last year to publish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. It wins him favor at home and across the Arab world for standing up to the West and allows him to present himself a~ morally superior to the West. But there is another important point. Ahmadinejad actually seems to believe that the volumes of documentation, testimony and living memory of the Nazi genocide are at best exaggerated and part of a Zionist conspiracy to falsify history so as to create the case for Israising its production, a move that he said "would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today's high oil priees." The Saudi government disavowed Obaid's column, and Turki ended his contract. But Arab diplomats said Tuesday that Obaid's column reflected the view of the Saudi government, whieh has made clear its opposition to a U.S. pullout fromlraq. ln a speech in Philadelphia last week, Turki reiterated the Saudi position. "Just pieking up and leaving is going to create a huge vacuum," he told the World Affairs Council. "The U.S. must underline Evidence of that came in a revealing interview last May with the German magazine Der Spiegel. The interviewer mostly wanted to discuss Iran's nuclear ambitions and its refusaI to give up uranium enrichment, but the discussion kept returning to the Holocaust. At one point, the exasperated interviewer actually lectured the Iranian president on Germany's culpability. "ln our view, there is no doubt that the Germans unfortunately bear the guilt for the murder of six million," the Spiegel journalist said to Ahmadinejad. The president gave little ground, saying Germans should rid themselves of such guilt. "1 will only accèpt something as truth if 1am actually convinced of it," he said. Across the Middle East, contempt for Jews and Zionism is widespread and utterly mainstream. Many say the Holoits support for the Maliki government because there is no other game in town." On Monday, prominent Saudi clerics called on Sunni Muslims to mobilize against Shiites in Iraq. The statement called the "murder, torture and displacement of Sunnis" an "outrage." The resignation of Turki, a former Saudi intelligence chief, was supposed to be formally announced Monday, officiaIs said, but had not happened by late Tuesday. "They're keeping us very puzzled," a Saudi officiaI said. Hassan M. Fattah contributed reportingfrom Dubai. Holocaust conference: As much about Iran's ambition as its beliefs Dy Michael Slackman CAIRO: Iran's so-called Holocaust conference earlier this week was billed as a chance to force the West to reconsider ~e. historical record and, thereby, the legttlmacy of Israel. The question, then, is why the Iranians would invite speakers with so little credibility in the West, including a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and disgraced European scholars. But that question misses the point. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sees conference partie- News Analysis ipants like David Duke, the former Louisiana Klan leader, and France's Robert Faurisson, who has devoted his life to trying to prove the Nazi gas chambers were a myth, as silenced truth-tellers whose stories expose Western leaders as the hypocrites he considers them to be. Just as Soviet leaders used to invite Americans who suffered racial or polit- rael. As a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he was indoctrinated with such thinking, political analysts in Tehran said, and in fact as a radical student leader, he championed such a view. Now he bas a platform to promote his theories and try to position himself regionally as a reasonable man simply asking the hard questions. The meeting included no attempt to come to terms with the nature of the well-documented Nazi slaughter, offering only a platform to those pursuing the fantasy that it never happened. ln addition, the organizers of the conference, a small circle around the president, have been building ties with neo-Nazi groups in Europe. "He is connected to people in Iran who trust his way of doing things and who seriously believe the Holocaust did not take place," said Martin Ebbing, a German journalist based in Tehran who bas closely followed the issue with the president. "They seriously believe it." caust has been wildly exaggerated and used to justify the creation of the Jewish state in 1948at the expense of Palestinians, a move viewed as yet another example of Western imperialism. Anti-Western rage fueled the 1979Iranian r~volution, and Ahmadinejad has tried to rekindle the energy of the revolution by spreading Iran's influence beyond its borders. Battling Washington, chiding Arab leaders and claiming to promote the Palestinian cause have made him extremely popular on the streets from Cairo to Morocco. Such actions have also helped turn attention away from his inability so far to deliver on promises of economic populism, including a redistribution ofIran's enormous economic wealth and greater social justice for the bulk of the country that is struggling to make ends meet. The president's ideas do not resonate in aIl corners of Iran, though, and some political scientists there say they have served to embarrass officiaIs who, even if they agree, do not want to see a focus on Holocaust denial further isolate Iran. "1raise two questions about this conference," said Ahmad Shirzad, a reformist politician and former member of Parliament. "First, how much does this solve the problems our people are faced with? And secondly, which one of our goals were realized? It looks like he wants to make news and do provocative things." Others see an even more ambitious post-Iraq agenda reflected in Ahmadinejad's high profile on the issues of Jews, the Holocaust and Israel. "It is for public consumption in Arab countries," said Mustafa EI-Labbad, editor of Sharqnameh Magazine, which specializes in Iranian affairs and is published in Cairo. "It is specifically directed toward deepening the gap between the people and their regimes and toward embarrassing the rulers so that the regional power vacuum, especially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran." l{t'ralb~(!tribllnt' December 14, 2006 43
Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Ozeti New Iraqi law on oil stalled by dispute on division of powers By Edward Wong BAGHDAD: Iraqi politicians are split along ethnie and sectarian lines in nego~iati.ons to resolve the f!nal stieking pomt m a draft of the national oillaw the oil minister says. The issue involve~ the division of powers between the central government and regional govemments in negotiating oil contracts. The minister, Hussain Shahristani said he believed the parties could work through their differences, which would allow them to unveil the draft soon. Th~ law would be the first step to ?penmp t~e door to foreign investment ln Iraq s 011 sector by setting rules for how Iraq would handle bids on contracts. Up to 60 oil fields would be offered for development in various rounds ofbidding, Shahristani said. It is. unclear whether foreign oil compames would tolerate the risks and security costs of operating in Iraq especially if the violence worsens. ' Ameriean and Iraqi officiaIs also consider passage of the oillaw to be a crucial step in the process of national •reconciliation because the law would lay out guidelines for the distribution of the country's oil wealth. Shahristani and other officiaIs say an Iraqi committee has reached agreement ?n critieal princip les in the draft, most Importantly on a measure that would allow the central govemment to collect current and future oil revenues and redistribute them to the provinces or regions by population. Sunni Arabs, who are leading the insurgency, have been opposed to the idea ~f regional autonomy because they beheve they would not get a fair share of the country's oil wealth, whieh is concentrated in the Shiite south and Kurdish north. So putting oil revenue collection and distribution in the hands of the central govemment - and giving the money to regional governments based on population - would in theory placate the Sunni Arabs to a degree. Sunni Arab areas in Iraq have little or no apparent oil reserves. But representatives of the main Sunni Arab,.Shiite and Kurdish political blocs are still at odds over the issue of contracts, Shahristani said in an interview this week. A ll-member committee made up of those representatives is reviewing and revising a draft of the oil law written by the Oil Ministry. If the committee reaches agreement, then the law would go to the cabinet and Parliament for approval. The Sunni Arabs want the process of negotiating and signing exploration and development contracts to bè' put entirely in the hands of the central government, said Shahristani, a conservative Shiite. The committee's Sunni Arab representatives, who are members of a politieal bloc called the Iraqi Consensus Front, are proposing that the Oil Ministry negotiate and approve aIl contracts, Shahristani said. At the other extreme are the Kurds, who want regional governments to negotiate the contracts and have final say over them, Shahristani and other Iraqi officiaIs said. According to the Kurdish proposaI, a central body called the Federal Oil and Gas Council, set up to make policy, would simply review the contracts to make sure they conform to a standard set of criteria, the officiaIs said. The Kurds recently discovered two new fields in the north after signing contracts with a Norwegian company and a Turkish company. The committee's Shiite Arab representatives, who are members of the United Iraqi Alliance, the main Shiite political bloc, fall in between the Sunni Arab and Kurdish camps. They argue that the regions should have the right to negotiate the contracts but that the contracts must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the federal council, Shahristani said. If the committee members 'can resolve their differences on the contracting issue, then the final draft would be finished quiekly, Shahristani said. The top American officiaIs here have been putting increasing pressure on the Iraqis to present a draft and perhaps even approve the law by the year's end. ln its report, the Iraq Study Group said that an equitable distribution of oil , was necessary for national reconciliation and recommended that the central government retain full control of revenues and oil fields, much to the chagrin of the Kurds, who have enjoyed autonomy since the Ameriean military established a no-flight zone in the north in1991. Once the oillaw is approved, the federal council will announce a round of bids for development of discovered fields, Shahristani said. The Iraq National Oil Co., whieh was shut down by Saddam Hussein in 1987but is expected to be re-established by the law, would be able to compete with foreign companies in making bids. The Iraqi officiaIs assigned to choose the oil fields to be offered in the first round ofbids would try to come up with a geographieally equitable list, so regions would not feel ignored, lftralb:Eiltribunt December 15, 2006 Shahristani said. Iraq has 80 discovered fields. Twenty are already producing oil and will be assigned to the Iraq National Oil Co., Shahristani said. Development of the others would be offered up for bids, he added. Oil contracts signed with foreign companies by Saddam Hussein's government would be reviewed by the federal council to see whether they should be honored or scrapped, Shahristani said. For example, a Saddam-era contract the Iraqi government had signed with Lukoil, the largest oil company in Russia, and another with a Syrian company would be revisited, he said. As for revenue distribution, the various parties have agreed that the money will be divvied out to the regions through the central government's budget process, Shah rista ni said. That means the central government would be able to divert money to finance its needs before giving the rest out to the regions. Earlier in the negotiations, the Kurds had insisted that the money, if collected by the central government, would not be funlleled into the central government's budget process, but would be split up and given out to the regions automatically. The Kurds have raised two other issues for discussion, Shahristani said. They are demanding that any contracts the Kurds have signed so far in the north should be honored. They also want assurance that the contested oilcity of Kirkuk will be included in Iraqi Kurdistan if people in the province vote for it to join the Kurdish north in a referendum scheduled for 200Z ln continuing violence, the country's widening Sunni-Shiite sectarian rift was highlighted Thursday by a brazen mass kidnapping in central Baghdad. Masked gunmen in elite police uniforms abducted 20 to 30 men in the moming from a neighborhood of automobile spare parts shops, an Interior Ministry officiaI and witnesses said. The men released several Shiite hostages after beating them in a room and asking whether they were Sunni or Shiite, said a man who was freed. ln the region around Kut, the police found 17bodies by a small river, police officiaIs said. AlI the victims had been shot and killed after being tortured. ln Baghdad, a car bomb exploded by an Iraqi Army patrol, killing two people, including one soldier, and wounding seven others, including three soldiers. Mortar rounds in western Baghdad killed a woman and wounded twoothers. A car bomb killed two policemen who were trying to defuse it and wounded four civilians late Wednesday, The Associated Press quoted police officiaIs as saying. The officiaIs said explosives experts successfully defused a second car b~mb in the same area. 44
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