Naseer Al-Nahr • Arab News Staff

BAGHDAD, 20 January 2004 — Iraq’s US administrator Paul Bremer urged the United Nations to back his political plans for Iraq as tens of thousands of Shiites marched through Baghdad yesterday to demand early elections.

Bremer and members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council met UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York to discuss a plan to hand power back to Iraqis by the end of June, before a US presidential election.

The plan would put power in the hands of an appointed transitional government, while many Iraqis, especially majority Shiites, want direct elections now so they can choose who controls Iraq.

Washington, which defied UN allies in invading last year, hopes to persuade Annan to back its plan and help convince supporters of Iraq’s most respected Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, that his call for elections is premature.

Annan delayed a decision on whether to return staff to Iraq after they were withdrawn last. Annan said further study was needed before any moves to dispatch a UN team to find out whether Shiite demands for May elections are feasible.

“We have agreed that further discussions should take place at the technical level,” the secretary-general told reporters.

Japanese soldiers entered Iraq yesterday, the vanguard of a mission marking a historic shift from Tokyo’s avoidance of conflict since World War II. The deployment poses a political risk for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose government could be rocked if there are casualties.

Under the US plan, regional caucuses will select a transitional assembly by the end of May and this will in turn pick an interim sovereign government by the end of June. Full elections would follow after the writing of a constitution in 2005.

In Baghdad, a member of the Governing Council said insufficient security and the lack of electoral laws or voter registers made holding elections now impossible.

“At the moment it would be too hard to hold elections in Iraq,” Iyad Allawi said in an interview.