Agence France Presse  --  Arab News

PARIS, 5 June 2004 — Iraq’s Sunni Muslim leader Adnan Pachachi, who declined the post as Iraq’s president, in a newspaper interview yesterday said he was the victim of a smear campaign and dirty politics by rivals.

Pachachi told the Financial Times that some members of the US-appointed Governing Council had engineered the appointment this week of the strife-torn country’s interim government, rather than the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

The octogenarian former foreign minister charged that an alliance of Kurds and Shiite members of the council had attempted to force a vote in favor of tribal leader Sheikh Ghazi Al-Yawar in order to create “some kind of fait accompli”.

“This was dirty politics at its worst. The Americans never offered me anything. They left it to Brahimi to consult and come to his conclusions,” Pachachi told the newspaper in a telephone interview from his Abu Dhabi home. Eighty-one-year-old Pachachi said on Tuesday that he had declined the largely ceremonial Iraqi presidency after he was accused of being the candidate of the United States. But he has strongly contested this. “Trying to portray me as a little soft on the Americans when I have been struggling for Arab rights all my life is not only false, it is unfair,” Pachachi told the Financial Times.

Accusing the Shiites and Kurds of “interfering” in the naming of a president, he told the British-based newspaper that the appointment should have been left to Sunni Arabs. “The Shias and Kurds had no right to interfere. We did not interfere in the selection of the prime minister by the Shias nor in the Kurds appointing their ministers.”

Pachachi was named on Tuesday after several days of bitter wrangling between the US-led coalition in Iraq and the interim Governing Council. But he turned down the post, allowing Yawar to step in as Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein president.