05 October 2006
Rice Makes Unannounced Visit to Baghdad
Meets with Iraqi prime minister to discuss national reconciliation plan
Washington -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unannounced visit to Baghdad, Iraq, October 5 to consult with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki about his efforts to achieve national reconciliation between the country’s various ethnic and sectarian groups.
Speaking to reporters en route to Baghdad, Rice said the role of the United States “is to support all the parties and indeed to press all of the parties to work toward that resolution quickly because obviously the security situation is not one that can be tolerated, and it is not one that is being helped by political inaction.”
Rice said the national political compact al-Maliki is working to forge would cover the management of oil resources, the de-Ba’athification process, the demobilization of militias, issues related to the country’s federal structure and the reform of the constitution.
“[T]he core of getting a security environment, a stable security environment, really does rest on getting some of these political issues resolved,” she said. Rice said she would work to help all parties understand “how their interests are going to be represented and how their interests are going to be served in this political process.”
Earlier in the week, Rice visited Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where she also met with foreign ministers from the Gulf states and Jordan to discuss what Iraq’s neighbors could do to support the political reconciliation process. Several of those nations have influence with groups inside Iraq. Rice said she would discuss the results of those meetings with al-Maliki.
The secretary refused to speculate what groups might be granted amnesty within the reconciliation process, saying that decision is up to the Iraqis. “Obviously there are people … who are still terrorists and are always going to be terrorists and who have been engaged in activities that's going to make it difficult for them to ever be a part of a political process,” she said. “But really, this is an Iraqi process. … Every country, when it goes through a war, has to go through this process of reconciliation and I think that's a conversation we have to let them have.”
Rice’s only comment on the management of Iraq’s oil resources was that “oil needs to be a unifying factor.”
The secretary praised the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s decision to dissolve a police brigade because of its ties to death squads. “That's a very positive thing because we've said many times that the Interior Ministry in the prior government, before the permanent government was put in place, was not active enough in really rooting out potential corruption and potential violence within the ministry itself, or of the ministry forces,” she said.
For additional information, see Secretary Rice's Trip to the Middle East and Iraq Update.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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