Where Charter Is Least Of Worries

Most of the voters in Muthanna, a province reached by a one-hour-plus helicopter flight from Baghdad over camel herds and palm groves, appear likely to vote without ever seeing one of the copies in the few boxes brought in Wednesday. And it's not clear whether those copies reflected any of the last-minute changes being made in continuing negotiations on the charter, as U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad presses Shiites and minority Kurds to come up with a charter more acceptable to Sunnis.

It's not that information isn't available here. Local television has devoted 10 minutes each morning to explaining individual aspects of the charter, residents said. Reasonably lively local newspapers have reported on the constitution as well, British military officials here said.

Tribal leaders said the basics are known: creation of a federal system of government that could give Shiites their own oil-rich region in the south as well as majority control of the central government in Baghdad. And, Zayady said, "victory over terrorism" -- an allusion to the Sunni Arabs, whose loss of the dominance they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein has fueled Iraq's insurgency.

But Baghdad and the insurgent attacks there seem remote from this homogenous region. Harry Fitzgerald, a political adviser to the British army commander, Col. Hugh Blackman, had to think for several seconds when asked when Muthanna last had a bombing. "June," he finally said.

Muthanna almost looks like another country, one without the black funeral banners for bombing victims that drape Baghdad or the concrete blast walls that make it a fortress. But it's not immune to violence. In August, police shot and killed at least two protesters as about 1,000 people demonstrated outside the governorate demanding more electricity and clean water.

In coming weeks, authorities will throw the switches on a new power plant in the province, U.S. officials said. But its electricity will go to Baghdad, where outages cause even more complaints and more political and economic fallout.

"We've gone from a state where the center controlled everyone to one where some complain that the center is almost absent," said Kubba, the government spokesman, acknowledging that he came carrying no immediate remedies from Baghdad. "We're trying to put it together again."

In Muthanna, as in much of Baghdad, the leaders building the government were once members of the anti-Hussein insurgency. A British military official said Hassani, the governor, was a longtime leader of the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia that trained in exile in Iran when Hussein was in power. The guerrilla-turned-governor seems to get his way now in political debates, the official noted.

In Muthanna on Wednesday night, local officials scheduled, then canceled a town hall-style meeting where Muthanna's people were to have had a chance to see the constitution and the Baghdad officials who brought it. Hassani and other local leaders thought it more important for the visitors to hear their own complaints, Kubba said.

As the Baghdad officials and their British, U.S. and Australian escorts left, police carried the boxes of the draft constitution into Hassani's office, for safekeeping.