By SALAH NASRAWI
The Associated Press
Monday, November 14, 2005; 4:45 PM

CAIRO, Egypt -- The Arab League has invited about 100 Iraqi leaders to a weekend meeting in Cairo to prepare for an Iraqi reconciliation conference, including possibly some members of Saddam Hussein's former Baath Party, officials said Monday.

However, a top Iraqi Shiite leader insisted that no officials from Hussein's regime or the insurgency should attend the U.S.-backed gathering, leaving both the Arab League and the Shiite leadership in Iraq sharply divided on acceptable participants.

The league has said that members of Saddam's former Baath Party could attend the three-day preparatory meeting, which will also include members from Iraq's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities.

The league agreed to exclude those Baath Party members involved in atrocities against Iraqis but has declined to reveal who has been invited.

"Naturally, we are not going to invite those who have committed crimes against Iraqis, but you cannot exclude a large section of the Iraqis because they were once members of the party," said Hesham Youssef, a key aide to Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa.

The reconciliation conference, which would be held in Iraq early next year, is aimed at persuading Iraq's Sunni Arab minority to join the political process and work with the country's Shiite Muslims and Kurds, who have taken political control after decades of domination by Saddam, a Sunni Arab.

But Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said the conference should not be turned into a platform for reconciliation with former Baathists.

"Killers, terrorist groups, Saddami Baathists, remnants of Saddam's regime, and those who call people infidels have no place in this meeting," al-Hakim said in a statement issued Monday.

"We will not sit with them as long as they belong to this vicious school of crimes," said al-Hakim.

Other top Shiite leaders, including the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, have also rejected the notion of Baathists participating in the conference.

Iraqi Shiites and Kurds have been suspicious and angry with the Arab League because it had taken so long for the group to seek a role in Iraq. Many of them resent the league's past support for Saddam and suspect a bias in favor of the country's minority Sunnis _ a vast majority in the rest of the Arab world.

Khaled al-Attiyah, a Shiite legislator in Iraq, said the delegation to the weekend meeting in Cairo will be headed either by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari or al-Hakim. He said 22 members of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance will attend.

Also among the invitees were representatives of four key Sunni Arab groups who have said they will boycott elections on Dec. 15 to select a new Iraqi government.

In addition, eight foreign ministers who belong to an Arab League working group on Iraq were invited, as were envoys from the United States, Europe, Iran and the United Nations.

A few glitches apparently remained. A top SCIRI leader complained Monday that his group had not yet received invitations from the league.

"We want it to be a successful meeting but until now we don't know who is invited and what is the program," SCIRI's Hummam Hamoudi told The Associated Press.

Moussa traveled to Iraq last month _ his first visit since Saddam was ousted in 2003 _ for consultations with Iraqi politicians about the possibilities for the reconciliation conference.

The 22-member Arab League kept Iraq at arm's length after the U.S.-led invasion out of fears it would appear the group condoned the war.