Portrait of the Week – 5 June 2004

Minister Mr Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist who has lived in exile in Britain for decades; he was not the man America had chosen. Under the terms of a new draft resolution put to the United Nations, American and British forces would leave Iraq by early 2006, with the election of a new parliament. American forces agreed to halt offensive operations in the Shiite cities of Najaf and Kufa if Muqtada al-Sadr disbanded his armed militias there; but friction continued. Fallujah remained in the control of a brigade that is supported by the United States but which bars any Coalition forces or Western contractors entering the city. A powerful bomb killed at least 15 at a Shia mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, a mile away from the place where Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a Sunni cleric with close ties to al-Qa’eda, was shot dead the day before. President Thabo Mbeki gave a state welcome to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ousted ruler of Haiti, who has been granted asylum in South Africa after some uneasy weeks in Jamaica. Haiti and the Dominican Republic tried to deal with the consequences of the floods which were found to have killed more than 2,000 a week earlier. Five were drowned when a tourist boat capsized on the biggest underground lake in Europe, in the Hinterbruehl grotto, Austria. Poisonous cane toads are expected to overrun Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, by Christmas. CSH THE SPECTATOR 5 June 2004 6 Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said on television: ‘I hope and anticipate that in a year’s time we will see a very substantial reduction in troops’ in Iraq. In the meantime a few hundred more troops were sent, including engineers skilled in building anti-terrorist defences. In the same interview Mr Blair praised Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wants to be prime minister: ‘He is a tremendous asset to the party and the country.’