President George W. Bush met Tuesday with two members of the US hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council at the White House to discuss how to implement an agreement reached last year to return power to Iraqis before June 30.  

"We are looking at various options in this and we hope to be able to make certain refinements, so to speak, to make it more transparent and more inclusive," Adnan Pachachi, who heads the council this month, told reporters after the meeting.

"We want to have a legislative assembly that will really reflect the desires of the Iraqi people and a broad representative base, which is very important," Pachachi, a secular Sunni, said.

As to a three-way meeting among the council, the United Nations and US civilian administrator Paul Bremer in New York on Monday, Pachachi said the consultations meeting had gone well. He said he expected the United Nations would send a team of experts to Iraq "very soon" to assess whether direct elections could be held before June 30.

"The United Nations has a role to play," Pachachi said. "We have asked them to send a team very soon to Iraq. I think they are going to send it very soon," he added.

Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, a Shiite and a member of the Iraqi Governing Council who met Bush with Pachachi, said the Shiites had made it clear that they want direct elections to choose their future national leaders through demonstrations over the past two days.

"We said clearly that we should have elections in Iraq and we should keep to the timetable of the transfer of sovereignty," Al-Hakim said.

"This is why we demand the United Nations to send a technical mission to decide the feasibility of the election. This is why we think all the fronts should concentrate on to see whether it's possible to have an election in Iraq in order to convince the Iraqi people and to go ahead with the election," he said.

The Shiites, who make up over 60 percent of Iraq's population, have been calling for direct elections to choose a national assembly which will elect an interim government to take over power from the US-led coalition before June 30.

The Bush administration has so far refused to embrace the demand, saying that it is impossible to hold direct elections in Iraq in the next five months. But the administration said it is willing to clarify or refine the way to choose an Iraqi transitional national assembly.

(Xinhua News Agency January 21, 2004)