Instead, the nation witnessed a display of ethnic infighting, backstabbing and farce before the plug was pulled on television transmission and Arabic music filled the airwaves.

The National Assembly, dominated by Shia and Kurdish factions once brutalised by the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein, had been due to announce the name of a parliamentary Speaker.

The post had been ear-marked for a Sunni in an attempt to include the fractious minority, which has been waging an armed campaign against the United States- installed authorities for nearly two years.

However, the only Sunni acceptable to all sides, acting President Sheikh Ghazi al- Yawer, turned down the job, throwing the entire process into a quandary.

“We are surprised, we are upset. This meeting is held up because of one person’s decision,” Saad Jawad, a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which heads the dominant Shia block in parliament, said.

One Western diplomat said that Sheikh al-Yawer had long made clear that he wanted to be Vice-President and not Speaker. Sunni voters largely boycotted the elections, giving parliament little choice of Sunni candidates for the key posts.

With Shias and Kurds blaming the Sunnis, the much- delayed session started with the acting Speaker announcing that the debate would be on procedural rules for the assembly. A Shia woman jumped up in defiance and insisted that a Speaker be named so that parliament could start its business.

In the clamour that erupted, another member for Basra stood up and denounced a British army raid on his family house in the southern port city.

As the session threatened to degenerate into acrimony and irrelevance, Hussein al-Sadr, a moderate from the party of Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, tried to call the members to account.

“What are we going to tell the citizens who sacrificed their lives and cast ballots on January 30?” he cried. “The people are waiting for us to act!” At that point, the acting Speaker — appointed in a similarly abortive session two weeks ago on the basis that he is the oldest member of the House — demanded that all press and television cameras leave the hall: transmission ended and the nation found itself watching a Saddam-style broadcast of an orchestra playing the national anthem.

Mr Allawi, whose party did poorly in the elections and who is now politically isolated, stormed out of the session with his entourage minutes later. Even the politicians at the centre of the political deadlock admitted that the process of building a democratic government was hard, with the victorious Shia List wrangling with its junior partners, the Kurdish block, over the division of ministries and the distribution of Iraq ’s oil wealth.

“This is the birth of democracy and birth is never easy,” said Hussein al-Shahristani, a nuclear physicist close to the Shia leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Barham Saleh, the acting Deputy Prime Minister and a Kurd, was more direct: “You can say we are in a crisis,” he said after the session.

“The Iraqi people are getting very itchy, the street has become very nervous and there are lots of talk in the street that people want to protest about this,” Mr Jawad said.

With the acting Government working in a vacuum for the past two months, agitation has blossomed into rare street protests. On Sunday guards at the Science and Technology Ministry fired on workers protesting about wages.

Elsewhere, three Romanian journalists were kidnapped from their hotel in the capital on Monday night. In the northern oil city of Kirkuk a roadside bomb aimed at a senior Kurdish official wounded 18 people.

STICKING POINTS

The appointment of a Sunni Speaker of parliament. Sunni members insist that he come from a Sunni parliamentary block

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