So it goes

Al-Hayat says:

An organization called the Federal Democratic Iraq Gathering (Southern region council) held its first convention yesterday to announce the provisional leadership of the South, but there was a noticeable absense of political authorities and parliamentarians, something some observes take as a clear message of complete rejection [of the project by the politicians].

So reads the concluding paragraph in a news item that is otherwise devoted to detailing the criticisms of this project by a variety of members of the national parliament. The piece opens like this:

A number of members of the Iraqi parliament criticized the convention that was held yesterday in Baghdad which announced what it called "provisional leadership for the South" comprised of the three provinces of Basra, Dhi Qar and Maysan. [The parliamentarians] stressed that most of the political blocs agreed on postponing the question of decisions respecting [establishment of federal] regions.

And the journalist quotes parliamentarians representing the Sadrists, the UIA (Shiite) generally, and the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni), all in opposition to the idea of raising this kind of issue at the present time.

There is a prominent report this morning that has the meaning of this backwards. Juan Cole writes:

In Baghdad, al-Hayat says that a group of Iraqi parliamentarians held a conference to announce the formation of the "Provisional Command of the Southern Region," comprising Basra, Dhi Qar and Maysan provinces. The politicians said that most blocs in parliament agreed with the establishment of such a provincial confederacy. [140 MPs voted to expedite this process last October.]

This is apparently a case of mistranslating the initial verb "they criticized" as if it meant "they agreed", and then somehow scanning the rest of the piece to suit. (UPDATE: I figured out what he probably did: The verb intaqada "[the politicians] criticized", looks a lot like the verb aqada "[the politicians] held" (a meeting), so he thought it was the politicians that held that meeting, and that got him off on the wrong foot.)

In any event, the Al-Hayat piece doesn't say anything else about the conference itself. For instance, the reporter doesn't say who attended the conference, or who the "provisional leadership" is. And when he says most parliamentary blocs oppose bringing this up right now, he implies that some blocs support the idea, but he doesn't say which ones.

(For background on the idea of a three-province federal unit in the South, see Reidar Visser's essay Basra Crude: The great game of Iraq's "Southern" Oil, discussed here.)