LONDON (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday his country will not slide into civil war, but acknowledged that mounting sectarian violence is now killing 100 civilians a day.

Three huge bombs killed at least 62 people in Baghdad and Kirkuk on the eve of Maliki's first trip to the West since being named prime minister three months ago in a unity government.

In Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's mass murder trial resumed without the ousted leader. Sixteen days into a hunger strike, Saddam is boycotting the court and being fed through a tube.

Maliki stopped in London to meet Prime Minister Tony Blair on his way to the United States for talks with President George W. Bush, leaders of the two countries whose 140,000 soldiers in Iraq have failed to stop the killing there.

In east Baghdad, shattered vehicles showed the power of one of the blasts, which killed 34 people. Blood lay in pools. "There is a sectarian issue, but the political leaders ... are working on putting an end to the sectarian issue," Maliki told BBC radio. "Civil war will not happen to Iraq."

But even top Iraqi officials are already privately calling it just that. "If this is not civil war ... then I don't know what is," a senior government official told Reuters on Sunday.

Maliki confirmed UN data showing an average of 100 civilians a day were killed in May and June. Asked how long Iraq would need foreign troops, he said he expected improvements in Iraq's ability to police itself by the end of the year.

"It is definitely not decades, not even years," he said. "There are certain aspects of our local forces that need development. When that happens, foreign troops can start leaving." He said disarming ethnic militias was key, and the government had a plan to do it. "We have reached an agreement in the government that we will have to confront them (the militias) and deal with them."

But those efforts look stalled. On Saturday, the main party from Saddam's once dominant Sunni Arab minority stayed away from the first meeting of a Reconciliation Commission that Maliki has called the "last chance" for peace.

Sunnis, whose community has rebelled for the past three years against U.S. occupation and Shiite majority rule, accuse Shiite militia death squads of targeting them.

U.S. officials also now say such sectarian violence is a greater threat than the Sunni insurgency.

The Americans fought heavy clashes over the weekend with members of the Shiite Mehdi Army, the vast militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, killing at least 14 militants in Mussayab, south of Baghdad, and arresting eight for suspected "death squad" activity after clashes in Sadr City.

In ominous remarks, a senior member of Sadr's faction in parliament said on Sunday the government was shielding Sunni militants and warned of more violence. "Many terrorists have infiltrated this government," Bahaa al-Araji said. "The occupiers and Sunni extremists are trying to hinder national reconciliation."

Defense lawyers also boycotted Monday's session of the trial of Saddam and seven others for the killing of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail in 1982.