The Morning Star (Saturday 25 June 2005)
KARL STEWART reports from a UNISON fringe meeting on the bloody state of occupied Iraq
KURDISH Iraqi trade unionist Shadya Mohamad told a UNISON fringe meeting on Thursday night of the chilling warning that she had received before travelling to Britain - "Don't get your face on TV while you're over there or, when you come back, someone might try to kill you."
Ms Mohamad received the warning from family friends when she told them that she had been invited to Britain as a fraternal guest of the public-sector union.
She and other union representatives from the war-torn country spelled out the dangers that they face on a daily basis, as they appealed for solidarity and support from their British sisters and brothers.
The ongoing conflict in Iraq is not, they all insisted, a simple matter of "the occupiers versus the resistance."
There is also the developing Iraqi working class movement. A movement which is often, sometimes literally, caught in the crossfire.
Organisations such as the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and Kurdistan General Workers' Union Syndicates (KGWU) have their own industrial, social and political agenda and work closely together towards their common goal of a "sovereign, democratic, federal and secular Iraq."
As a result of this, the IFTU has been targeted by both the occupation forces - the US military attacked their Baghdad offices last year - and by insurgents who kidnapped and murdered Hadi Saleh, one of their leaders, in January.
However, the unions blame Iraq's mounting death toll squarely on the war and occupation. Speakers called for the removal of all foreign forces and insisted that they neither asked for nor supported the invasion or the continuing occupation.
"It was opposed by the Iraqi working-class movement, as it was by you, right from the beginning," said IFTU executive member Abid Hashim
"And, when over a million of you marched against the invasion, we saluted you for the solidarity that you showed us.
"We wanted the removal of the Saddam regime and the cleansing of the army and security services to have happened at the hands of we Iraqis ourselves, not by the occupiers," he stressed.
Many years of internal repression, war, invasion and now occupation and terrorist attacks have all, in Mr Hashim's words, "impacted severely on the Iraqi working class" and although they are determined to keep fighting for Iraqi workers' rights, they are appealing for support and solidarity from trade unions in Britain and elsewhere.
In response to questions asking what British trade unionists could do to help, Mr Hashim said that their most pressing needs are resources for training and education, which are "absolutely essential."
The Iraqi federation wants to create a workers' academy he said, explaining that this could be used to educate, train and develop a new generation of union leaders, organisers and activists.
UNISON deputy general secretary Keith Sonnett, who has visited Iraq with a TUC-organised delegation, suggested that unions could provide language training and that branches and regions could set up "twinning" arrangements with their Iraqi equivalents.
Posted at June 26, 2005 10:12 PM