Gary Kent interviews an Iraqi Kurdistan trade union leader
Iraqi trade unionists often turn up at the Commons nowadays. They are very down to earth people with inspiring tales to tell of their own past – though they are always far too modest about their brave battles against Saddam and contemporary Iraqi terrorism – and to win allies for the future of their movement and country.
The latest comrade to pitch up for tea at Portcullis House was Wishyaar Hamad Haji, a member of the secretariat of the Iraqi Kurdistan Teachers' Union. Wishyaar is based in the region's capital of Arbil where he is head of the literacy department at the Education Ministry as well as an author and journalist.
He was on a whistle-stop tour which had taken him from Arbil to Belfast, where he was a guest of the NASUWT teachers' union at their annual conference, and back to London for a couple of days. The Education Secretary Alan Johnson had been a guest speaker at the Belfast gathering and praised the secular trade union movement in both Northern Ireland and Iraq.
I began by asking him about the priorities of his 104,000 strong union. Not surprisingly, wages and living standards topped the list as did what he saw as the increasingly successful battle to root out what he called "the culture of domination" – physical violence against pupils which was part and parcel of Saddam's totalitarian regime. He added that democracy required a human rights ethos in the curriculum and that current teaching methods lagged far behind modern ideals.
Politically, the union is full-square behind current efforts to build a sustainable federal democracy. I pressed him on whether he and his colleagues would prefer independence. He maintained that "we have the right to that aspiration but we know the reality " and emphasised that the name of the game was a new federal Iraq.
He also emphasised the need for a resolution of the status of Kirkuk to which Iraqi Kurds have historical claims and stressed the importance of holding a referendum in the nearish future.
He argued that unions are a vital building block of civil society and democracy. I know from meeting Iraqi union leaders that they are very committed to increasing the participation of women in their movement and in society as a whole. So I next asked for his views on current attempts to import Sharia law into the constitutions of both the Kurdistan Region and Iraq. He supports the Union of Kurdistan Women's opposition to it and favoured the separation of mosque and state.
We briefly talked about the new Iraqi passports which are only available to women on a restricted basis – with permission from their men folk. The Kurdistan Region has done much more than many parts of the Middle East in the last decade to enable women but this part of our conversation was a salutary reminder of the low base from which women's liberation begins in the region.
The UK has a good reputation in the Kurdistan Region where English is a compulsory second language from the first year of school, though Arabic only starts a couple of years later. When I was there last year as part of the LFIQ delegation, this was stressed many times by all those we met who were keen on external investment as a means of creating jobs and thereby building a stronger labour movement which could then argue more effectively for social justice.
As with every other Iraqi trade unionist I have ever met, he argued that troops out now would be a "catastrophe" without first building up the capacity of the Iraqi security forces, for which he wanted training from British troops. If only more people on the left would heed what trade unionists like Wishyaar are asking for – political and material solidarity.
Posted at April 19, 2007 10:29 AM