Iraq's resurgent labor unions could have helped rebuild the country's civil society. The Bush administration of course tried to crush them.
By Matthew Harwood
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On Jan. 4, labor union leader Hadi Saleh returned to his Baghdad home after work. Five masked men laid in wait. After he entered, they jumped him, blind-folded him, and bound his hands and feet. The intruders beat and burnt Saleh on his torso and head and then choked him to death with an electrical cord. Before they left, the men strafed Saleh's body with bullets. His membership files were ransacked. This wasn't everyday violence. Saleh was, at the time of his death, international secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and a strong player in Iraq's born-again labor movement once crushed by Saddam Hussein. The labor leader's killers are widely suspected to be remnants of Hussein's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Saleh's slaying was the most high-profile attack on Iraqi labor officials, many of whom continue to be kidnapped and killed with impunity by the insurgents. In recent months, two more trade unionists have been murdered, one while he was walking home with his children.
There is good reason for insurgents to take on the trade unionists. The IFTU supports a secular state, representative of Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurd. Its leaders have called for the insurgency to end. The union has endorsed U.N. Resolution 1546, which sets the time table for Iraq's transition into a democracy. The group was one of comparatively few in Iraq to back the American-appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's interim government, the continued presence of coalition soldiers for security, and the Jan. 30 elections. Right before the elections, the IFTU's Foreign Representative Abdullah Muhsin emailed me a simple and direct view of their importance: “[T]he elections in Iraq are essential to avoid a brutal assault by reactionary forces.” The Iraqi labor movement, in other words, had been a consistent enemy of the insurgency, and a strong proponent of a free, self-governing Iraq.
Saleh's murder is more than just a sign of the frailty of Iraq's move towards democracy. It's also an apt example of how Iraq's labor movement has fared under U.S. control. Americans have largely left the Iraqi unions to fend for themselves, and in some cases actively undercut them. As a result, Iraq has been significantly deprived of the movement perhaps most willing and best equipped to nurture along a nascent national democracy in a religiously and ethnically divided country: organized labor.
From Poland to Brazil to post-apartheid South Africa, organized labor has played a critical role in helping new democracies emerge and stabilize. America's own history of successful occupation teaches the same lesson. After the Japanese surrender in World War II, the country's newly-appointed premier knocked on the door of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and was greeted with a memorandum outlining the framework for Japan's democratization. First on the list was the “emancipation of the women of Japan through their enfranchisement.” Second was “the encouragement of the unionization of Labor.” Had the American administrators in Iraq followed MacArthur's model and placed a similar emphasis on nurturing labor, that move alone would not have turned Iraq into a stable, civil society. But given the history of labor in emerging democracies and the dearth of other nation-building alternatives in Iraq, sheltering and encouraging a union movement ought to have been pretty close to first in the reconstruction playbook. Instead, it seems to have come somewhere near last.
Saddam's legal legacy
Iraq's contemporary labor movement was founded during the 1920s and played a crucial role in overthrowing the British-supported monarchy in 1958. The nation's unions had never coexisted very easily with the Ba'ath movement. While the Ba'ath Party preached a secular pan-Arabism organized on fascist lines, the Communist-inflected labor movement advocated a socialism inclusive of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. Whether someone was a Shiite, a Sunni, or a Kurd didn't matter according to the prevailing ideologies—what mattered was whether they were workers. For this, “the Iraqi Communist Party was viewed as selfless modernizers by the people, willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs in social justice,” Iraq historian Peter Sluglett of the University of Utah told me. While both Communists and Ba'athists helped lead the 1958 revolution against Iraq's royal family, they split soon afterwards, largely over the Ba'ath concept of wahda, or Arab unity, which excluded Kurds and other non-Arabs, critical members of the Communist coalition. So, when the Ba'ath wrestled control of the state in the coup of 1963, they systematically set out to eliminate their only real rival, the Communists. Seeing the labor movement as essentially red, the Ba'ath would stage intermittent purges of the trade unions for a decade and a half.
When Saddam finally consolidated political control of the country in 1979, things got much worse for labor. The new president immediately stepped up the persecution of dissidents in the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), Iraq's most powerful union, intimidating and torturing workers to flesh out dissidents, and appointing loyal apparatchiks to key positions. (The Saddam-controlled labor union was for a time in the 1980s headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid, the Hussein loyalist who would later become infamous as the war criminal “Chemical Ali.”) In 1987, Saddam decided he couldn't abide even this arrangement, and effectively banned trade unions in the public sector, where the majority of people worked. In response, organized labor went underground with a small cadre of activists and true believers collecting information on the regime's crimes and funneling it to the West, where many of the movement's leaders, now in exile, were agitating for regime change.
So by March 2003, when the first American and allied tanks rolled into Iraq, laborites there, who had been hoping for Saddam's overthrow for decades, were mostly cheering. By mid-May, the IFTU arose out of the labor movement that had resisted Saddam for more than two decades. Composed of liberals, nationalists, and communists who represented Iraq's Mueslix-like mixture of ethnicity and faith, the IFTU was one of the few existing organizations in Iraq whose membership crossed sectarian lines.
But from the time the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) took possession of Iraq, the Americans running the country not only declined to engage the labor movement in the process of building a nation, but also worked actively to undermine labor's ability to play a constructive role.
First, during his tenure, CPA chief L. Paul Bremer repealed virtually the whole Iraqi legal structure with his so-called 100 Orders. He did not, however, repeal Saddam's 1987 Labor Code, which forfeited the right of public sector workers to bargain collectively. That decision, though deeply foolish for purposes of nation-building, made perfect sense to the movement ideologues staffing the U.S. occupation. Much of the CPA's effort in Baghdad was devoted to helping create a conservative's ideal state, complete with a 15 percent flat tax on individual and corporate income. Bremer's crew was so zealous that they tried, in September 2003, to privatize virtually the whole economy—200 state-owned firms. Legalizing labor unions would not have been helpful, to say the least, to these privatization plans. As Bjorn Brandtzaeg, a former CPA team leader for trade and industry, wrote in the Financial Times, “Instead of focusing on restarting the main industrial complexes as soon as possible after the end of hostilities, a team of ideologically motivated CPA officials with close ties to the US administration pursued a narrow privatization strategy. The result…[s]everal hundred thousand people remained out of work.”
Ironically, and perhaps predictably, this U.S.-engineered unemployment helped undermine the administration's privatization plans. Iraqi workers feared privatization would worsen unemployment, seeing that overseas subcontractors were already importing cheap skilled foreign workers for jobs that Iraqis believed were rightfully theirs. Massive protests organized by Iraqi labor unions ensued. Bowing to labor's demands, the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) petitioned the CPA to forestall privatization until a democratically elected government of Iraqis had assumed power. The CPA reluctantly heeded their advice.
The clash over privatization didn't exactly improve the U.S. attitude towards Iraq's labor unions. In late 2003, the CPA refused to unfreeze union assets, which the IFTU argued were rightfully theirs. In a 2004 interview with Scotland's Morning Call, the IFTU's General Secretary Subhi Abdullah Mashadani complained, “It's not Bremer's money, it is not CPA money—it is our money.”
The truth is a bit more complicated. The IFTU is claiming ownership of the assets of the old GFTU, the once free and independent union that Saddam transformed into a “yellow union” by executing and imprisoning its leadership and appointing apparatchiks throughout its hierarchy. From then on, the GFTU functioned as an “extension of the party and the state,” according to Harry Kamberis of the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center, which provides training and assistance to labor unions in emerging democracies, including to the IFTU. The GFTU still survives in Iraq, leaving it and the IFTU to fight over the frozen assets. As Abdulwahab Alkebsi of the National Endowment for Democracy told me, bad blood exists between the two unions because the “GFTU represented the status quo underneath Saddam and therefore had the assets.” The IFTU contends that the GFTU remains Ba'athist, while the GFTU claims it has cleansed itself of any regime residue. Their struggle aside, there's no clear rationale for why, after two years of occupation, a decision or compromise couldn't have been made that released at least some of the assets to deserving unions—especially since six of the 12 IFTU constituent unions democratically elected their leadership. (When I asked why the U.S. government hadn't come to a decision on the union assets, the State Department's press office replied that the “Iraq office [was] not able to speak on this issue.”)
The U.S. government further signaled its attitude towards Iraqi labor unions in early December 2003 when coalition troops stormed the IFTU headquarters in Baghdad, ransacked their offices, arrested eight union workers, and shut down the office. Within a day, the arrested were released uncharged from Al Muthan airbase, but IFTU headquarters remained shut for seven months. The jailed men accused the United States of relying on information provided by a member of Saddam's old regime, Abdullah Murad Ghny, who owns a major private transport company whose workers had begun to organize. While in jail, Turkey Al Lehabey, the General Secretary of the Communication and Transport Workers Union, an IFTU affiliate, said a local American commander named Kelly had told the men, “Iraq has no sovereignty and no political parties or trade unions. We do not want you to organize in either the north or south transport stations.” He added, “You can organize only after June 2004; for now, you have an American governor.”
The raid had Muhsin and his followers equating American intimidation with Ba'athist repression. “They saw how Saddam Hussein brutalized the labor movement,” Muhsin told me, “and then, [when] they saw the American forces come under the slogan of liberation, [they felt that they were] being terrorized by the same forces and not given a reason why.” The State Department declined repeated offers to comment on any questions relating to the raid and how it perceived the IFTU's role in an independent Iraq; nevertheless, it seems clear that the CPA didn't exactly consider the union a partner.
Union cards and national unity
What's especially maddening about the U.S. government's attitude towards the IFTU is that organized labor has repeatedly played a vital stabilizing and democratizing role in situations that, in some cases, come close to that which Iraq finds itself in today. In Poland, Solidarity quickly evolved from a labor crusade into a social movement that peacefully brought down the communist regime and, once in power, established a system of regular, free elections. The trade-union movement in Brazil had a similar effect, helping to end 21 years of oppressive military rule and usher in 15 years of representative government. But perhaps the most significant precursor comes from South Africa. There, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) not only agitated for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, but, as the apartheid government was losing power, helped keep the country from splintering along racial and tribal lines. “Labor organizations are based on social class identity and as a result cut across divisions of tribe and culture so that you'll find Zulu and Xhosa workers of COSATU,” said Professor Mike Bratton of Michigan State University. “In that sense, COSATU is one of the major organizations that helps build a sense of national, non-tribal identity.” Instructively, all of these countries have remained democracies: According to Freedom House's annual survey, each country is ranked “free” in its commitment to both political rights and civil liberties.
Groups like the IFTU, then, are precisely what Iraq needs to make a successful transition to stable self-government. Iraqi political leaders seem to understand this. In January 2004, the Iraqi Governing Council recognized the IFTU as “the legitimate and legal representatives of the labor movement in Iraq.” America's allies in Iraq also seem to get it. By March of that year, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, speaking before the House of Commons, named the IFTU as the legitimate representative of Iraq's labor movement, England's union partner in the rebuilding of the war-tattered nation.
Even the Bush administration seems to have come around, at least a bit. In January of 2004, one month after the U.S. military raid on the IFTU offices, the president devoted a few lines of his State of the Union speech to acknowledging trade unions as a crucial component of democratization. “I will send you a proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy” Bush told Congress, “and to focus its new work on the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labor unions in the Middle East.” Yet while Bush announced that the building of free trade unions would henceforth be official U.S. policy, the priority that policy has since been given can be seen in the budget numbers. The National Endowment for Democracy has spent $1.5 million for Iraq's free trade union movement—compared with the total of $40 million the State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency gave Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
Years from now, when historians try to figure out what precisely went wrong in the American occupation of Iraq and why, there will be many candidates: the failure to win enough international support; insufficient numbers of ground troops; the decision to ignore plans drawn up by experienced nation-building experts outside the Pentagon. But somewhere on the list will be the administration's indifference, indeed hostility, to Iraqi organized labor. The Iraqi people are paying a price for that attitude.
Matthew Harwood is an editorial fellow of The Washington Monthly and author of www.woodshavingsdaily.blogspot.com
Resistance Is Not Futile: Labor and the Struggle for Iraq
By Joel Wendland
Political Affairs Magazine
23 March 2005
Now that elections in Iraq have produced a representative interim government responsible for constructing new legal and political structures, there is no longer any excuse to postpone US troop withdrawal. While no one should have illusions about a perfect election or the transfer of full national sovereignty as yet, most Iraqis, burdened by 20 years of war, political repression, sanctions and occupation see these past weeks as the first steps in a political process to restore peace, democracy and sovereignty. If the election has produced progress, it is not attributable to the Bush administration or US imperialism. In fact, Bush’s goals and tactics have been antithetical to the interests of the people of Iraq. The illegal and deadly war, occupation and the disastrous failure to adequately aid in the reconstruction of Iraq have blocked progress. If democracy arises from the ashes of the Saddam dictatorship and the Bush occupation, it will be because of the concerted efforts and determined actions of the Iraqi people.
US occupation forces couldn't find any WMD, but they did strike oil quickly enough
The broadest possible movement is still necessary to oppose the illegal war and occupation in Iraq. Some on the left, however, insist on the politically irrelevant tactic of fostering images of a militant Iraqi insurgency fighting the US military and its Iraqi collaborators as the reason for ending the occupation. Fantasies of armed bandits delivering military defeats to the US are unconvincing and won’t mobilize tens of millions of people needed to bring the occupation to an end sooner rather than later. Additionally, painting in broad strokes the victims of car bombings, assassinations, beheadings, and other attacks as collaborators who deserve death is futile and barbaric. Finally, representing the Iraqi people as completely dominated by US imperialism without the ability to resist – unless enacted as violent and destructive – is a paternalistic, and not helpful, portrayal of the Iraqi people. This distorted view of the situation confuses the true struggle for peace and sovereignty. While the Bush administration miscalculated Iraq’s determination to shed the occupation, critics of the political process underestimated the Iraqi people’s insistence on a peaceful and political struggle.
Most of the "insurgency" is motivated less by opposition to the occupation or US imperialism than by finding more advantageous positions within the political framework established by the occupation. It arose primarily as a political rivalry among factions working desperately to provoke ethnic conflict in the period before the election. Rather than an anti-imperialist or a democratic struggle, they sought to foment conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Much of the insurgency originated in Sunni majority cities and is aimed at the security apparatus, other Sunnis who wanted to participate in the political process, civilians operating the infrastructure, and at Shia civilians.
Sunnis comprise about one-fifth of Iraq’s population and some expressed concern over an election that would create a Shi’ite-dominated National Assembly. Extremist elements – mainly Saddam-era Ba’athists and religious fundamentalists – turned this concern into violent attacks on the political process couching their fight in anti-occupation language. While the Shi’ite majority favored the election, many insurgents hoped that ethnic divisions and violence would dominate the political process and prevent the formation of a Shi’ite majority interim government. The basis for an ethnic conflict of this nature has little popular backing in Iraq.
Despite low rates of participation in the election in Sunni majority areas, leaders of 13 Sunni parties have agreed to participate in the political process. A large turnout by Kurdish Iraqis indicates that a much broader multiethnic national movement can be forged in the new political system than election observers on the right wanted and election critics on the left deemed possible. About 86 percent of Iraqi voters rejected the US-backed Ayad Allawi-aligned candidates, showing their determination to establish a legitimate and sovereign national government.
A more fundamental aspect of the situation that has received scant attention, from either the corporate or alternative media, has been the involvement of the organized section of Iraq’s working class in the political struggle for national sovereignty and reconstruction. The leading elements of this section of Iraqi society are the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the coalition that formed the People’s Unity List for the election, and the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). The largest and most rooted is the 200,000 member IFTU. The labor movement’s size after only two years of existence suggests that Iraq’s working class intends to set the course for a democratic, independent and economically stable Iraq.
Background on Iraq’s Labor Movement
The Ba’ath Party came to power in 1968 and immediately launched a campaign to control the trade-union movement. Leaders and activists who refused to side with the Ba’athists were removed from power. At that time, the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) held elections that "took place without secret ballot and in an atmosphere of intimidation and reprisal," says a brief history of Iraq’s trade-union movement written by the underground Workers Democratic Trade Union Movement (WDTUM) in November 2003. (The WDTUM was formed in 1980 as an opposition underground union movement. It received widespread international support, and worked tirelessly to expose the corrupt GFTU. WDTUM activists would eventually surface after the collapse of the Hussein government to organize IFTU.)
When Saddam Hussein took power in 1979, he "ordered a series of purges within the ruling party to obliterate all potential rivals or critics." He installed his henchman in GFTU leadership positions, including former military commander Ahmed Muhsin Al-Dulaimy whose career was made in the fascist "National Guards" and other paramilitary groups with personal loyalty to Hussein rather than as a union leader loyal to workers.
Unions became Saddam’s tool for repressing workers and for domestic "security." Suspected subversives were subjected to spying, harassment, detention, interrogation, torture and killings. According to the Center for Human Rights, an arm of the Iraqi Communist Party, Saddam’s repressive measures would result in the deaths of tens of thousands and even more imprisoned and tortured at places like the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison. The WDTUM unearthed evidence in mid-2003 that shows "the horrors of physical liquidation, mass and summary executions of thousands of political prisoners and detainees, with lists including the names of scores of workers."
During the 1980s, GFTU leaders ordered support for the war against Iran and turned itself into an apparatus for quashing anti-war sentiment. It confiscated wages from workers and turned the money over to the government for military expenses. The union even forced many workers to enter military service. Some 60 percent of workers were conscripted for service at some point during the war with Iran. One million Iraqis are believed to have been killed.
An Independent Union is Organized
After two decades underground, WDTUM activists organized the Iraqi Federation of Workers Trade Unions (IFTU) in late 2003. Through its strong ties to the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU), International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the influential Kurdish trade unions, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and through the association of its members with the Iraqi Communist Party, Arab nationalist and Kurdish democratic parties on the Iraq Governing Council (IGC), IFTU received the IGC’s recognition, though, significantly, not the Coalition Provisional Authority (the occupation’s political arm up to June 2004).
Among the first international delegations to meet with Iraq’s new labor movement was Britain’s Trade Union Congress (TUC). A TUC report published in April 2004 described a fact-finding mission to Iraq by representatives of the TUC, ICFTU, ICATU, the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations in February of 2004. This delegation, as the report says, "came across lively, muscular (even argumentative) trade union grassroots," even though many of the workplaces they visited had only been organized for a few months.
Since the Hussein government’s collapse, according to the report, "workers have thrown out managers ... and union leaders strongly aligned with the Ba’ath Party, and created more active trade union organizations, often breathing new life into formal legal provisions such as on industrial democracy." According to union spokesperson Abdullah Muhsin, dock workers in Umm Qasr, upon hearing of a visit from a delegation from the ICFTU in late 2003, gathered at the Port Administration offices to demand a union. Unions of professionals demonstrated similar militancy.
The TUC delegation’s report highlighted the successes of the new union movement. "Unions are dealing with problems of vandalism (...), unemployment (at over 50 percent...) and inadequate management – failure to pay wages on time and so on." In general, union members saw their wages growing faster than inflation.
The numerous organizing committees that sprang up in different parts of the country highlighted IFTU’s immediate organizing capabilities. According to Abdullah Muhsin, the Basra federation of the IFTU organized "10 trade unions in the Basra region including those for Mechanics, Construction, Transport, Oil, Railways, Dockers and Public Services, for workers in restaurants, hotels, hairdressers, public health and municipalities, water and cleaners" representing tens of thousands of regional workers.
Of great concern in that early period after the collapse of the Ba’athist regime was the continued role of Saddam loyalists in the competing parallel union, the GFTU. After an initial period of competition, Iraqi workers removed Saddam’s bureaucrats and demanded democratic unions. Some GFTU structures were dismantled and others merged with IFTU. There are important indications that the GFTU’s pro-Hussein leadership was removed or left.
The workers and union leaders whom the TUC delegation met in April 2004 indicated the need for "practical solidarity." Training, practical resources, material support, and information technology were high on their list. Workers also expressed a desire to restore a positive image of unions "tarnished by compulsory membership and slavish adherence to the [Hussein] government," says the TUC report. The delegation also spoke with union activists who were optimistic about greater leadership and participation by women workers in the movement.
While the Transitional Administrative Law, imposed by the CPA and adopted by the IGC, confirmed "the right to join trade unions and the right to strike and demonstrate, along with more general rights to freedom of assembly, of expression and protection from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion etc.," union leaders are concerned that legal structures created by the CPA will influence the National Assembly’s views on labor law.
The CPA refused to consult with Iraqi labor leaders about the labor law it imposed. It adopted provisions from the Hussein labor code of 1987 and appointed administrators to local and regional departments that have expressed interest in imposing and enforcing the 1987 code. This 1987 law prohibited unionization in the public sector and pillaged workers’ pensions to enrich the regime and finance its wars. Because most of Iraq’s economy is nationalized (in the public sector), the CPA’s use of this labor code signaled its intention to prevent any further organizing efforts in Iraq’s most important economic sectors and to block organized opposition from workers in those public industries slated for privatization. The international labor movement has rejected the 1987 code and calls for protections of the rights of Iraqi workers to organize.
The occupying authority’s antagonism to the IFTU and its organizing objectives surfaced during a US military raid on the union’s headquarters in Baghdad in December 2003, which according to one news account "involv[ed] 10 armored vehicles and dozens of soldiers. The U.S. troops ransacked and destroyed the IFTU’s possessions, removing documents including minutes of union meetings. They tore down union banners and posters that condemned acts of terror. They smashed windows on the front of the building and smeared black paint over the name of the IFTU." IFTU spokesperson, Abdullah Muhsin called the raid "an attack on Iraq’s working people."
Meanwhile, the IFTU continues to work closely with the International Labor Organization and other labor-related organizations to develop a code that adopts the major pro-labor provisions encoded in Iraq’s Labor Law No. 151 of 1970. This law, which guaranteed such rights as the eight-hour day, pensions, and the right of public sector workers to organize, appeals more to the interests of rank and file workers.
Present Prospects for the Future
The completion of the national elections intensifies demands for the withdrawal of foreign troops and a sincere effort to contribute to an Iraqi-controlled reconstruction effort. Despite attacks from insurgents and harassment from coalition authorities, the organized sections of the Iraqi working class continue to press on for worker rights, a secure and stable country, and end to the occupation and war.
Forces that want to maintain the status quo of instability and violence, according to both IFTU and ICP spokespersons, were behind this wave of attacks on Iraqi National Guard troops, police, and civilians in the months prior to the national election and since. Many civilians and workers killed are not affiliated with either the US or British occupying armies or corporations.
Among this rash of terrorist violence, numerous Iraqi trade unionists have been killed. Railway workers have suffered numerous terrorist attacks in the outskirts of Baghdad and on the railways into the southern part of the country. Over the last few months many have been killed and injured.
In a statement published in early January, the IFTU denounced "further attacks on its members on the railway line between Basra and an-Nasiriyyah and on union premises in Baghdad. These criminal acts designed to intimidate workers and trade unionists follow a well-established pattern of targeted campaigns of assassination and terror which have been waged by those loyal to the former fascist-type, dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein against individual IFTU activists and ordinary workers in recent months."
Terrorists targeted numerous trade-union leaders including Nuzad Ismaiel, president of the IFTU in the Kirkuk region, who was nearly killed twice. Just days after the attacks on the railways, long-time union leader, founder member and IFTU international secretary, Hadi Saleh, was found strangled to death in Baghdad, his eyes blindfolded and hands tied with metal wire. This method was the preferred handiwork of the experts of the Saddam regime. Hadi Saleh was also a leader of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). His assassination sparked immediate international furor from the world’s labor movement.
IFTU praised the trade-union leader’s life and work in its official statement in early January: "Hadi Saleh opposed Bush’s illegal war against Iraq. He returned home to Iraq after the ignominious collapse of the disgraced Saddam Hussein dictatorship. Hadi worked tirelessly to end the occupation and set about the task of re-building independent trade unions in Iraq." Despite attacks directed against Iraqi workers, the IFTU expressed its commitment to "continue the struggle and fight to build a democratic trade union movement and participate in the rebuilding of Iraq."
In its statement the AFL-CIO remarked: "Hadi was a courageous trade unionist fighting for Iraqi workers.... Like all trade unionists, Hadi believed in peaceful solutions to working people’s problems." The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the UK’s Trade Union Congress, the International Labor Organization, the Canadian Labor Congress, along with labor movements in Pakistan, Italy, Spain, Japan, Ireland, Australia the US Labor Against War organization, and other international unions and community organizations expressed outrage at the assassination of Saleh.
Just weeks after Saleh’s murder, IFTU leader Talib Khadim Al Tayee, the President of the Iraqi Mechanics’, Metalworkers’ & Printworkers’ Union (IMM&PU) was kidnapped and subsequently released.
Saleh’s assassination follows the murder of ICP leader Wadhah Hassan Abdul Amir, a member of Iraq’s interim National Assembly, last November. ICP spokesperson Salam Ali states that 16 Party members have been assassinated in the rash of violence. These people "were active on the grassroots level, elected to local councils and leading organizational work in poor and working class districts," Ali said.
Ali told the British newspaper Morning Star last January that terrorist attacks in general are committed with the aim of "strengthen[ing] the hand of those elements, whether in the government or within the political life of the country, who call for an iron fist policy – it’s not difficult to see that these forces are most closely associated with the Americans and also those who, lacking a power base, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo."
The vast majority of the insurgency in his view is comprised of either loyalists of Saddam or religious fundamentalists. "These people want to regain their position. It has nothing to do with liberating the country or achieving progress or a democratic alternative. They are enemies of democracy," he contended. Ali told Political Affairs prior to the election that "some of these acts were aimed to stir up sectarian strife. They aim to alienate the people, marginalize them in the ongoing political process, and spread despair and fear among them. This agenda holds no prospects whatsoever for liberating Iraq and present no prospects or real hope for a better future for the people."The overwhelming majority of Iraqis, says Ali, oppose the agenda and tactics of these groups.
The Iraqi Communist Party along with other progressive organizations put together a list of 257 candidates known as "People’s Unity" for the January 30th elections. The People’s Unity coalition included communists, democrats and independent patriotic and social figures, included 91 women candidates and covered all of Iraq’s provinces. According to the People’s Unity platform, "The candidates represent the full social, ethnic and religious spectrum of Iraqi society."
Ali pointed out that the "ICP’s agenda, calling for eradicating the legacy of both dictatorship and occupation and opening up prospects for a truly sovereign, independent and democratic Iraq is diametrically opposed" to the real goals and objectives of insurgents who fought to undermine the election.
The tactic of spreading terror through killing "holds no prospects whatsoever for liberating Iraq," Ali added, "and present no prospects or real hope for a better future for the people."
In fact, the violence, insisted Ali, "only serves to perpetuate the occupation, provides a pretext for increased foreign military presence (as recent events have shown), helps to bring further death and devastation, and continues the vicious cycle of violence which clearly serve the schemes of extreme right-wing circles in the US under the cover of war against international terrorism."
Ali sees the elections preparing the next phase in the political process. According to UN mandate, the National Assembly will draft the country’s new constitution and prepare the groundwork for the general elections next year. Because the national assembly will represent a broader section of Iraq’s population it will be "more legitimate," Ali said, and will have influence and oversight on the current transitional government and representative.
Most importantly, the national assembly should not be timid about exercising real power and "should seize back control over security matters, as well as the economic policy and other sovereign powers, from the occupiers," Ali insists.
Iraq’s Communist Party proposes to be an important part of the process of regaining sovereignty and building a democratic society. "After decades of repression, fascist terror, wars, sanctions and finally foreign occupation," Ali concluded, Iraqis are longing for "freedom and a dignified life."
The People’s Unity platform calls for full civil rights, religious freedom, and equality for all members of Iraqi society. It envisions a federal democracy that guarantees the rights of minority nationalities. It calls for an end to the occupation and full national sovereignty and control over state apparatuses and policies.
The platform’s main focus, however, is on repairing the economy and recovering from the effects of dictatorship and Bush’s war and occupation. It demands the reduction of unemployment, adequate wages for working people, helping the disabled and pensioners, enforcement of workers’ rights, abolition of Iraq’s debts incurred by Saddam Hussein, full social security, a free health care system, and reforming the public education system. Additionally, the platform calls for the reconstruction of the public economic sector and development of the private sector.
As the election results trickled in and some reports of election irregularities and abuses marred the project, the People’s Unity candidates released a statement that described the election as an "historic event, when the Iraqi people defied the forces of terror, violence and crime." While People’s Unity won only a fraction of the national vote, its role in reconstructing a democratic society cannot be underestimated.
No one can, with certainty, say what Iraq’s future will be. In fact, peace and progressive forces outside of Iraq haven’t the right to try to determine that future anymore than George W. Bush does. But we can side with Iraq’s working class and with its broad democratic movements. As we work to end the occupation and for provision of adequate resources for reconstructing Iraq, we should also include the call for the protection of the rights of Iraqi workers. We should remember and echo the appeal Hadi Saleh made just weeks before his assassination:
"We call our brothers and sisters in the international community to support us to make sure that our rights in organizing formal unions freely and openly is guaranteed and ensured. That our struggle for fair wages, better working conditions, is guaranteed. We consider ourselves as fledglings in the trade union movement, and we need support to build our union. The international labor movement has a lot of expertise, knowledge on this, they could assist us."
On 16th March 1988 Saddam Hussein's fascist-type regime gassed over 5000 Kurdish civilians in the town of Halabja as part of Anfal, the campaign of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Saddam's regime in which 182,000 Kurds disappeared without trace.
'The Joint Kurdish Committee for Anfal and Halabja' supported by the Kurdish Studies Forum of SOAS are organising a meeting in remembrance of Anfal and Halabja at the Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, 10 Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OCG on Sunday 13th March 2005 from 2.00pm – 7.00pm.
ADMISSION FREE
The meeting will encompass presentations by distinguished and expert speakers, including:
- Dr Salah Al-Shaikhly, Iraqi Ambassador to the UK
- Ms Helen Bamber, Founder of the Medical Foundation
- Prof. Kevin Boyle, Member of Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex
- Dr Gareth Stansfield, Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
- Mr Shorsh Haji, Academic and Researcher
- Prof. Dlawer Ala’Aldeen, Academic and Researcher, Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham
- Dr Munther Al-Fadhal, Advisor of Prime Minister-KRG
- Kerim Yildiz, Director of Kurdish Human Rights Project
- Kamran Salih-Beg, representing the Joint Committee of the UK branches of Kurdistan Parties.
- Dr Sherzad Talabani, Academic
There will be time for questions and discussions
- The Programme will also include pieces of traditional and contemporary Kurdish music and songs by Tara Jaff, Adnan Karim and Goran Mufty.
- Poetry reading by Choman Hardi.
- Teatro di Nascosto - Hidden Theatre of Volterra, Italy, will present a short theatre reportage with the name "Memories" or "Yadgariakan" about Anfal and the gas bombing of Halabja. With Annet Henneman and Gianni Calastri.
- A Dramatic production on Halabja called "A message from the martyrs of Halabja" - by Heewa Sheik and group.
- Photo exhibition on Anfal and Halabja – Fed-Bir (Kurdish Federation in the UK)
- Two video documentaries on Anfal and Halabja from South Kurdistan.
1) “Anfal” by Aref Qurbani from Kirkuk Television.
2) “Halabja” by Ibrahim Hawrami, from Halabja City.
Light refreshments and snacks will be provided
GFTU: Instrument of Repression Against Iraqi Workers under Dictatorship.
Published by the Workers Democratic Trade Union
Movement (WDTUM) in Iraq - Nov. 2003.
When the Baath party seized power by a coup
d'etat in July 1968, it launched a systematic
campaign to break up the workers' trade unions.
Only four days after the coup, the regime took
over the offices of the legitimate trade unions,
arrested the leadership and appointed their own
men in union positions.
During the following decades, until the collapse
of Saddam's regime last April, there were no
genuine trade union elections. The first
elections to the official union, the General
Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) that the
Baathist regime was forced to hold took place
without secret ballot and in an atmosphere of
intimidation and reprisal. The official unions
thus lost their representative nature and became
instruments for imposing Baath hegemony over
workers. A vicious purge was conducted to remove
all leaders and activists who refused to pledge
total allegiance to the ruling Baath party.
On many occasions, senior officials of the yellow
trade unions themselves were physically
liquidated. When Saddam Hussein became president
in July 1979, he ordered a series of purges
within the ruling party to obliterate all
potential rivals or critics. Among those executed
were the General Secretary of GFTU who was
himself a minister and a member of the
"Revolution Command Council" which ruled by
decree, the Chairman of GFTU and other officials,
all of whom were Baathist appointees. In January
1983, the Gen. Secretary of GFTU, Khalid Muhsin
Mahmoud, was officially announced dead in a
"tragic car accident".. A new chairman, Ahmed
Muhsin Al-Dulaimy, was appointed by the "General
Workers' Bureau" of the Baath party. He had never
held any trade union position before and was
known to have been a leading member of the
fascist "National Guards" (following the first
bloody coup of the Baath party in 1963) and also
the paramilitary "People's Army" of Baghdad
region in the early 1980s.
Trade union activity under the Saddam's
dictatorship was monopolised by the state, and
the official trade unions were turned into an
apparatus of repression against workers, i.e.
yellow unions, unrepresentative of workers'
interests and incapable of fighting for their
economic and political demands. To cover up its
isolation, the regime resorted to falsified
elections for the leadership of GFTU. But such
tactics failed to hide the fact that these yellow
unions were nothing but an instrument in the
hands of the ruling clique to crush legitimate
trade union rights and workers demands. Despite
sham elections, GFTU's leadership was effectively
appointed by the regime and run by the "Workers'
Central Council" of the Baath party.
Repression
During the late 1970s, a systematically organised
campaign of repression and mass scale terror was
unleashed by the regime with the full
participation of instruments of repression:
Security, Baath party organisations, and the
yellow unions. GFTU carried out information
gathering and spying activities on workers. GFTU
offices became centres of interrogation, beating
up and on many occasions torture. As a result,
thousands of Iraqi trade unionists and workers
suffered harassment, victimisation, and expulsion
from work, detention and torture. Many workers
died under torture in the custody of the
notorious Security services.
As the death toll increased and international
solidarity mounted, the regime's tactics were
changed. In some cases, detainees were given
delayed action Thallium poisoning and released to
die weeks after in their homes, seemingly from
natural causes. Assassinations at factory gates
were carried out as a means of mass terror. Many
workers "disappeared" and their fate remained
unknown.
Since the collapse of Saddam's regime in April
2003, documents of the Public Security Department
have revealed the horrors of physical
liquidation, mass and summary executions of
thousands of political prisoners and detainees,
with lists including the names of scores of
workers. Thousands of mass graves have so far
been unearthed all over Iraq.
Among "disappeared" workers:
Badran Risan (Tobacco workers)
Abdul Razzak Ahmed (mechanic)
Fa'iq Mustafa Abdul Karim (mechanic)
Abdul Khaliq Tahir (Dock workers union)
Radhi Atiyya (Printworker)
Natiq Al-Shakily (Electrician)
Nasr-allah Al-Nabawi (Post Office worker)
A prominent trade union leader, Hindal Jader
Al-Sawadi, from Basra "disappeared" in 1979, and
in 1983 a London-based human rights organisation
(CARDRI) reported that he been killed.
GFTU and Saddam's Wars
The GFTU fully supported the regime's internal
and external wars and criminal adventures. During
the Iraq-Iran war which lasted 8 years (1980-88),
it was instrumental in sending nearly 60% f the
workforce as cannon fodder to the war fronts.
Wages were reduced during that war, firstly by
25-30% in state enterprises, and then 20% was
deducted at source from wages towards the war
effort. Allowances were abolished and working
hours were increased to 12 hours.
Tens were thousands of workers were killed and
maimed during that futile war which resulted in
death and destruction on a horrific scale. In
Iraq alone, the number of those killed was
estimated at 200,000 people. GFTU was used to
quell the angered workers. It played the same
role during the Gulf War (1991) and the last war
(March - April 2003).
GFTU support for abolishing Labour Law!
The GFTU supported Saddam's decree on 11 March
1987 that abolished the Labour Law No. 151 of
1970, which guaranteed such rights as the 8 hours
day, turning workers in the public sector into
government employees thereby denying them the
right to form or join unions. The pension funds
of these workers were handed to the treasury
without compensation.
The decree was announced by the dictator during a
televised meeting with the GFTU leadership and
members of the "Central Workers Office" of the
Baath party.
He said:
"From now on, the title 'worker' is abolished and
all workers shall become official
employees by the State .. As everybody is now a
government employee, there is no more
need for trade unions. Workers in the private
sector will have a special labour law
decreed for them".
New "unions" were created for the private sector
only which, according to Law 52 of 1987, would
work with management to "increase efficiency and
work discipline".
One of the GFTU leaders remarked to Saddam during the 11th March 1987 meeting:
"Sir ? your historic decision has rid us of the problem of the British TUC not
working with us. They always told us that we were working for the government".
In the following days, the announcement was
trumpeted in the official press by GFTU "leaders"
as a "revolution" that was removing class
structures from Iraqi society. Writing in the
regime's daily Al-Thawra on 13 March 1987, GFTU
"Chairman" Ahmad Al-Dulaimi proclaimed that they
were "celebrating this great historic
achievement", and he thanked God and Saddam
Hussein for it.
Trade Union Solidarity in Britain
Under the conditions of fascist terror and war,
and the monopoly of trade union activity by the
state under Saddam's rule, an underground trade
union organisation was formed in Iraq in 1980 -
the Workers' Democratic Trade Union Movement
(WDTUM). The movement encompassed workers
regardless of their nationality, religion or
creed.
The WDTUM enjoyed worldwide support and
solidarity, including the firm and principled
support of British labour movement. This was
demonstrated by a TUC resolution as well as by
the visit to Britain in 1984 of a representative
of WDTUM. He held fruitful meetings and
discussions with many national and regional trade
union leaders, including TUC representatives.
Among the unions he met were NALGO, NUPE,
AUEW-TASS, NGA, FBU, TGWU and ASLEF. Solidarity
and support expressed by the British trade union
movement for the Iraqi people and workers was
reaffirmed.
Thanks to international workers solidarity, all
desperate attempts by the yellow unions, the
GFTU, to establish contacts with British tradeunions
miserably failed. Some were under the guise of
invitations to visit Iraq, to attend conferences
and meetings held in Baghdad and hold bilateral
discussions. But such attempts were exposed as
nothing but a ploy designed to help the yellow
unions break out of their tight international
isolation, to beautify their tarnished image
abroad and to serve as a public relations and
propaganda exercise for their masters.
posted by abdullah
Saddam’s Fight Against Workers
Democratic trade unionists in Iraq have called for increased solidarity with Iraqi workers in the wake of dictator Saddam Hussein’s latest decree ‘abolishing’ workers.
Saddam first announced his decision on 11th March 1987 during a televised meeting with the “leaders” of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) and the members of the “Central Workers Office” of the Ba’th Party.
During the meeting Saddam asked his astonished audience “instead of calling those who work for the state ‘workers’, why not call ALL who work for the state ‘civil servants’, and get rid of the term worker?”. He then continued his argument saying “from now on the Labour Law is annulled and the Civil Servant’s Law takes its place”. So now the wife of a worker is the same as the wife of a general manager, and the same as the wife of the President”!!
The dictator then announced that “the term ‘worker’ is abolished, the Labour Law is abolished, GFTU is abolished and all workers become civil servants@. He saw no need for trade unions now that, in his view, workers did not exist any more!
Saddam’s audience lost no time in praising his latest orders. In the days following the meeting the announcement was trumpeted in the press, and by the GFTU “leaders” themselves, as a “revolution” that was removing class structures from Iraqi society. Telegrams of congratulations poured into the Presidential Office and numerous public celebrations were held. Writing in the regime’s daily newspaper Al-Thawra on 13th March, GFTU “President” Ahmad Dulaimi proclaimed that they were “celebrating this great historic achievement”, and he thanked God and Saddam Hussein for it.
Decree No. 150 from the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) followed on 19th March to formalize Saddam’s decision. This decree, in addition to the measures described above, also announced that the Labour Pension and Social Security Fund was to be handed over to the treasury – i.e. workers had even been robbed of their pension funds! Workers in the state sector (“civil servants”!) were also decreed not to be eligible for resolving their disputes in the Labour Courts.
The decree announced the annulment of Labour Law No. 151 of 1970. This law contained many provisions to safeguard worker’s rights and was passed as a result of the pressure put on the regime by the worker’s struggle. The regime never implemented this law fully.
Saddam Hussein, in an article published by the Iraqis press on 31st March, said that he abolished the Labour Law because it was “causing serious problems to production”.
Since them the working day has been extended to 12 hours in many civilian and military factories. Travel and food allowances have been stopped.
Trade union organization was also decreed to be confined to the “private, mixed and cooperative sectors”. This only covers 20% of Iraq’s workforce. Since then the regime has reorganized GFTU as the trade union for the private sector. “Elections”, directly supervised by the security apparatus, were held on 26th July for the “new” GFTU “leaders”. This move was taken purely for international consumption in order to maintain international trade union contacts.
Saddam’s solution has revealed the nature of his regime quite clearly. In one fell swoop he has abolished an organization that was no longer useful to him. He has unmasked the puppet organisations he has tried to present to the world as genuine trade unions. His actions are also a desperate attempt to trample the growing opposition of Iraqi workers to his brutal rule.
One of the very first actions of the Ba’th regime after the 1968 coup was to arrest trade union leaders, occupy their headquarters and impose its grip on the organisations through its own appointments.
In this way it succeeded in converting GFTU into a yellow trade union structure, whose job became to police workers on behalf of the security services, and to act as a conveyor belt for the management and Ba’th Party decisions.
Workers were thus deprived of effective organisations to defend their interests. The situation became more acute as Ba’thist terror worsened in the late 1970s. GFTU was turned into a systematic information-gathering centre for the security services - indeed, its own leaders perished in the purge of Ba’thist officials after Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979.
Workers have suffered terribly over the last few years. Wages have been frozen and the working hours extended while the cost of living has increased dramatically. ‘Donations’ for the war effort were extracted forcibly from workers’ wage packets. About 60% of the Iraqi workforce was at the warfront. Their places in the factories were taken up by women forced into becoming bread-winners through the loss of their men folk in the war, as well as by migrants who number over 2 million. These have been used as a source of cheap labour.
Against this background the underground Worker’s Democratic Trade Union Movement in the Iraqi Republic (WDTUMIR) was formed in Iraq in 1980. It has become increasingly successful in organising workers clandestinely and in the organisation of actions to defend worker’s rights.
Solidarity with the trade unionists is all the more vital in the present situation. One of the GFTU “leaders” remarked to Saddam during the March 11th meeting: “Sir… your historic decision has rid us of the problem of the British T.U.C. not working with us. They always told us that we were working for the government”. There are many in the British trade union movement who have campaigned actively in solidarity with the Iraqi people.