Interview with Head of the Teachers’ Union in Baghdad

Gary Kent saw Mahdy Ali Lafta on his recent trip to the UK when he was a guest of the TUC and the NAS/UWT.

Teachers lost little time in building a new union. As soon as Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003, they were off and by July had organised the first open conference to set up the Baghdad branch of the Iraqi Teachers' Union. Other open conferences were held and the first open national conference was held in August 2003, which elected a central leadership which also draws representatives from each of the branches in Iraq's 14 governorates. There are equivalent organisations in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The activists were starting from scratch. According to the Head of the Teachers’ Union, Mahdy Ali Lafta, on a recent trip to the UK, “The union under Saddam had merely been a transmission belt for the Baa'thist regime. Instead of defending workers it had assisted the torture squads. Many teachers were jailed, tortured or just disappeared.”

Mahdy's brother was one of the many victims: “He just disappeared without trace and his family was never given any compensation or his pension and had to fend for themselves. Even now there has been no trace of him although many mass graves have been discovered. The Mukhabarat secret police used to tag the bodies with identity numbers but increasingly didn't do this because there were so many bodies.”

The new Teachers' Union has issued 250,000 union cards throughout Iraq and there are more than 75,000 in the Baghdad region alone. The union organises educationalists throughout the education sector – from nurseries to schools to universities.

Mahdy outlined the union's priorities: “Education is fundamental to a healthy society. Teachers need proper training and to retrieve the dignity robbed from them by Saddam. We need smaller class sizes of between 25-30 to avoid stress for teachers and for the students. Schools need to be properly equipped with decently sized rooms and be healthy places to work and learn in. Earnings have improved since the fall of Saddam but most teachers don't have secure homes.”

He said that teachers often have to spend two-thirds of their salary on rent. But the union has plenty of land but no money to develop homes, “In Baghdad we could build 4,000 homes if we could raise the money.”

As for the future, he said, “we are positive that a free, democratic, peaceful and federal Iraq will be built and one that is at peace with its neighbours. We are sure that the extremists will wither away but the news you see only shows chaos and suicide bombs but doesn't show how the police and army are making progress in catching extremists by the score. The Iraqi people now have the confidence to co-operate with the police. The election was an historic moment. The terrorists' back was broken by the election and we hope that turnout will be even bigger in the next election.

We opposed the war but the fall of the dictatorship was wonderful. To those who say they are against the war, we say what war are you fighting. The old regime fell so what should we do now. People should support Iraqis against terrorism and for democracy. We need to reconstruct the economy and not blow up pipelines and destroy jobs.

We want to convince the peace movement to support the struggle for democracy. We are very eager to be exposed to the virtues of well-established mature democracies and ask people to come and see for themselves what we're doing.”

The union is not just concerned with its industrial role but also works with the IFTU. A symbol of this is that the ITU has authorised Abdullah Muhsin who is also the IFTU Foreign Representative to represent the union in the UK.