Worth fighting for

John Lloyd wrote this inspiring article last year in the FT about a Downing Street launch of the TUC book on the life of Hadi Saleh, the slain Iraqi trade union leader, and it’s worth re-reading. (Gary Kent)

John draws these two key lessons.

First, Saleh’s life and death shows what the stakes are, and remain, in Iraq. Those who hated him, and who hate trade unions, do so because their vision of society is of one ruled by either a party or a faith or both that prohibit, on pain of death, any challenge to a totalitarian reality. The "insurgents" who are launching attacks on the US and British forces include groups and individuals who see any effort to build the institutions of civil society as an intolerable provocation. Their attacks on trade unionists continue: of some 10 trade union leaders I met on a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan two years ago, one has been killed and two injured; another was the victim of an attempted kidnapping.

Second, trade unions struggle for rights. Rights are won by dialogue and sometimes industrial action between employers, workers organisations and, sometimes, the state. They are in many ways the most obvious fruit of a free society, and the strike is the most graphic demonstration of freedom. Unions, insofar as they remain organisations for bettering the wages and conditions of groups of workers and are organised or at least controlled by the collective decisions of these workers, represent a necessary balancing force to the powers of corporations, and of the state itself. That this is so has been tested to literal destruction not just in Iraq, but in every tyranny: yet when they do succeed in organising within such tyrannies, they can break it: it was, after all, Solidarity that was perhaps the major initiator of liberation movements that spread from Poland across the communist world in the 1980s.

Nov 03, 2006

It was a small ceremony, in a Downing Street public room. It took perhaps half an hour of the prime ministers day, much of it pressing the flesh of the guests milling about with wine glasses. Then he gave a short speech. He was flanked by Brendan Barber, who is the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress: at one point, Tony Blair turned to Barber, gave a "joke coming up" little grin, and said, "relations between government and trades unions can be difficult, as Brendan and I know... " The guests obliged with a little laughter: Barber made an obligingly rueful moue.

In fact, Blair had been talking about a murder - hideous, agonised, prolonged by torture. He was speaking of Hadi Saleh, the Iraqi trade unionist who was murdered in January last year by men who broke into his house in Baghdad, tortured him, then killed him by strangulation, shooting and burning. Indeed, those who conducted these rituals - ex-Baathist secret police were suspected, but never caught - had many reasons to kill him. The ceremony was to mark the launch of a TUC-published book, Hadi Never Died.

Hadi Saleh had, since his teens, sought to establish independent trade unions in Iraq. The Baath coup of 1968, which brought Saddam Hussein to power, crushed unions not organised by the Baath party: Saleh was condemned to death in 1969 for daring to dissent. A member of the Iraqi Communist Party, which had had to undergo more dizzying changes of line than most such Moscow-tied parties, he was reprieved after five years on death row during a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Hussein, and found refuge in South Yemen, Syria and Sweden. Abroad, he founded the Workers Democratic Trade Union Movement, which helped keep an underground syndicalism barely alive. Returning to Baghdad after the invasion (which he opposed) he co-founded the Iraqi Federation of Workers Trade Unions, and became its international secretary, travelling as much of the world as he could, wearing a battered suit and an unwavering smile.

This was the man whom Blair honoured last week. The next day, answering a question in the Commons from the Labour MP for Blaydon, David Anderson, who is a former mineworkers official, Blair called for an end to curbs the present Iraqi government has put on the unions (it controls their finances). And he added a plug for the TUCs book, written by Saleh’s successor as international secretary of the Iraqi unions, Abdullah Muhsin, and Alan Johnson. The book, said Blair, "makes quite clear the appalling brutality to which people - especially trade unionists and others - were subjected under Hussein and shows how, despite the difficulties, that is changing in Iraq today".

Small matters, both the Downing Street reception and the PM questions. Easily dismissable as a beleaguered prime minister seeking a little solace and support in any quarter, proclaiming success or at least not outright failure in obscure parts of Iraqi society, when it is clear that we are witnessing disaster... and so on.

Three things should be said. First, Saleh’s life and death shows what the stakes are, and remain, in Iraq. Those who hated him, and who hate trade unions, do so because their vision of society is of one ruled by either a party or a faith or both that prohibit, on pain of death, any challenge to a totalitarian reality. The "insurgents" who are launching attacks on the US and British forces include groups and individuals who see any effort to build the institutions of civil society as an intolerable provocation. Their attacks on trade unionists continue: of some 10 trade union leaders I met on a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan two years ago, one has been killed and two injured; another was the victim of an attempted kidnapping.

Second, trade unions struggle for rights. Rights are won by dialogue and sometimes industrial action between employers, workers organisations and, sometimes, the state. They are in many ways the most obvious fruit of a free society, and the strike is the most graphic demonstration of freedom. Unions, insofar as they remain organisations for bettering the wages and conditions of groups of workers and are organised or at least controlled by the collective decisions of these workers, represent a necessary balancing force to the powers of corporations, and of the state itself. That this is so has been tested to literal destruction not just in Iraq, but in every tyranny: yet when they do succeed in organising within such tyrannies, they can break it: it was, after all, Solidarity that was perhaps the major initiator of liberation movements that spread from Poland across the communist world in the 1980s.

Third, Blair is indeed beleaguered. It is true that there are real advances in Iraq in civil freedoms, but the chaos, mainly in the capital, offsets these and makes government and development hard. Also, the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, is under pressure to deliver more, faster, in the way of security, by UK and US leaders anxious to set a date for withdrawing their forces.

But the little scene in Downing Street was larger evidence of a prime minister who knew, as few leaders now do, what the stakes are; the more so since he is tied to one. Through the doughty Labour MP Ann Clwyd, his representative on human rights in Iraq, he remains in touch with a range of groups, as well as unions. He is seeing the gamble he took in seeking the destruction of the regime take a murderous direction. He will be pilloried for it until the day he leaves office, and beyond. Yet he must hope - and so should we, if we value the ideas to which we subscribe - that it will be recognised how much honour he did his country by ensuring the end of a monster. And this least labour-ish of Labour prime ministers did most to give sense to the life and death of Hadi Saleh, trade unionist.