Latest IWPR report

The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has produced the latest Iraqi Crisis Report. This edition includes: Kirkuk council’s difficult task of mending ethnic ties after a bitterly fought election; an insight into the growing number of Arab lecturers who are now able to take jobs at universities in Iraqi Kurdistan post Saddam Hussein; why Iraq's top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has endorsed Jaafari for prime minister and a report into the fears voiced by women in Kurdistan over the introduction of religious law.

Urmee Khan

Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) condemns murder of trade union activist

IFTU Condemns the murder of brother Ahmed Adris Abbas a member of the Transport and Communication Workers Union in Baghdad :

The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) announces the loss of the martyred trade unionist and member of the Transport and Communication Workers Union, brother Ahmed Adris Abbas who was assassinated on Thursady 24th February 2005 in Martyrs’ Square in central Baghdad.

These cowardly attacks and assassinations of our members represent the bankruptcy of the terrorists and their Saddam supporters who focus their campaign of hatred against working people and their trade union representatives.

The IFTU calls on these assassins to be brought to justice and declares that their attempts to terrorise us will not deter our resolve to build a strong, independent and democratic trade unions.

The IFTU calls on the international labour movement to condemn this atrocity against a brave trade unionist who fought to build free unions.

Glory and honour to the martyrs of the Iraqi working class
Glory and honour to our fallen brother, the martyred Abu Fahad.
Shame and disgrace on the terrorists.

c/o UNISON,
1 Mabledon Place,
London WC1H 9AJ.
Tel’: 00 44 79 76 84 68 68
Email: abdullahmuhsin@iraqitradeunions.

Walid Jumblatt on the Iraqi elections: “the Berlin Wall has fallen.”

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Lebanese Druze Muslim community, tells David Ignatius of the Washington Post that "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

Iraq's choice and voting here

There's no denying that the Iraq war is prompting people on the left to rethink whether they can vote Labour at all. Some contemplate voting Liberal Democrat whilst others will vote for Respect or not vote at all. A book, “So who do we vote for?" outlining such debates has been written by John Harris.

He summarises the Iraq problem for such left-wingers: "Moreover, the pro-war faction's endless trumpeting of the fall of Saddam and their idiotically rhetorical question to those who were opposed – Do you want him back? – hardly nullify the sense of a monumental set of errors. If Bush and Blair's statecraft led to the future of Iraq being whittled down to a choice between Ba'athist dictatorship and blood-spattered anarchy, then the accusation of howling political failure still sticks, a fact only underlined by their lamentable neglect of the Middle East peace process."

The book was probably written last year and released quite recently but already feels worn out.

The choice that over 8 million Iraqis made at the election was to go for a process that aims to end the anarchy and build a democracy. Attacks are declining but the insurgents can still deliver death. But there are also signs that the more biddable elements of the insurgency are willing to negotiate and that Sunni groups regret their boycott of the elections and wish to participate in the process.

It's early days yet and they may fail, not least if the international labour movement fails to lift its finger and provide huge solidarity to the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions and other civil society groups which are trying to cement democracy.

As for the Middle East peace process, it is now easier to see that this was held up, in part, by the huge errors of Yasser Arafat's leadership and that his successor may have the ability to negotiate a lasting peace with the Israelis based on a viable Palestinian State and Israeli security. And we are seeing the beginnings of potentially huge changes elsewhere in the Middle East which could boost democracy and thereby make a lasting settlement more likely. Again, one should not be panglossian. Decades of bitterness and oppression aren't going to be removed overnight. (Gary Kent)

Three tipping points

Once more, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts his finger on the most important issues in Iraq and the wider Arab world. He identifies three potential tipping points and concludes that: “what's happened in the last four weeks is not just important, it's remarkable. And if we can keep all three tipping points tipped, it will be incredible.”

The three tipping points are:

“Thanks to eight million Iraqis defying "you vote, you die" terrorist threats, Iraq has been reframed from a story about Iraqi "insurgents" trying to liberate their country from American occupiers and their Iraqi "stooges" to a story of the overwhelming Iraqi majority trying to build a democracy, with U.S. help, against the wishes of Iraqi Baathist-fascists and jihadists.”

“Lebanon went from a country where few dared whisper "When will Syria leave?" to a country where nearly everyone was shouting it, and Syria was having to answer.”

“The Israel-Palestine drama has gone from how Ariel Sharon will use any means possible to sustain Israel's hold on Gaza, which he once said was indispensable for the security of the Jewish state, to being about how Mr. Sharon will use any means possible to evacuate Gaza - with its huge Palestinian population - which he now says is necessary for saving Israel as a Jewish state. The issue for the Palestinians is no longer about how they resist the Israeli occupation in Gaza, but whether they build a decent mini-state there - a Dubai on the Mediterranean. Because if they do, it will fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.”

Harry Barnes has tabled the following Commons motion on the most recent murder of an IFTU leader in Iraq

“That this House unreservedly condemns the murder of Ali Hassan Abd, a leading member of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Union's (IFTU) Oil and Gas Union, who led the way in rebuilding independent unions after the fall of Saddam Hussein and who was assassinated on Friday 18th February by terrorist extremists while returning with his children to his home close to the Al Dorah oil refinery in Baghdad; supports the statement issued by the IFTU Executive Committee, which `condemns this cowardly act and resolves to continue to organise for free, democratic and independent unions' and `pledges to its martyred hero Abu Fahad to carry on organising workers and also for a new and democratic Iraq'; and strongly supports the IFTU's call for the international labour movement to condemn this atrocity against a brave trade unionist, which once again confirms that the so-called resistance is deliberately targeting leaders of the Iraqi labour movement in order to prevent the growth of a new civil society in Iraq, after the brave defiance shown by millions of Iraqis in the last elections.”

The new Iraq

Normblog carries quotes from an article in Prospect magazine (subscriptions necessary) which quotes the author Bartle Bull, who has reported on Iraq for the New York Times, as wondering if media were hoping for the failure of the election in Iraq. These are very telling extracts, which should be studied by anyone on the left who wishes to understand the new situation in Iraq after the elections: “.....The huge turnout has cemented the new Iraqi state as an accomplished fact, and Muqtada and the radical Sunni political groups have shifted their rhetoric to make demands within the new paradigm. It is a momentous shift. No longer is everything illegitimate.” And “.....A process has been unleashed that now has very little to do with America and with our opinions about US power. The process is in the hands of a people who on 30th January showed that they have what freedom requires: deep reserves of patience, tolerance and courage.”

Iraq: moment of truth is coming

Tony Parkinson, in the Australian Age, asks a series of pertinent questions to anti-war activists: "There had to come a time, surely, when the scales would fall from their eyes. There had to come a moment when they stopped chanting the mantra long enough to start listening to the authentic voices of liberation emerging in the Arab world." He concludes that "a moment of truth is coming - when the critics take a deep breath, have a fresh and impartial look at the evidence, and begin to calculate whether the war, this war, was ultimately for the greater good." I would only argue that one didn't have to support the war or to change one's mind if one opposed it but it is vital to see that there is a new set of priorities at the fore, including the need for solidarity with the Iraqi trade unions.

Hat Tip: Normblog

A moving account of Iraqi elections

A “terrifically loudmouthed critic of the Bush administration”, Jeff Simmermon, gives a moving account of the Iraqi elections and concludes that “for the first time in my life, I can say that I was wrong to be compulsively critical of the current administration without seeking my own truth.” He quotes an Iraqi man, three of whose unles were murdered by Saddam as saying "The insurgents and the people fighting the United States are the ones who were favored under Hussein's regime. They had land and houses when nobody else had anything. Now that Saddam is captured, they are fighting violently to cling to what is already gone. They do not represent Iraq. They are the chosen people of an evil, evil man and they have benefited for too long from everyone else's suffering. Older people in Iraq, poor people and the uneducated are confused right now because there is no order and the old ways are gone. But we all are hopeful,and we know that things will get better."

Prospects for social democracy in Iraq

Brian Brivati, Professor of contemporary history at Kingston University, has an incisive and highly important article, Sneering will not help democracy, in today’s Guardian. He rightly takes the left to task: “There has been no greater abdication of leadership by the left since 1945 than its failure in the past decade to articulate how we should transform tyranny into freedom. The progressives should own this issue, but today it is President Bush's…” He concludes that “It is a double game in the next period. The first is to get as many people as possible to build on their first vote and buy further into a democratic oriented Iraq. The second is to use Iraq as a beacon of democracy in a region of tyranny, and for that we can only hope that the constitution is as liberal as possible. It is time for the left to take off the anti-American blinkers and see what voters across the Middle East want our help to build: freedom and democracy. If we don't engage, these new states will have no idea that social democracy was even an option.” I would only add that the role of the Iraqi labour movement is clearly central to this task.

Demos and Disillusionment

A Personal Journey from the Stop the War Coalition to Labour Friends of Iraq By Phil Doré

In March 2003, as the war began in Iraq, I found myself sitting in the middle of a road in Cardiff alongside hundreds of anti-war protestors. I was one of what the media had dubbed 'protest virgins': ordinary, politically non-aligned people who had been galvanised by the impending war into joining a protest march for the first time in their lives.

Like most of the protest virgins, I didn't stay with the Stop the War Coalition for long. The bulk of them turned up in London on February 15th, spent a jolly day marching from the Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park, watched Ms. Dynamite and then went home to gossip over a latte about what a thrilling experience it had been and how they even got to carry a placard.

Personally, I stayed rather longer. I continued to join protests and help organise local STWC events until about three weeks into the war. By this time the US forces were about to take Baghdad. It was also becoming increasingly obvious to me that whatever remained of the Stop the War Coalition post-invasion would be ugly, ineffectual and dominated by extremism and idiocy.

Two years on, and with the benefit of hindsight, my time with the Stop the War Coalition has been a rather depressing experience. Not just because the biggest protest movement in British history failed utterly to have the slightest influence on government policy, but also because of what it illustrated about the state of the British left. At its peak, the STWC represented a broad swathe of centre-left opinion, but its direction was all-too-easily steered not by those people who
represent the best of the left, but its worst. Clapped-out Stalinists, dimwit Trotskyists, armchair Che Guevaras, clueless ultra-left hacks – these constitute the sorry shower who have become the noisiest voices on the left over Iraq.

The Socialist Workers Party are not the only ones to blame for this, but through their manoeuvring in order to dominate the STWC agenda, they have to shoulder more blame than most.

Of those protest virgins who tried to continue working with the STWC, there often seems to have been some sort of pivotal see-saw moment when the desire to register one's protest at the war became overtaken by the sheer levels of blithering stupidity on display at STWC events. For an acquaintance of mine, that moment was when American flags began to be burned on protest marches. For me, it was the "Victory to the Resistance" placards printed by the SWP a couple of weeks into the war. Declaring your opposition to an ill-conceived, potentially disastrous foreign policy adventure is one thing; being a cheerleader for Saddam's Fedayeen thugs is quite another. It wasn't a coincidence that around this time I stopped turning up to STWC meetings and
started "forgetting" to return the voicemail messages of STWC activists.

Once the invasion was over and the occupation began, one would have expected that the priority of a decent left would have been to begin building solidarity with democratic and progressive forces in Iraq.

The anti-war movement's failure to do so is shocking. At times they've not only ignored Iraqi leftists and democrats, they've actively hindered them. The Iraqi Communist Party opposed the war, but once it was over joined the Iraqi Governing Council. To an ordinary mortal like me, getting involved with the closest approximation of a democratic forum in post-invasion Iraq seems like a sensible and obvious move in order to try to influence events. To the ideologues of the hard left, however, this was collaboration.

When a representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions told a Labour Party conference that an immediate withdrawal of British troops could lead to civil war and the balkanisation of Iraq, it struck me as a straightforward
statement of the bleeding obvious. Whatever one may have thought about
the original war, a sudden pullout of foreign troops is a self-evident recipe for disaster; a quick and easy way to massively escalate the chaos and turn Iraq into a deeply unpleasant place where anyone who is a democrat, a socialist, a communist, a liberal, a trade unionist, a feminist or a human rights campaigner is liable to wind up receiving a bullet in the back of the head.

Despite the sheer obviousness of the IFTU representative's words, this was, once again, collaboration. This time the charge was made in an official Stop the War Coalition statement. Chillingly, the same statement also condemned the IFTU's "view that genuinely independent trade unionism in Iraq can develop under a regime of military occupation." So trade unionists aren't even allowed to try to represent Iraqi workers? Socialist solidarity, comrade. Even more
chillingly, this was followed by a call for Iraqis to resist the occupation "by whatever means they find necessary." This was only a week or so after certain Iraqis found it necessary to behead Ken Bigley. A couple of weeks later, other Iraqis found it necessary to murder the humanitarian aid worker Margaret Hassan.

The words "by whatever means they find necessary" were soon expunged from the statement, followed by unconvincing denials that they had ever said it in the first place. Despite the denials, it's always been fairly obvious whose side the STWC leadership see themselves as being on. We can find the evidence in STWC vice-president Tariq Ali's words that, "The immediate tasks that face an anti-imperialist movement are support for Iraqi resistance to the Anglo-American occupation" and that the resistance is "the classic initial stage of guerrilla warfare against a colonial occupation." We can find it in George Galloway's comparison of the Iraqi insurgency to the French resistance in World War Two, and in John Rees' comments that "I don't propose to lecture the Iraqi people on the methods they use, and neither should we."

So, to summarise, beheading terrified hostages is more forgivable than engaging with the occupation in order to try to develop a working democracy.

Those who want the occupation to be replaced by an Islamofascist theocracy or a return or to Baathist tyranny are worthy of our support. Those who want an orderly handover to a democratic state are not. All this reminds us of George Orwell's famous comment that, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Thanks to the ideological agenda of the SWP and their allies, the overriding principle guiding STWC policy has become not democracy, human rights or international law, but anti-imperialism. When anti-imperialism is taken to its idiot extreme (and it all too often is) then anyone who is an opponent of Western foreign policy becomes declared an ally to be supported. The trouble with this is, all too often this means supporting people with little or no regard for
democracy, progressivism, the Geneva Convention or even basic human decency. The Vietcong, General Galtieri, the IRA, the Soviet Union, Hamas, the Iranian ayatollahs, and now the brutal thugs of the Iraqi insurgency: all have received declarations of support from so-called "progressives" who really ought to know better.

Naturally, all of this has no impact whatsoever on actual policy. The SWP are about as influential in the corridors of power as the Flat Earth Society are in geography classrooms. But the hysterical voices of the tinpot "anti-imperialist" ideologues can drown out the more reasoned voices of those who want to see a decent left founded on principles of democracy and humanitarianism. The SWP are not a threat to New Labour or the Bush agenda. They are a threat to genuine left-wing dissent.

It was this sorry state of affairs that I was contemplating when I was invited to join Labour Friends of Iraq. The key idea behind LFIQ is a straightforward one: no matter whether you supported or opposed the war, the important thing now is to get behind the democrats and left-wingers in Iraq, beginning with the Iraqi trade union movement. I was sympathetic to the idea. How many times does one have to rerun the old argument about what should have been done back in March 2003? I opposed the war, and don't apologise for that. Even so I'd rather work with someone who supported the war but wants to ensure the best possible future for the Iraqi people, than someone who'd happily see an entire nation burn just to prove Bush and Blair wrong.

There was, however, a slight snag. When the war began I'd vowed never to vote Labour again. Now I was being asked to join the Labour Party in order to support the Iraqi trade unions. I opted to go back on my word and signed up with Labour and LFIQ. If the only decent, pro-democracy alternative to the STWC was inside Labour then that was where I would go.

So far I haven't had cause to regret pledging my support to LFIQ. By challenging the far left's smears and libels against courageous Iraqi trade unionists, LFIQ and others have succeeded in forcing the SWP and co to mute their hostility to those Iraqis who have the temerity not to follow the SWP party line. (I suppose an apology from the SWP might not be possible? No? I thought not.) There is a need to support Iraqi leftists operating in difficult and dangerous conditions, and LFIQ have highlighted that need where others have ignored it or tried to hinder it. It would be the ultimate irony if, after all the cries of betrayal over New Labour, a new form of dissent based on decency and
democracy were to emerge from within the ranks of Labour itself.

A new, decent left needs to emerge to challenge the totalitarian pseudo-left. The voices of this decent left can be heard not just in LFIQ. They can be heard on internet blogs such as Harry's Place, in the thoughtful analyses of writers such as Johann Hari, in Peter Tatchell's bloody-minded commitment to the principle of universal human rights.

For now, Labour Friends of Iraq have generated a remarkable change in my own outlook. In March 2003 I felt ashamed to have supported Labour in the past, and proud to march with the Stop the War Coalition.

In March 2005, I feel ashamed to have supported the Stop the War Coalition, but I can now once again feel proud to be a Labour supporter.

Iraq – murder of oil trade unionist and wave of kidnappings mark surge in worker intimidation

The International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICFTU) reports that “Iraq is an increasingly dangerous place for trade unionists.”

The State of Iraq: An Update

Brooking Institution analysts Adriana Lins de Albuquerque, Micahel O'Hanlon and Amy Unikewicz write in the New York Times (registration required) that “Iraqis remain divided in their views toward the United States. Many are grateful that the American-led coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein but resentful about much that has happened since…While there is no overwhelming pressure for an immediate withdrawal of coalition forces from the public or major political leaders, surveys suggest that the Iraqis are eager to begin discussing a responsible exit strategy.” The survey was undertaken before the January 30th elections in Iraq.

Urmee Khan

The weekly column by Alan Johnson

Islamic Fundamentalism and the Left

What links John Rees, leader of the ‘Socialist’ Workers Party and the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt? What links Alan Simpson MP, Chair of Labour Against the War and ‘Sheikh Hassan Zarkani, representative of the Al Sadr movement, Iraq’. No, this is not a game of seven degrees of separation. It is the platform of the Third ‘Anti-Imperialist Cairo Conference’.

The ‘Cairo Conference’ was launched in 2002. At it, the Iraqi delegation to the Cairo Conference was headed by Nabil Negm (an under-secretary in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry who rose to become chief political adviser to Saddam Hussein) and Saad Qassem Hammoudy (a leading member of the Baath Party, Secretary-General of the Iraqi Conference of Arab Popular Forces, and Iraqi Ambassador to the Arab League.

Key speakers alongside these Saddamists were John Rees of the SWP and George Galloway. Writing in New Politics in 2002, Stan Crooke noted that among the other participants were ‘Moustafa Bakri, editor of the Egyptian magazine Al Osboa, attended the conference. Al Osboa is a publication renowned for its denunciations of homosexuality and human rights activists. In 1999 the International Human Rights Federation published a report accusing Bakri of ties to the Egyptian security services’.

The Iraqi Communist Party described the first Cairo Conference as “a conference of solidarity with Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

In 2003 the Cairo Conference coincided with the capture of Saddam Hussein. As news filtered through that the tyrant had been caught it was George Galloway who expressed the outrage of the conference. ‘But Galloway had taken the microphone. “The Prisoner is Saddam,” he said, “he’s been paraded on the TV screens and he’s been virtually humiliated. His enemies are having a good laugh but it won’t be the last laugh,” at which point applause filled the hall’ (Al-Ahram Weekly Online report of the second ‘Anti-Zionist and Anti-Imperialist Conference’, held at Cairo, Egypt).

At the final press conference of the Second Cairo conference John Rees, a leader of the SWP sat happily between George Galloway, the man who hailed Saddam Hussein and spent Christmas with Tariq Aziz, Ramsey Clarke, defender of Radovan Karadzic and a member of the International Committee To Defend Slobodan Milosovic and Azzam Tamimi, who, according to Louise Ellman MP, speaking in the House of Commons, is an advisor to Hamas and hopes the Jews drown with the boats they are driven out of Israel in (Tamimi denies these charges).

A new political force is emerging, part ‘anti-imperialist’, part fascistic, each chasing a purity without spot. The Rees-Galloway project is to yoke the left to ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’. The democratic left needs to raise our dropped jaw and take its measure. We need a better understanding of the rise of Jihadi Fundamentalism and a more compelling political program to combat it.

When he was a socialist, Max Shachtman argued that if capitalist society continued to decay and if the organized working class failed to lead an alliance of forces to a progressive democratic collectivism then a totalitarian doppelganger, Stalinism, could emerge as a reactionary alternative to impose a reactionary ”bureaucratic collectivism.” While history never repeats itself, we can use the logical structure of Shachtman’s analysis – “if…if…then” – to fathom the rise of Jihadic Islamic Fundamentalism.

If the national, secular, often state-capitalist, modernizing projects of the bourgeoisie and state elites fail to develop the society and culture, and become stalled in corruption, tyranny, and cultural stagnation (in 2001 only 300 books were published in Egypt), leaving the rulers unable to secure the support of large sections of the middle class; if global capitalist competition, penetration, and dislocation presses upon that middle class, sending it into panic and rage, disintegrating welfare systems established by the state-capitalist regimes in the post-war period, ravaging old social relationships but not creating new ones, threatening the old exploiting classes – the bazaar merchants, the religious establishment, sometimes landlords; and if the political leaderships and organizations of the Left are widely discredited for having tailed the nationalist projects of the bourgeoisie (the Egyptian CP dissolved into Nasser’s front in the 1960s, for instance), and if the working class is weak and not organized independently, then not only the middle classes (small manufacturers, shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, market merchants, frustrated university graduates) but also those classes created by primitive capital accumulation and pauperization, a cast-off sub-proletariat, a mass of marginalized semi-proletarian poor and distressed petit-bourgeois (who were, in truth, never really won over to secularism during the post-war years) are “opened up” for recruitment by the traditional intellectuals of political Islam, the ulemas. These forces can be swept up into a mass movement aimed inchoately at “the West” or “Imperialism” or “the Infidels,” chasing the entirely reactionary “solution” (actually incapable of implementation) of using modern military technology and, they hope, state power, to turn back the clock to the pure Islamic state of the 7th century based on Sharia law.

Each of these pre-conditions for the rise of political Islam can be found, with national peculiarities of course, in the countries that have suffered its spectacular rise.

The Islamic Fundamentalists appeal to a deep sense of humiliation. Bernard Lewis, in his book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, is right (whatever his political failings) to focus attention upon that anguished question which torments the Islamic world: how did the very fulcrum of civilization become dependent, defeated, backward, corrupt, and poverty-stricken? The Fundamentalists say “they did it!” pointing to a cast of villains such as “infidels,” “westernizers,” corrupt oil sheiks, Jews, and uppity women.

Fundamentalist Islamic intellectuals such as Sayyid Qutb, Mawlana Mawdudi, and Ruhollah Khomeni laid the foundations for the rise of Political Islam. When modern secular nationalism stalled amid defeat and failure in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Stalinist-led workers’ movements lost the allegiance of major social layers, then the Islamists became the repository of the hopes and dreams of millions. In turn, the Islamists worked tirelessly to redefine those dreams as nihilist fantasies. The result has been a wave of Islamist political militancy and violence from Iran to Algeria, Sudan to Afghanistan, Kashmir to Chechnya, and, in the form of al-Queda, a global Jihadic terrorist network.

How does this mayhem connect up to Shachtman’s idea that “capitalism is decaying”? It depends how “decay” is defined. If Shachtman meant the “decline of the productive forces” then he was just plain wrong. The global explosion in the productive forces of the post-1945 world, and the surge in life expectancy and living standards associated with it, speaks for itself. World GDP increased six-fold from 1950-1998, with an average growth rate of nearly 4 per cent a year, according to the OECD. Real GDP per capita rose by 2.1 per cent a year between 1950 and 1998. That compares with less than 1 per cent a year between 1820 and 1950.

In fact Shachtman defined decay rather differently: “To say that capitalism is decaying is to say that it is increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems of society, of maintaining economic and political order.” That is an accurate indictment of the “runaway world” of the 21st century: a voracious, amoral capitalism eats up the resources of the planet, churns up communities, mocks social institutions from the family to representative democracy, and turns everything it touches – and it touches everything – into a commodity to be bought and sold. This pathology generates a counter-pathology: an irredentist throwback to a simpler time of order, tradition, tribe, and blood. Benjamin Barber has called this the dialectic of McWorld and Jihad.

We have tamed the irrational forces of nature but we remain at the mercy of irrational social and political forces we have created, from the religion of the market to the market place of religions. Humanity is kept in a state of suicidal macro-irrationality “increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems.”

The Jihadis offer no answer to any of this. They are a desperate, anti-modern reaction to the impasse. And half the region are aged 25 or under.

If the democrats are to push them aside, and reconnect with Muslim workers and diverse progressive elements in society who experience the Fundamentalists as their mortal foe, then we must first define them correctly as a deadly enemy not a potential ally.

When Islamic Fundamentalism first emerged the Left defined it as analogous to fascism. The Arab Trotskyist Salah Jaber wrote in 1981 that “Islamic Fundamentalism is one of the most dangerous enemies of the revolutionary proletariat.” He pointed out that “the fundamentalist movement shares many of the characteristics of fascism outlines by Trotsky: its social base, the nature of its political ideology, its fierce anti-communism and its totalitarianism”. But there were also differences between classical fascism and fundamentalism. In some respects “the fundamentalist movement is, in fact, more backward than was fascism”. It drives the historical clock backward to a reactionary utopia with more faith and zeal than the classical fascists. But the Fundamentalists, as part of this “more reactionary” drive backwards, can also challenge big private capital. This contrasts to the role of classical fascism as the brutish guarantor of big capital in the face of a mass workers movement. All this means socialists will find themselves on the same demonstration, protesting the same social ill, from time to time. However “any compromises proposed by the fundamentalists as a result of this type of situation pose enormous dangers for all sections of the left, both moral and physical”. Tactical flexibility must be balanced against the overriding political conclusion that it was “absolutely and under all circumstances necessary to combat its ‘reactionary and medieval influence.’” Even the so-called “anti-imperialism” of the Fundamentalists, Jaber pointed out, does not amount to what socialists mean by that term. It represents only an inchoate reactionary hostility to “the hated ‘west’…all the political and social gains of the bourgeois revolution”.

Compare Jaber’s approach to a Lindsey German chasing ‘the Muslim vote’, a George Galloway denouncing the free Iraqi trade unionists as ‘Quislings’ in the Arab press, a John Rees, cosying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, or a Professor Alex Callinicos, sniffily waving away the “hullaballo” about the torture and murder of Hadi Saleh, a leader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, by the ‘resistance’. That left is finished whatever its noisy show.

It is finished because once Fundamentalism gained a mass base and - all-important, this, for an essentially anti-American left - came into conflict with the USA, then some (forgetting that the possession of a mass base was also typical of classical fascism, forgetting that totalitarian Russia was also in conflict with the USA) allowed their rhetoric about the USA being “the heart of the beast” to merge with the political Islamists’ talk of “the Great Satan.” Reactionary Islamic Fundamentalism was now redefined as “Radical Islam” and the anti-Semitic zealots of Hamas, for instance, were redefined as bone fide “anti-imperialist” forces. This redefinition was part of a wider collapse of independent working class socialist politics. Too often leftists halt at a merely negative and inchoate oppositionism to whatever the U.S. is doing. A complex world has been reduced to a face-off between two camps, “Imperialism” versus “the Resistance.” (the crudity is dressed up in post-structuralese, but crudity it is). These leftists define the political Islamists as part of “the Resistance,” and, of course, in that act redefine themselves as the critical supporters of the political Islamists. The price paid in the West has been the loss of independent political judgement and much idiocy about, for instance, the “anti-imperialism” of groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Elsewhere the price has been much higher. In 1977 in Pakistan, the Left sided with Jamat al-Islami against Bhutto, imagining a tactical alliance against a common enemy. They were used and then jailed. During the Iranian Revolution negative oppositionism and inchoate “anti-imperialism” pushed the Left into the arms of Khomeini, the so-called “objective anti-imperialist.” They were led to his gallows.

Our job is to push on past a stalled modernity and a demented reaction. How? By a consistent fight for democratiya. That’s how the decent left we need will come to know itself and challenge the pro-tyrant left we have. This column will publicise the debates and the struggles of the Iraqi democrats over the coming 12 months.

Parts of this column first appeared in New Politics 35 in Summer 2003.

Veteran left-wing rebel breaks ranks with anti-war movement and urges them to move on to boost solidarity with Iraqi labour movement

One of "Blair's bastards" has rebelled against the hard left Labour Against the War (LATW) group in a split that will call the group's future into question.

The veteran left-wing MP Harry Barnes, who helped launch LATW, has resigned from the group because "Labour Against the War hasn't adopted a creditable analysis of the changed position and adopts an approach which aids terrorist, religious extremist and anti-democratic forces in the Middle East."

The North East Derbyshire MP opposed the war in every Commons vote but says that the group, which includes Commons warhorses such as Alice Mahon MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP and Alan Simpson MP, has failed to understand the new realities of Iraq: "Unfortunately, the invasion took place but this led to a situation where the options facing the Iraqi people changed."

Mr Barnes says that "I thought it was right to oppose the war. But history moves on and the Iraqi people now have a golden opportunity to take back their country and build a decent non-sectarian democracy based on social justice. There are huge obstacles but I hope that parts of the left don't make themselves part of the problem by ignoring the urgent need to back the new Iraqi labour movement. Labour Against the War is standing in the way of solidarity and I have resigned to help alert the wider movement to the need to support Grassroots Iraq."

The MP has also issued a blistering attack on the Lancet figures of the numbers of civilians killed in Iraq.

He said: "I don't follow Stalin's dictum that 'A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.' Every death of a human being is an immeasurable loss to all humanity. But we must tell the truth about Iraqi deaths. The Lancet figure of 100,000 civilian deaths is so often used by some anti-war figures that it is commonly but wrongly accepted as a fact. The Lancet figure is wide of the mark. It's bad enough that, say, 20,000 people have died but the use of
exaggerated figures shows that some anti-war leaders are more concerned to win points, regardless of truth, than to make an intellectually rigorous assessment."

The MP also slams the anti-war movement over "their attempts to rubbish the elections."

"One can have been strongly opposed to the war and yet recognise that Iraqis have shown that they wish to take back their country from both the "resistance" and foreign troops. Both motivations were present. And who can blame the Iraqis for wanting democracy free from foreign interference, after so many decades of one of the most awful regimes on earth."

He adds that "whilst it's understandable to call for troops out now, it does buck international law, which says that the Iraqis should decide on this matter."

Mr Barnes has helped form a new group, Labour Friends of Iraq with Ann Clwyd, the Prime Minister's Special Envoy to Iraq on Human Rights to unite those who took different positions on the war.

Mr Barnes said: "None of us who opposed the war likes how we got here but we must face the facts if we are to provide solidarity to Iraqi democrats in their hour of utmost need. My plain message to those on the left who abuse statistics and rubbish Iraqi democracy because they cannot stand the idea that Tony Blair or George Bush get some sort of credibility from them is to get real and do so quickly."

Ends

Mr Barnes will today table this Commons motion deploring the latest murder of an Iraqi trade union leader

That this House unreservedly condemns the murder of Ali Hassan Abd, a leading member of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Union's (IFTU) Oil and Gas Union, who led the way in rebuilding independent unions after the fall of Saddam Hussein and who was assassinated on Friday 18th February 2005 by terrorist extremists while returning with his children to his home in close to the Al Dorah Oil Refinery in Baghdad; supports the statement issued by the IFTU Executive Committee, which "condemns this cowardly act and resolves to continue to organize for free, democratic and independent unions" and "pledges to its martyred hero Abu Fahad to carry on organising workers and also for a new and democratic Iraq;" and strongly supports the IFTU's call for the
international labour movement to condemn this atrocity against a brave
trade unionist, which once again confirms that the so-called resistance is deliberately targeting leaders of the Iraqi labour movement in order to prevent the growth of a new civil society in Iraq, after the brave defiance shown by millions of Iraqis in the last elections.

Harry Barnes MP urges anti-war party activists not to pick and mix candidates

The Labour Against the War Group has circulated a bulletin in which it says that "We are drawing up a list of campaign contact details for those Labour MPs who opposed the war and oppose the continuing occupation of Iraq.

We are urging every LATW sponsor and affiliate to get involved in campaigning for anti-war Labour MPs. If you don't have an anti-war Labour Party candidate we will tell you where the nearest one is – so you can join their campaign. There are some anti-war Labour MPs with small majorities – they deserve our support."

Of course, it is entirely reasonable for party members not to work for particular candidates, even their locally selected ones, on grounds of conscience. Some members, for instance, would find it difficult to work for someone with strong views for or against abortion. A candidate's support for the war in Iraq could also be classified as a matter of conscience.

However, there is something quite different about a group of Labour Party members organising what amounts to a boycott of particular candidates on these grounds.

Labour Party candidates are selected by due democratic process and, whilst no-one can force members to work for them, organising this collectively is a dodgy precedent and we ask LATW to retract this ill-advised tactic.

IFTU strike action at Baghdad Hotel

IFTU web site (see bottom of this page) reports that "400 hundred workers are staging strike action at one of Baghdad’s top hotels. The Public Service Workers’ Union committee (an IFTU-affiliated union) in the Palestine Hotel called for strike action on 20th February 2005 after negotiations with the hotel management for a wage increase had failed.

Negotiations have resumed between the management and the union today. The workers have said that they will continue their strike until their demands are fully met.

The IFTU supports the action of the hotel workers' union committee and stands in solidarity with the Public Service Workers' Union demands. Workers at the nearby Sheraton 'Baghdad Hotel' have staged a successful strike recently in which they won a wage increase and better working conditions.

Jane Ashworth examines the claims of the FWCUI

The Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) report, 'now a new wave of heroic strikes have swept industries like the Textile in the city of Kut, in which the workers were suppressed and shot at by the authorities, also the strike of Electricity Power Station in Nasriyah, the chemical, and plastic industry, and soft drink factory workers in Baghdad, and in Basra Electricity Power Station.' They also report that the workers 'managed to impose their demands on the US appointed Interim Government'

So far so good. The reasonable reader can assume the battle for the de facto right to organise is going well. But the article starts to loose credibility with this next paragraph, 'the FWCUI has become the only organization trusted by the (striking) workers to negotiate on their behalf and strengthen their position through it.' But again, the reasonable reader might lend the benefit of the doubt and reckon the FWCUI have a few good people who know how to lead a strike. Knowing the FWCUI are very small, you might think that they were lucky to be so well positioned in this wave of militancy.

However, the end of the article confirms growing doubts with this appeal to readers to '… please participate in strengthening the strikes of workers and their struggle by supporting the only true representative of the workers in Iraq Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI).'

In just a few lines we have travelled from supporting the strikers to declaring the FWCUI as 'the only true representatives of the workers'. And such self-aggrandisement is enough to make the same reasonable reader run away because we have been through this before. When Steve Biko, from the Black Consciousness Movement, was perhaps the best known of the younger South African militants and non-ANC unions were leading strikes in the mines, the ANC nonsensically insisted it was the sole legitimate voice of progressive South Africans. That was the practical example of the more basic truth: no-one speaks for everyone.

Every working class is fragmented; every political situation provokes many responses. And so it is with Iraq.

Its right to support these strikers who so ever they lean on for advice and leadership. But it’s quite another to willingly line up behind an organisation which claims the impossible.

'The Change Cannot be Reversed'

Iraq the Model on the prospects for democracy in the Middle East

Omar at Iraq the Model sets out why he remains optimistic about the prospects for democracy in Iraq and across the region. His message: "Take a look at my country and learn from my people and have faith in yourselves because if you keep thinking with such negativity you will never get the change you want. If the people really want something they can achieve it and they will find many hands reaching out for them with support and advice.

"We in Iraq weren't fully prepared for the change here as well but we took advantage of the moment and we believed that this is what we want. Many spectators were expecting a civil war in Iraq and it didn't happen and won't happen and many are still warning of a possible theocracy in Iraq and I believe that this is impossible too.

"Bottom line is: the world has changed, we're not living in the fifties anymore and when a tyrant is kicked out, no other tyrant can claim his place. Why? Because nothing can be done behind closed doors anymore, the whole world can watch and have a say in almost everything everywhere and the era when thugs could reach power against a nation's choice is over. The world has simply changed and the change cannot be reversed". (AJ)

President Chirac Does Not Get It (1)

Guess how many countries still refuse Iraqi requests to train Iraqi military and police forces inside Iraq? Six (France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece and Spain). Guess how many officers France has pledged to the NATO mission in Brussels set up to train Iraq’s security forces out-of-Iraq. One. And he is described as a ‘mid-level’ officer. Pathetic.

Iraqis want to take their country back. They demand training and resources to defeat the resistance. President Chirac generously built Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor. Democratic Iraq needs that kind of generosity again, in the shape of a massive training programme for its security forces. (AJ)

Briefing meeting with Iraqi Teachers' Union

Gary Kent and Eric Lee met Shari Ali, from the Teachers' Union of Iraq. Shari explained that he represented an independent movement which had arisen after the fall of Saddam with branches in 16 Iraqi provinces, all except for Iraqi Kurdistan. The union has over 400,000 members, 75,000 in Baghdad alone, in all parts of the education sector from primary schools to university level.

They had managed to retrieve the buildings of the old unions but these were in a bad way having been destroyed and looted and they only found a few hundred dollars in assets. They have negotiated with the interim government and succeeded in reinstating 30,000 teachers dismissed under Saddam.

He proudly showed us his own membership card – an impressive laminated
card with his photo and blood group, which illustrated to us the advanced level of union organisation.

The union had won higher pay for its members but faced big problems because there aren't enough schools and classes have more than 30 peoples and some have to run concurrent shifts. More schools would also generate jobs for teachers many of whom also need homes.

Referring to the textbooks from the Saddam era, he said that "the old one-party ideological system was totally abolished and we need to catch up with the rest of the world." He praised the assistance being given by British unions and also by American unions.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is to donate 200 mobile satellite phones, electronically connect all branches with the centre in Baghdad and
with the Education International network and train 200 activists. The union intends to affiliate to the EI as soon as possible.

This support from the AFT is a major start but no-one should be under any illusions that this generous act will complete the task of allowing this union to overcome years of totalitarianism and isolation.

He agreed that a new secular, federal and democratic Iraq had the potential to marginalise the so-called resistance and said that "We were proud that our schools were used for voting. The elections were a severe blow to those extremists. People want a new politics."

We asked why the union was not a part of the IFTU. Shari explained that professional associations had by tradition worked separately but his union works closely with the IFTU. The union also enjoys very good relations with the Iraqi Kurdish unions.

Women's rights in Iraq

Over at Salon, Mitchell Prothero looks at the prospects for women’s rights in Iraq, saying that “many Iraqi women remain extremely anxious as religious party leaders, with strong ties to Iran, sit down to write a constitution.” It concludes that “If the Shiite can indeed harness the sense of self-sacrifice that they have shown their leaders for hundreds of years, whether on the field at Karbala or in defying Saddam, and find a middle ground with their political opponents, maybe Iraq does have a chance for a representative, egalitarian government -- one that incorporates lasting and equal rights for women.”

‘Resistance’ Good for Something

The folks over at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Aqil Jabbar and Yaseen Madhloom, report that pupils have been given extra holiday time as schools used as polling stations undergo repairs following shell damage.

“I’m glad they hit our school because I don’t want to have to wake up early,” said Laith Mushtaq, 10, who goes to the Ibn Sina primary school in Baaqubah.

On a more serious note IWPR report the telling question raised by Zainab Abbas Hussein, a 17-year-old student at a school in Iskandariyah. "What do the terrorists want from us? They want to destroy Iraq but we won’t give them that chance. We will complete the school year anywhere we can, even if it’s in the yard of another school." (AJ)

IFTU condemns murder of brother Ali Hassan Abd (Abu Fahad) of the Oil and Gas Workers Union in Baghdad

The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) mourns the loss of the martyred trade unionist and member of the Oil and Gas Union, brother Ali Hassan Abd who was assassinated on Friday 18th February 2005 by terrorist extremists while returning with his children to his home in al Dorah District, close to the Al Dorah Oil Refinery in Baghdad.

The IFTU Executive Committee condemns this cowardly act and resolves to continue to organize for free, democratic and independent unions. The IFTU pledges to its martyred hero Abu Fahad to carry on organising workers and also for a new and democratic Iraq.

The IFTU remembers Abu Fahad as a courageous trade unionist who was one of the first to organize the union formation in the oil industry at Al Dorah Oil Refinery in Baghdad in April 2003.

The IFTU calls on the international labour movement to condemn this atrocity against a brave trade unionist who fought to build free unions.

Glory and honour to the martyrs of the Iraqi working class.
Glory and honour to our fallen brother, the martyred Abu Fahad.
Shame and disgrace on the terrorists.

Two Views of the Iraq Elections

“A process to anoint the occupiers” (Michael Meacher MP, and author of Diffusing Power)

"I have participated in many elections in my life. This was probably one of the most moving elections I have ever seen because it was basically people making a very dignified, peaceful demonstration that the will of the people has to be heard." (Carina Perelli, chief of the UN Electoral Assistance Division) (AJ)

Sunnis engaging with politics

Associated Press reports that “Sunnis Seek Place in New Iraqi Government” and that 'As the Shiite majority prepared to take control of the country's first freely elected government, tribal chiefs representing Sunni Arabs in six provinces issued a list of demands — including participation in the government and drafting a new constitution — after previously refusing to acknowledge the vote's legitimacy. "We made a big mistake when we didn't vote," said Sheik Hathal Younis Yahiya, 49, a representative from northern Nineveh. "Our votes were very important." He said threats from insurgents — not sectarian differences — kept most Sunnis from voting.'

Matewan examines New Left Review

In a foray onto the terrain of moral philosophy that he may come to regret, Perry Anderson kicks off the January/February 2005 issue of New Left Review with a leading critique of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Norberto Bobbio - 'The Military Philosophers' as the journal's strapline has it.

The journal is now available in hard copy and will be accessible online to subscribers towards the end of this week.

While Habermas and Bobbio are damned for inconsistency (why support intervention in the Balkans but not Iraq?) it is Rawls who is Anderson's real target.

Anderson writes: "It had been an error of 'A theory of Justice', [Rawls] explained, to suggest that a capitalist welfare state could be a just social order. The Difference Principle was compatible with only two general models of society: a property-owning democracy or liberal socialism... Such thoughts are foreign to 'Political Liberalism'. They outline, of course, only the range of ideal shapes that a just society might assume. What of actually existing ones? Rawls' answer is startling. After observing that favourable material circumstances are not enough to assure the existence of a constitutional regime, which requires a political will to maintain it, he suddenly - in utter contrast to anything he had ever written before - remarks: 'Germany between 1870 and 1945 is an example of a country where reasonably favourable conditions existed - economic, technological and no lack of resources, an educated citizenry and more - but where the political will for a democratic regime was altogether lacking. One might say the same of the United States today, if one decides our constitutional regime is democratic in form only.'”

Anderson continues: “The strained conditional - as if the nature of the American political system was a matter for decision rather than of truth - barely hides the bitterness of the judgement. This is the society Rawls once intimated was nearly just, and whose institutions he could describe as the 'pride of a democratic people'. In one terse footnote, the entire bland universe of an overlapping consensus capsizes." - Anderson, 'Arms and Rights', NLR 31, pp37-38

Is Anderson reading too much into one footnote? And is it a coincidence that NLR have deployed their leading theoretician at a time when the charge widely levelled against writings of the lesser lights amongst the NLR crowd (Susan Watkins, Tariq Ali) is that crass, amoral anti-imperialism has caused the left to lose its bearings leading to a deepening rift between the decent left and the pseudo-left?

The charge must be hurting them more than they want to admit."

Briefing with Iraqi Kurdistan union leaders

Harry Barnes MP and Gary Kent met Hangaw Khan and Sdeeq Hassan of the
Kurdistan Workers Syndicate Union (KWSU).

They explained that Erbil is the centre of their activities where they have an Executive Committee of 9 members and that there are 25 leading officials, with 5 drawn from each province in Iraqi Kurdistan. He said that 750 people had been openly elected and that there were 167 workplace committees for 6 individual unions covering Transport, Wood and Construction, Agriculture and Food, Mechanical, Printing and Metalworkers, Food and Leather Products and Public Services with more than 100,000 members.

Although Iraqi Kurdistan had been better able to develop its own institutions of civil society under the safe havens established in 1991, they were still subject to Iraqi laws including the 1987 ban on public sector union organisation. Another existing law demands loyalty to Saddam's revolutionary command but this was a dead letter. The reason they worked under these laws is to illustrate that they see themselves a federal part of Iraq and want the new Parliament to
legislate for freedom of association.

The KWSU is independent and derives its revenues only from its members. It allows no government interference in its internal affairs but has good relations with the government and has had no obstruction from the Government in, for instance, the provision of visas for travel.

The union owns several buildings but they are in a state of great disrepair and they desperately need to renovate them. They would like printing machines so that they can also generate commercial revenues.

They want union buildings to act as cultural centres and also require computers, faxes, cameras and cars as well as training for union activists. They were particularly grateful to the Fire Brigades Union for its provision of equipment for firefighters.

As for relations with the IFTU, Hamgaw explained that "We are Iraqis. We will see what the constitution brings and will work according to it if it is good. We want a progressive labour code and a secular constitution. Our independent labour movement will be allied to the wider Iraqi labour movement with comradely relations in a federal arrangement."

The state of Iraq’s transport sector

Harry Barnes MP and Gary Kent for LFIQ met Ghasib Hassan, an Executive
Committee member of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, and former
President of the Railway and Aviation Union last week to be briefed on his union's activities.

Ghasib began by saying that they had been banned by Saddam in 1987 and
had begun organising after his fall but there was initial hostility from the US authorities. He recalled how one US officer had pulled a gun on another union leader. But eventually the unions established their right to organise an formed workers' committees for train drivers and organised open conferences but still faced problems from managers loyal to the old Ba'athist order.

He said that the railways were in a very poor state due to the 2003 war and the subsequent social disorder as expensive spare parts were stolen from unguarded depots. Railworkers went on strike in January in protest at the terrorist murders of railway workers and have now ended their strike and are being paid even though they cannot leave the depots because the state cannot guarantee their safety.

He told us that the insurgents had murdered one worker, beheaded him, placed his head in his stomach and displayed it where everyone could see it as an example for others.

Harry Barnes spoke of his experiences with the British-Irish Peace Train movement which mobilised popular support against the IRA, which attacked the Belfast-Dublin rail line to try to shift freight to the roads where drivers could be extorted for protection money.

The railway network, which extends only from Basra to Baghdad and Mosul, is suffering huge problems of under-investment with backward trains, stations, carriages and everything and requires new technology but he does not feel that privatisation should be supported in key services such as rail, water and electricity.

The situation in the Iraqi aviation sector was equally dire. It effectively ceased to operate at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991 when Saddam moved the Iraqi national fleet to other countries or ordered that jets stayed where there were marooned. The fleet had now rusted away to nothing.

He looked forward to the day when all Iraqi airports could be placed under civilian control and spoke of a massive project by the Transport Ministry to develop rail and aviation networks for the transport of goods and people in addition to the relatively well-developed road network but that this was held up by the terrorist problem.

Harry Barnes speech to the TUC conference on solidarity

Abridged version of speech by Harry Barnes MP, LFIQ Joint President on 14th February.

Everyone here is interested in assisting Iraqi unions but there are many in the labour movement who don't even know that there are trade unions in Iraq. We have to get this message across and increase action in their support.

Everyone here knows their history from how the Labour Representation
Committee was formed when initially only 2 Labour MPs were elected, the Taff Vale and Osborne judgements against the trade unions and so on.

The Iraqi movement also has its history from organising the docks and oil industry after the First World War to the organisation of intellectual forces such as Doctors and Teachers to the overthrow of the feudal monarchical system in 1958 by the Free Officers' Movement with popular support.

And Iraq was influenced by the UK until the Baghdad Pact in 1955. I was a soldier on national service in Basra in 1955/6.

And then a million people marched on the May Day march in 1959 out of a population of about 14 million people.

But then there was a series of coups and counter-coups which led to Saddam's totalitarian state and his controlled yellow unions. Public sector unions were banned and union leaders were tortured and murdered.

Clandestine networks were established. They opposed the war and thought there were internally based alternatives. It is better for people themselves in struggle to create their own futures.

After the invasion people got together. I remember telling Tony Blair about the oil workers' strike in Basra. I don't think he was that keen on the idea of strike action.

The Baathist laws continue and trade unions in the public sector are technically illegal and there is a need for new laws to allow trade union activity.

But freedom of organisation and association are threatened by terrorists as we saw with the terrible murder of Hadi Saleh.

The unions also face the problem of rip-off capitalism being imposed as it was in Russia after the fall of communism.

The unions need training in industrial relations as well as computers and mobiles.

The elections present the beginnings of real possibilities for change with, in relation to the foreign troops, Iraq and its Parliament defining what they want.

But democracy is more than voting but is about the rights of unions, women's youth and ex-prisoners groups to speak out. As groups will for better schools and hospitals.

We have set up Labour Friends of Iraq to help provide solidarity with such groups as they take control over their own lives. And change in Iraq can lead to change in the whole of the Middle East.

Hopes of an Iraqi Endgame

Over at Normblog, there is a very useful link with an article from Time Magazine entitled Talking with the Enemy, Inside the secret dialogue between the U.S. and insurgents in Iraq—and what the rebels say they want. One leader says to his US interlocutors that "We are ready to work with you." Whilst this article from Newsweek analyses the nature of the groups that form the "resistance." It says that its "investigation shows that long before U.S. and other Coalition troops blasted across the border into Iraq on March 20, 2003, Saddam had put aside hundreds of millions of dollars (some sources claim billions) and enormous weapons caches to support a guerrilla war."

Faleh A Jabar unravels the seeming paradoxes of the Iraqi election

Over at the IFTU web site, there is an incisive analysis of the Iraqi elections by one of Iraq’s leading sociologists

Sunday's announcement, 13 days after the poll took place, of the results of Iraq's first contested elections in half a century, will determine the make up of local provincial government, the Kurdish regional government and, most importantly, the constituent assembly charged with drafting the permanent constitution.

Even before the votes were counted sundry interpretations were made. Salafis, like the Jordanian extremist Abu Musaab Al-Zarqawi, denounced the elections as a failure. US President George W Bush extolled them as a slap in the face of terrorism. Iran, top of Bush's second term hit list, viewed them as a rebuke to Washington. In the West the left dismissed elections held under occupation as little more than a conspiracy and they were quickly joined by Baath restorationists and their Arab supporters. Iraqi voters, rightly or wrongly, thought of them as a miracle of kinds, a feat of defiance on the part of the voter. Iraq's elections, at once a defeat and a victory, the vehicle of both honour and shame, for Iraq, the US, the Arabs, exhibited all the paradoxes of globalised liberalism.

Hardly had the polls closed before the event itself was overshadowed by interpretations of what it might portend. Iraq stands at a crossroads and, like Janus, the Roman god of doorways, faces in more than one direction. This multi-ethnic, multi- religious and multi-cultural nation is, under occupation, on the brink of breaking the sectarian monopoly of power and national wealth. The chronic divorce of nation and state could well be reaching an end. And it is a transition characterised by a tilt towards Islamist conservatism, with all its geopolitical consequences.

WHOSE FAILURE?

It was the Iraqis who pushed for elections. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), under US appointee Paul Bremer, wanted a 3-5 year period in which to restructure Iraq at will along radical liberal lines. What they had failed to factor in to their equation was Iraqi nationalism.

The transfer of sovereignty in June 2004, and last month's elections, came about because of Iraqi, and not CPA, demands.

That elections, symbol of a popularly mandated and peaceful transition, should so capture the imagination of the majority of Iraqis wrong-footed the media, taking regional commentators as much by surprise as it did those, hailing mainly from Sunni areas, driving violence.

Radical Sunni groups, Salafis and restorationists, abhor any peaceful or institutional political process. Sunni liberals, on the other hand, toyed with the idea of boycott but at the last moment took an active part in the process. The moderate Islamic Party -- the old Sunni Muslim Brothers -- adopted a different position: it pulled out of the contest while announcing it was prepared to take part in the post-election constitutional process.

Those forces, both Iraqi and regional, seeking to derail elections, failed miserably. The twin tactics of intimidation and boycott failed to prevent 8.5 of some 13-14 million eligible voters from going to the polls. Thirteen suicide bombers, one suffering from Downs Syndrome, were sent on their missions. A handful of poll centres were targets of mortar rounds and there were two reports of gunfire. And that, more or less, was that.

Voters had expected worse. Early birds showed up before 9.00am to avoid attacks. The more audacious ventured out at what many suspected would be the most hazardous time. The bulk waited. Then, by midday, voters rightly guessed Salafi attackers had deployed all they had. The masses poured into voting stations, amazing themselves and the world.

Violent opposition groups had singularly failed to grasp the depth of pro-election sentiments. More than two hundred political entities registered. Tens of thousands stood as candidates. Volunteers flooded to help the Independent Commission for Elections in Iraq, manning 600 registry offices and 9,000 voting stations nationwide in the face of threats, car bombs and assassinations. Their presence was a questioning of the legitimacy of such tactics. The majority of Iraqis viewed elections as means of restoring sovereignty. They could not understand how voting stations could become targets for paradise-bound Jihadists.

ELECT ME, ELECT ME NOT

As expected the lowest turn out was in the Anbar province (two per cent). Diyala, another violent province, had 34 per cent of voters go to the polls. Baghdad, a mixed city, registered 45 per cent. The highest turnouts were in Kurdish areas, which recorded an average of 80 per cent, and in the Shia provinces of the south, where between 60-80 per cent of voters turned up at the polls.

That more than 150,000, many of them supporters of Interim President Ghazi Al- Yawar, voted in Sunni Mosul came as a surprise, while even Saddam Hussein's home province of Salahuddin (Tikrit) saw 29 per cent of the electorate casting its vote.

Iraq's first pluralistic ballot betrayed a crisis of identity. As grand ideologies -- Arab socialist-nationalism in its Baath or communist guise, radical Islamism -- wane so local identity politics came to the fore, either confessional -- Shia versus Sunni -- or ethnic -- Kurdish versus Arab, Turkmen or Assyrian. And these new aggregate identities, a protest against earlier exclusion, were themselves fractured from within by city, tribal and family loyalties.

Religious institutions, freed from state control, developed into centres of mobilisation and recruitment. Several blocks emerged, most significantly the Shia bloc and the Kurdish list. Beyond these two broad coalitions dozens of liberal, leftist, Iraqi nationalist, tribal, monarchist and ethnic and religious groups orbited.

The Shia and Kurdish blocs had considerable resources at their disposal, both financial and organisational and including extensive infrastructure -- mosques, offices and, in certain cases, private militias -- in addition to the symbolic capital furnished by religion and ethnicity. The Shia list could also draw on the charisma of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, with Shia preachers repeatedly warning congregations of the wrath of God should they not vote for Al- Sistani's list.

The Shia bloc received 4,075,295, or 48.1 per cent, of votes. The Kurdish bloc secured 2,175,551, or 25.7 per cent. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Alawi, effectively single- handedly, secured 1,168,943 votes, or 13 per cent, appealing to the middle classes and stressing strong leadership and security, currently Iraq's most popular political commodities.

Dozens of other lists failed to secure the 30,000 votes required for a single seat in the constituent assembly. Only a few others survived, including the Iraqi Communist Party with 70,000 votes, the Al-Sadr faction, competing as Kawadir wa Nukhab (Cadres and Elites), with 65,000, and, on the back of his personal vote in Mosul, the list headed by Interim President Ghazi Al-Yawir.
Overall, Iraqis voted against the deposed Baath, for peaceful transition, for power sharing, for religious leaders, for an end to the monopolising of power and against chaos and violence.

MAJOR PLAYERS, NEW DYNAMICS

The three successful blocs -- Al-Sistani, Kurdish and Alawi lists -- will determine the future of Iraq, while the failure of Sunnis opposed to elections to have them postponed has many repercussions.

It has strengthened the resolve of other groups to advocate legal ways of balanced power sharing and to restore Iraq's national sovereignty -- i.e. end the occupation -- peaceably. The dynamics of the Palestinian elections and national consensus-building have provided Iraqis with a strong case to cite and emulate.

The elections have legitimised national politics and created a momentum behind the constitutional process. Radical Sunnis, such as the Society of Muslim Ulama (Society of Doctors of Religion) led by Dr Harith Al- Dhari, an advocate of violent opposition, appeared stunned by the massive turn out and by their ensuing marginalisation. Their boycott of the process not only deprived them of any meaningful representation but allowed over representation of the Shia bloc. Had Sunnis gone to the polls the number of votes required per seat would have risen to 50,000. There are already signs that radical Sunnis are rethinking their position and searching for a face-saving exit.

While the success of the Shia bloc inevitably alarms secular and moderate players, domestic, regional and global, it should be remembered that it is an alliance of more than a dozen organisations and that half the list comprised independent candidates. The list encompasses trends in favour of Khomeinism, communalism and Islamic-liberal compromises. And while, for the time being, they will unite in their drive to elect a presidential council and form the transitional government, divisions will become apparent when the constitutional debate begins next month.

Already there is fierce competition between three candidates for the premiership -- the moderate Adil Abdul-Mahdi of SCIRI, the conservative Ibrahim Al- Jaafari of the Daawa Party and the notorious liberal opportunist Ahmed Chalabi. It is against such a backdrop that Sunni groups might stage a comeback, initially by involving themselves in drafting the constitution and then, should the outcome be unsatisfactory, by mobilising support so as to prevent the necessary quorum in the ensuing referendum. Should they succeed, then the elections that will have to follow in December 2005 will be far more inclusive.

Two days before the elections the first armoured Iraqi division was deployed and applauded by the public. If two other divisions can be combat ready by the end of this year, as planned, the confluence of political legitimacy and capacity building is likely to bring the insurgency to breaking point. At which time the possibility opens for a gradual reclaiming of the centre ground in Iraq's politics and the promotion of a more moderate trajectory.

* The writer is an Iraqi sociologist, research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of many books on Iraqi state, religion, tribes and discourses. His latest publication is: The Shi'ite Movement in Iraq , London, Saqi Books, 2003.

Amicus pledge £1,000 for Iraqi trade unionists - an example to us all.

18 February 2005

Amicus officers who met with an Iraqi trade unionist yesterday have pledged £1,000 to help to organise representation for Iraqis.

Amicus Regional Council members in the West Midlands met with the Abdullah Muhsin, a representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) visiting from Baghdad and heard how Iraqi trade unionists were persecuted under the Ba'ath regime.

Amicus' Regional Secretary, Terry Pye, said: 'We were extremely moved to hear of the hardships Iraqi trade unionists have endured. We want to help them in their efforts to secure jobs and a living wage for Iraqi workers and to organise Iraqi workers so they can enjoy the inalienable right to join or form a union. With assistance the IFTU can and should be actively involved in the rebuilding of the country's economic and civil society.'

With more than 50 per cent of Iraqi workers unemployed, the IFTU's priority is to secure jobs and a living wage for Iraqi workers. To achieve this the urgent task of educating Iraqi workers about trade unionism, labour and democratic rights, health and safety and other issues becomes more urgent.

- Ends

Baghdad Spring?

Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Times (registration required) asks if we are witnessing the Baghdad Spring. He writes that “It's good news, bad news time again for the Middle East. The good news is that what you are witnessing in the Arab world is the fall of its Berlin Wall. The old autocratic order is starting to crumble. The bad news is that unlike the Berlin Wall in central Europe, the one in the Arab world is going to fall one bloody brick at a time…” and surveys the prospects for democratic reform throughout the Middle East. Fingers crossed and let’s hope that the left and wider labour movement align themselves with the reformers rather than the reactionaries.

Far left abstain over condeming the murder of Hadi Saleh

The Workers' Weekly newspaper carries a report of the recent Stop the War Conference in which it claims that "The RMT moved a motion in this session condemning "unequivocally" the assassination of IFTU international secretary Hadi Saleh and all other attacks on trade unionists in Iraq. This was passed without any debate, but without the votes of the SWP, whose comrades abstained."

If true, it's a terrible sign of the times that left-wingers abstain on a motion condemning the brutal murder of a trade unionist. Perhaps our SWP readers might explain.

The paper also reports a row over the continued presence on the organisation's steering committee of "Workers Power" member, Kuldip Bajwa, and says that "…after WP's demonstration against the presence of the IFTU at the European Social Forum it was now considered, according to Andrew Murray, "too damaging to be associated with".

Hat Tip to Harry's Place

Lest we forget

Over at Normblog, there is a reminder of the force with which Ann Clwyd MP spoke about the plight of the Iraqi people under Saddam, which we publish lest people forget what a truly awful regime his was. Ann, who is now a Joint President of LFIQ and Special Envoy to the Prime Minister on Human Rights in Iraq, delivered this moving and influential speech in the Commons on 26 Feb 2003.

Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley): In 1991, I stood at the Opposition Dispatch Box and described what I had seen on the mountains of Iran and Iraq when the Kurds fled from the bombardment of Saddam Hussein. I am afraid that people have very short memories. The scenes were appalling and typical of the attacks made by the Iraqi regime on its own people. The victims include Arabs as well as Kurds. They also include Assyrians, Turkomans and the Shi'as in the south of the country who were forced to flee from the marshes into Iran.

I have spent the past two days travelling and I have come back for this debate so that I can tell the House what I have seen and heard. As the House knows, I have continually argued the case over the years for indicting the regime for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. I am grateful to 201 of my colleagues on both sides of the House who supported my proposal. I believe that the regime should be removed and that it could have been removed by using international law and indictment. It is a great regret to me that this country, which could have led the way, did not do so. After two years of our making the case and providing evidence from the victims of the regime, the Attorney-General felt that there was not sufficient evidence. I do not know how much evidence one needs, because it abounds. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have the evidence, and the Kurds captured documents from the torture centre that they eventually liberated. Thousands of their citizens died there.

On my latest visit, I opened the first genocide museum in Iraq. It was snowing and quite dark on that day and people had come from all over the area. Their relatives had died in that torture chamber. Inside the museum were photographs that the Kurds had taken. The images were of skulls and shreds of clothing, and of the type of thing that one sees in genocide museums elsewhere in the world. I have been to similar museums in Rwanda and Cambodia, and I have seen the holocaust exhibition in London, but I am afraid that, on this occasion, I just cried. I do not think that I have ever cried in public before, but I did so because the regime's victims were all around me. One old woman came up to me with a piece of plastic and pushed it into my hand. I unwrapped it and saw three photographs. They were of her husband and two sons who had died in that torture centre.

People had written things on the cell walls. Sometimes the writing was in blood and sometimes it was just marks to cross off the days of the week. Inside one cell is a statue of a Peshmerga, whose face looks upward towards a grill through which the light comes. I was told that that Peshmerga had died in that cell and that he was always looking towards the light, because he hoped that, one day, he would be out in the daylight again.

The victims were all around me, and I have been involved for 25 years—including before I became a politician—with the Iraqi opposition. For those 25 years, I have heard the tales of Saddam Hussein's regime and its repression of the Kurds and other minorities. People seem to think that that all came to an end in 1991, but that is a big mistake. Repression, torture and ethnic cleansing have continued throughout the time since then.

On my latest visit, I met some of the victims of torture who had, in the past few months, come out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad under the so-called amnesty. One man told me stories that I hardly like to repeat, but we at Indict have taken victims' statements over the past seven years. This victim was a youngish man who said that he had been in prison for eight years. He said that almost every day, people were executed at that prison—not one person, but hundreds. When there was an attack on Uday Hussein's life some time ago, 2,000 prisoners in the prison were executed on the same day. That is the reality of Saddam's Iraq. When I hear people calling for more time, I say "Who will speak up for those victims?"

I shall recount only two stories told by the same man. He told me that a university professor gave birth at the Abu Ghraib prison while he was there. Apparently, because of the very poor diet of thin soup and bread, she did not have enough milk to feed the baby when it was born. She begged the guards for milk, but they refused to give it and the baby died. She held that baby in her arms for three days and would not give up the body. At the end of the three days, because the temperature in the prison was very hot—some 60° C—the body began to smell. They took the woman and her dead baby away. I asked the former prisoner what happened to her and he said that she was killed.

The man then talked about a young boy aged 15 who had done something or other and was in the prison, and fainted during one of the torture sessions—he was beaten so hard that he fainted. The guards pinned him up to the frame of a window and crucified him on the window frame while he was still alive. When he came to, he was crying out for water, but nobody would give him water. One of the other prisoners threw water in his face, but that prisoner was himself taken away and beaten.

Ethnic cleansing goes on all the time. I visited a UN camp where there were hundreds of recent victims of ethnic cleansing who had been kicked out of Kirkuk. The men, women and little children in the camp had been told that they had 24 hours to get out of Kirkuk because they would not agree that they were not Kurds, but Arabs, as part of Arabisation. In other countries, we have taken action against people responsible for ethnic cleansing, so I say to my colleagues, please, who is to help the victims of Saddam Hussein's regime unless we do?

I believe in regime change. I say that without hesitation, and I will support the Government tonight because I think that they are doing a brave thing.

The state of Fallujah

Jack Fairweather examines the state of Fallujah in today’s Daily Telegraph. He quotes American officers calling it the safest place in Iraq, says that the insurgents who once controlled the city and used it as a springboard for violence elsewhere have gone and that roughly a fifth of the population, about 50,000 people, have returned to see if their houses were destroyed in the fighting. He quotes Hashem Mahmud, a contractor who employs 200 men in Fallujah repairing schools and clinics: "The insurgents are waiting for the people to reach a desperate point before moving back in," he said. "We've got to get people employed otherwise they will be reached by the other side and paid money to do something nasty."

More trade union leaders kidnapped

IFTU Press Release: Friday , 18 February 2005

Another Iraqi trade unionist kidnapped: MOAID HAMED (General Secretary, IFTU Mosul Branch)

The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) reports that Mr. Moaid Hamed, General Secretary of the IFTU Mosul Branch, has been kidnapped on 11 February 2005 in Mosul.

On 11 February 2005, Mr Moaid Hamed was leaving his home in Mosul on union business when gunmen attacked him and kidnapped him, taking him to an unknown location.

In a previous incident, terrorists and Saddam's loyalists working together had kidnapped Saady Edan, the president of the IFTU in Mosul on 26 January and held him prisoner for a week in a unknown location where he was tortured severely and before his release on 1 February 2005 was told to stop working and organizing for the IFTU otherwise he would be killed next.

The IFTU office in Mosul received many threats and intimidation from forces loyal to Saddam and his yellow union the discredited GFTU.

The IFTU media and information office calls upon the international labour movement to demand the immediate release of Mr Moaid Hamed .

With the help of our international labour movement colleagues, the IFTU will continue to campaign to end terrorism against those brave patriotic working class fighters who are striving to organise Iraqi workers into free trade and demcratic unions.

Further information will be made available about the condition of Mr. Moaid Hamed and the circumstances of his kidnapping.

For further information contact Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU):
c/o UNISON, 1 Mabledon Place, London WC1H 9AJ. Tel’: 00 44 79 76 84 68 68

Alan Johnson examines Christopher Hitchens’ assessment of Tom Paine’s legacy

‘If there are going to be rights, there has to be reason’: Christopher Hitchens on the living legacy of Tom Paine for democrats

“Paine…spoke not as a Virginia gentleman, certainly not as a slaveholder or owner, but as a man of no property, as a self-educated artisan. Very fitting, in that connection, that we should be meeting in an institute like this, dedicated to the idea that only the self-educated working class can create and guard and keep and preserve the ideas of a free and equal and open society”.

So said Christopher Hitchens presenting the Thomas Paine Memorial Lecture, ‘Why the Rights of Man Require an Age of Reason’, January 19, 2005 at The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York.

Hitchens’ marvellous lecture - he speaks as well as he writes - shows us why we of the decent left should see Tom Paine as one of our greatest heroes. In this passage Hitchens tells us one reason why Paine was able to play a leading role in the 18th century American and French Democratic Revolutions and inspire the great awakening of the downtrodden in 19th century Britain. He understood that human rights were inseparable from human reason.

“Because he believed in science and the scientific method and because he believed in human reason and because he evolved the concept of rights and he thought these things were indissoluble. And he thought, if there were going to be rights, then there had to be reason. (…)

Well, look, the argument that Paine makes is very simple: Until then, there was the divine right of kings. There were rights okay, but only for the rulers. It was, in a sense, not all that radical to say, “No, we annex the concept of right. If there is to be right, it is innate in all of us.” And it's at that very critical moment, John Locke would only go this far, John Locke who wrote the slave-owning constitutions of the Carolinas. He would only go as far as saying that these rights were life, liberty and property. And by a little shove and a little extension or extrapolation, Paine and his friends were able to begin the argument that says, “No, if there's to be right, it must be human and it must transcend property and, in a happy phrase, include the pursuit of happiness.” We still don’t know whether that was meant to mean happiness as a pursuit or happiness as the object of a pursuit. I'm willing to leave that question open, too, but it does mean that something has changed and the divine right of kings and bishops and popes is over and that human rights will replace them and contest them. That, if there is such a thing, which I am also willing to doubt, is progress.

Now it could have been, I suppose, that Paine could have done this without the belief in reason, but I think it's extremely unlikely. It was a time when the view of science and innovation and endeavour was very closely linked to the concept of human emancipation”.

Hitchens’ point is not merely an historical one. Today, also, the decent left will insist that rights and reason, like equality and liberty, are yoked, and will fall or rise together. (AJ)

David Hirsh detects bovine excrement

David Hirsh gives a critical personal examination of a trade union leader's claims in today's Guardian.

Hassan Juma’a Awad, President of the Basra Oil Workers’ Union writes in the Guardian today that rather than laying the basis for a new life in Iraq, the foreign occupiers have attacked communities with chemicals and cluster bombs and overseen a regime of rape, torture, and killing in Iraqi homes.

He says that Saddam’s forces used to break into houses at night while the occupying forces do it in broad daylight. He says that journalists who try to tell the truth about how terrible conditions are in Iraq are kidnapped by terrorists in the interests of the occupation. He says that ‘unions should operate regardless of the government's wishes, until the people are able finally to elect a genuinely accountable and independent Iraqi government, which represents ‘our’ interests and not those of American imperialism’. He says that the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions is a ‘regime-authorised’ union, pro-government and communist. He says that the occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division between Sunni and Shia which was previously unknown. He says that those who voted in the election are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted it, while only those Iraqis whose ‘interests are dependent on the occupation’ oppose immediate withdrawal. ‘We are Iraqis, we know our country, and we can take care of ourselves’.

How, gentle Guardian reader, did you read this piece this morning, over your cornflakes? I suspect that many Guardian readers will have read it with a peculiarly uncritical eye. Peculiar, because Guardian readers know how to read between the lines of a political argument. They know when a Government Minister who pretends to be concerned for the fairness of immigration law is in fact using racist demagogy at election time. They know when ‘rationalisation’ or ‘modernisation’ is used as a code for cutting public money. Guardian readers know that as George Bush makes speeches about freedom and liberty he is presiding over a little gulag at Guantanamo Bay. But face the average Guardian reader with a number of key claims, and their critical faculties will instantly dissolve, leaving a political thinker as deferent as any Daily Mail or Express fan.

The key claims are these: I represent an oppressed nation; I represent oppressed workers; imperialist rule is worse than that of Saddam; ethnic division amongst ‘the oppressed’ is nothing but a product of imperialist strategy to divide and rule; there is a conspiracy between imperialists and terrorists; I know the truth because I am authentic, you know nothing because you are Western.

Faced with these kinds of claims, many liberals and many on the left tend to go into an uncritical mode in their heads. This piece in the Guardian is comforting, if you are someone who opposed the war and who accepts the picture of events pushed by the anti-war movement. If a tiny corner of your mind was secretly wondering if Iraq wasn’t, in some ways, apparently, despite the occupation, a little better off than it had been under Saddam, reading this article uncritically will be comforting, because it will confirm the simplicity and purity of being ‘anti-war’ and ‘anti-imperialist’. It does this by speaking with the authority of the oppressed and in the name of the oppressed; it does this by confirming a picture of the world that re-entrenches current liberal and left commonsense. All this, in spite of the fact that a half-critical reading of this piece by Hassan Juma’a Awad, even if you know nothing about Iraq, should set all sorts of alarm bells ringing in your head.

Hassan claims to speak for his membership of 23,000 workers and he also claims to speak for all Iraq. Isn’t it obvious that in Iraq, a country in huge transition and political turmoil, there will be political disagreement? Some people will think one thing, others will think another. Attitudes to the occupation will vary. Some people will experience the occupiers as being worse than the old regime while others will experience them as bringing a possibility of something better. Hassan, however, speaks for all Iraqis. Those who voted in the election, those who boycotted the election – all are hostile to the occupation, all raise the correct anti-imperialist slogan of ‘troops out now’. Everyone. Everyone except those unpatriotic collaborators who have an interest in the occupation of their own people. Why are so many Guardian readers incapable of sniffing even a mild whiff of bullshit when faced with these kinds of claims?

Hassan paints a picture of the occupation as bringing nothing but unremitting repression and daily terror – like the Saddam regime, but more open. How can we disbelieve this picture? We live in Highgate or Harrogate, he lives in Basra. Yet he also says that his union was formed 11 days after ‘fall’ of Baghdad. Why? Why wasn’t the union formed 11 days before the ‘fall’ of Baghdad? Or 11 months before the ‘fall’ of Baghdad? Or 11 years before the ‘fall’ of Baghdad? The reason is obvious, isn’t it? It is because anyone who had attempted to organise a free trade union under the Saddam regime would have been killed. It was not possible to organise a free trade union under the Saddam regime. It is possible under the occupation. This, already, is a hugely significant difference.

‘The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. We never knew this sort of division before.’ It is true that colonial regimes all over the world have a dirty history of ruthlessly creating and exploiting ethnic divisions in order to divide and rule. The Hutu/Tutsi divide in Rwanda and Burundi, which culminated in the genocide of 1994, was undoubtedly encouraged and exacerbated, arguably created, by the European colonizers. Yet Hassan’s claim here is incredible. In the two years, since April 2003, he says, the American and British occupiers invented the previously unknown ethnic Sunni/Shia distinction in order to divide the Iraqi working class and prevent it from effectively opposing imperialism. Never mind that the Saddam regime was largely based on a covert ideology of Sunni supremacism; never mind that it was responsible for a genocidal attack against the Shia’s. I wonder if the Americans invented the idea of Kurdistan while they were at it? Why are so many Guardian readers incapable of sniffing out a whiff of bullshit?

Labour Friends of Iraq warmly supports people who are bravely building Trade Unions in Iraq. We offer what solidarity and encouragement we can. Yet that does not mean that we are in favour of the wholesale suspension of critical faculties.

Genuine solidarity is also about the effort to understand the world and to think critically about the world. Political engagement is a part of solidarity. Pretending that the world is simple, when it is in fact complex, helps nobody.

Turning Down the Lights in Iraq by Alan Johnson

This week Alan Johnson starts a weekly Friday column. This week he is prompted by Oliver Wendell Holmes to reflect on the appeal of wishful thinking about Iraq to both political right and left.

Lying in bed last night I was reading The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America, by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Louis Menand. It’s a quite beautiful book about Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S Peirce and John Dewey. But one sentence in it would not leave me alone. Apparently, before he died, the philosopher William James asked his brother Henry, the novelist, to stay in Cambridge for six weeks after the funeral: he would try to communicate from the other side. It was with this kind of thing in mind that Wendell Holmes said of his old friend William James, 'His wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance'.

I felt that phrase powerfully. Certainly it had a depth worthy of the famous Supreme Court Judge. But it was also reminding me of something? But what?

I had it. Holmes had captured in poetic form what I had heard Democratic Senator Joe Biden say to Chris Wallace about the wishful thinking of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on Fox News. Here is the exchange:

WALLACE: Finally, in Dr. Rice's, Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, you had some blunt advice for her. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: For God's sake, don't listen to Rumsfeld. He doesn't know what in the hell he's talking about on this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(LAUGHTER)

WALLACE: Classic Biden. And afterward, as you were saying goodbye to Dr. Rice, you told her she shouldn't listen to Vice President Cheney either. My question, Senator Biden, is, why not?

BIDEN: Because they've been wrong on every major decision relative to Iraq since the statue came down. They indicated that we would be able to draw down troops very rapidly. They indicated that we would be greeted with open arms. They indicated there would be enough Iraqi oil to pay for this operation. They indicated it wouldn't cost $260 billion. They indicated that we had trained up troops, and we haven't.

Every fundamental — and I told the president this just four months ago, straight up. He asked my opinion. And it seems to me that my obligation is to say it as I see it. The truth of the matter is, they're both fine men. They have been substantively wrong on the specific decisions they've made since the statue has fallen. And many of the military leaders in the region — I've visited there more than anybody, I believe, in the United States Congress — and people that are involved with this administration believe they've been dead wrong on the advice they've been given. All I'm saying is, unless they change their advice, I wouldn't be listening very closely.

BIDEN: When Rumsfeld was on your program — I think it was your program, I could be mistaken — a year and a half ago, he said it's, I think the word was "amazing," we'd trained up 210,000 Iraqi forces. We put 210,000 people in uniform who couldn't shoot straight and had little training, some of them as little as three days.
I just think we should get real here”.

Wendell Holmes was saying that William James had turned down his powers of reason, his intellectual ‘lights’, so as to give miracle, i.e. dogma or unreasoning faith, its chance. Rumsfeld and Cheney have indeed ‘turned down the lights’. From the scrapping of the State Department plans to the failure to send enough troops; from the casual dismissal of the post-war turmoil in Baghdad with the comment ‘stuff happens’ to the criminally delayed democratic elections that gave the Ba’ath and Islamist terrorists their opening; from the culpability for Abu Ghraib to the myth-making about ‘210,000 Iraqi troops’. The result has been a series of what Chris Hitchens calls ‘near impeachable’ errors and set-backs that only the bravery of the troops and the Iraqi people have, perhaps, salvaged.

But wasn’t only Biden’s attack on the right wing fantasy world of Donald Rumsfeld that the Holmes had reminded me of. There was something else. Something much closer to home.

I realised that the new issue of the US socialist journal New Politics had dropped through my letterbox that morning and I had been repressing my bad reaction to an article in it all day. I used to edit New Politics so I had looked through the new volume eagerly. But then I fastened on this concluding sentence in an article by a new editor, Glenn Perusek: ‘The Iraqi resistance will continue to fight beyond the January 2005 Elections…Iraqis fought the British and their puppet monarchy before 1958; they fight today in memory of that great struggle’. Oh dear. No, they don’t. They fight to restore secular or theocratic tyranny, the very opposite of Iraqi self-determination.

But Perusek denounces as ‘collaborationists’ those who I would call democrats. He celebrates the murdering activities of the ‘resistance’. ‘In the Middle East the grievances are so great’ it is understandable that the resistance fight ‘in a forthright and rigorous manner’. They ‘give Goliath a black eye’. ‘Fundamentalist Islam can be…a marker for opposition to Imperialism’, after all. And, don’t you know, ‘the political character of the national liberation movement is a secondary consideration: the prime concern is opposition to imperialism’. Moreover, out of this ‘earnest struggle for anti-imperialism [i.e. the beheadings, the shootings of electricity sub-station workers and cooks, the murder of election workers, the torture of trade unionists and socialists – AJ] …a democratic left could be forged’. (You’ve got to love dialectics. Every cloud has a silver lining, that’s dialectics).

This picture of Iraq is, of course, literally, fantastical. It is unrelated to anything actually going on in the real world. Truly, we can say of Pesusek, 'His wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance'.

But it was with Perusek’s talk of the ‘black eyes’ inflicted by the resistance that I had to lay down my old journal for a while.

For Hadi Saleh, Iraqi socialist and leader of the free Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, got more than a ‘black eye’ from Pesusek’s heroic ‘oppositionists’. Perusek should listen to the voice of the Iraqi Faleh A, Jabar, a friend of Hadi and a leading Iraqi social scientist:

“A group of five, most probably, ex-security men, broke into his house in Baghdad, waited for him in the dark and preyed on him the moment he stepped in. They killed three times: first they strangled him with a wire; second they riddled his body with bullets; lastly they burnt him. This was not an ordinary killing. Unlike show beheadings that mark ‘resistance’ in Iraq, this was a triple vengeance: in the 1970s Saleh was condemned to death for clandestine unionism, he was amnestied years later, now the Ba’ath security men working in clandestine for restoration reneged on their amnesty.

They also took vengeance for the successes Saleh achieved in rebuilding trade unions (The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, IFTU) that stand now at some 200,000 membership, a formidable democratic social movement defying all sorts of fundamentalist, communal or other parochial identities. Lastly, they wanted to hush him and his colleagues who pursue a twin line of peaceful action for the restitution of Iraq’s sovereignty and building an all-inclusive, federal democracy.

Perhaps he was born with a smile; and simply forgot it was there. I never saw him appearing without that innocent grin. We rubbed shoulders at the ICP printing house in Baghdad that ran the only non-governmental publications in the 1970s. He was a printing worker, and later, an expert, I was a fledgling writer. My first book appeared there. He was on the production line ready with a helping hand. In exile in Beirut and Damascus, we worked on a daily basis to produce the ICP’s monthly, al-Thaqafa al-Jadida.

After his return from Sweden in 2003 with his wife Corea and two kids, the offices of the Iraqi unions were raided by the coalition forces for no apparent reason. I was worried about him. Following the macabre series of kidnapping and beheadings in 2004, my worries grew even sharper, and he had this reassurance to offer at our last encounter in Baghdad in November 2004: ‘I am a worker and unionist not a politician, who on earth would wish to target me. They are killing your lot, writers and intellectuals‘.

I wish he were right. He was on the hit list by the very murderers who raped the nation for thirty odd years and who reemerged now with the gold they dug from the Central Bank, their family networks and the criminals of the underworld, putting a false mantle of ‘resistance’.

Millions of Iraqis are resisting the occupation peaceably. Their collective wisdom is that restitution of sovereignty should go hand in hand with popular mandate, and block restoration. Hadi Saleh’s death is a wake-up call for all those who rightly opposed the war, but wrongly support post-conflict violence”.

But will Perusek hear that wake up call? Or has he turned the lights down so low to give miracle its chance that he cant see where he is anymore?

Blundering around in his darkness, Perusek tells us that in Iraq, ‘Muslim fundamentalists are the popular heroes’. In fact, on election day in Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew himself up before he could reach the lines of Iraqi voters. All day, as Iraqis voted, they walked around his body, spat on it as went in, and bore their purple finger with pride on their way out.

But Pesusek wont even accept the word terrorist. Like every ex-student of all those Smart Alec 101 classes he puts the word in sneering, sophisticated mocking scare quotes as ‘terrorist’. To Perusek these men are heroes and should, he insists, be called oppositionists. Such is the fantasy world of much of the contemporary western left. Terrorists who blow up brave democratic Iraqis as they vote are presented as heroic ‘oppositionists’. Democrats trying to build a new Iraq are dismissed as ‘collaborators’.

Like some kind of intuitive analyst, Wendell Holmes had gently pushed to the surface a thought I had been suppressing all day. The fantasy world of much of today's far left works in similar ways to the fantasy world of the right. Both sides dim the lights. Ridiculous fantasies are discerned in the semi-darkness, phantoms taken for reality. Tremendous hopes are entertained without any rational basis. Thought-worlds are allowed to loom over and dominate empirical worlds. Miracle is given its chance. Dogma and faith and text substitute for the accurate tracking of reality, serious thought, and steady carving out of the future.

Wendell Holmes and William James drifted apart, largely because of William James's drift to the irrational. But when in 1912 William James's son, Henry, asked Holmes for letters from James for an edition of his fathers letters, and Holmes re-read the letters, he said they 'revive a lifelong pain, the partial drawing asunder of two who loved each other'. Without wanting to be too maudlin I suspect that also speaks to and for many of us.

But we are right. After six weeks Henry James left Cambridge. If William had sent a message from the grave it had not been heard by Henry.

Echoes of the Hitler-Stalin Pact

Paul Anderson casts a critical eye on the left in his Tribune column, saying amongst other things that “I’ll accept that the rise of popular opposition to the Iraq war gave the left a boost. But it was the very worst part of the left that benefited: the diehard Leninists of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain, who appointed themselves as the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition. And their hard-core revolutionary defeatism and facile anti-imperialism did more harm than good even in the short term. All that remains from the mass mobilisation of 2003 is the grotesque sideshow of George Galloway, the SWP and a handful of reactionary Islamists in the Respect Coalition. After the election in Iraq, their support for the murderous Sunni-supremacist “resistance” looks like going down in history as the early-21st-century equivalent of the old Communist Party of Great Britain’s endorsement of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. He concludes that “I’m not denying that there’s plenty the government has done that ought to be opposed. But a left that is merely negative, a left without a project, can never flourish. Eight more years like the last eight, and the left might as well pack its bags and go home.”

Socialist Worker's U-Turn

Gary Kent examines the zig-zags of the SWP and corrects himself too

The SWP's report of the recent Stop the War conference quotes one union official as saying that some people who supported the war were now trying to use the issue of solidarity to justify the occupation.

It may suit the SWP to divide the labour movement into the unsullied who opposed the war and the "warmongers" who supported it. It may suit their sectarian aims to ignore those on the left who didn't oppose the war because they could see no other way that a fascist-type dictatorship could be overthrown and took advantage of external intervention, as the Iraqi Kurds had done for over a decade when they were able to build a thriving society away from Saddam's chemical weapons and tanks.

The solidarity movement with Iraqi trade unions must be open to people who honourably took different positions on the war. LFIQ brings together activists who took different views and we seek to unite the labour movement here in favour of the labour movement there.

But nothing should conceal the fact that Socialist Worker is rather new to this task. It was only a few months ago that it was abusing the largest Iraqi union as "fake" and collaborationist and its leaders endorsed the view that genuine trades unionism was impossible under occupation. The presence of a variety of Iraqi trade unionists at recent events disproved this nonsense.

Older readers will not be surprised by the U-turn. The SWP does a lot of this zigzagging. During the 80's miners' strike, the SWP denounced as nothing but 'left-wing Oxfam' the support groups which sprang up all over the country in response to miners' needs for food and money. During the strike, the SWP's theorisings isolated them from anyone with a half-decent political instinct who soon got down to work in support of the miners and so they changed the line. The comrades took to assembling food parcels as though they had been born to it. Then as now, we should, I suppose, welcome sinners who repent.

Postscript

And while we're talking about repentance, I should add my own apology for a mistake and thank the alert reader who so swiftly let me know, although he added that "If this is the kind of egregious error Mr Kent can make over such a straightforward story, then it calls into question the rest of what gets posted on this site."

He's perfectly entitled to his fun at my expense but we shall leave it to our readers to judge the quality of our postings. I originally misread the SW report as referring to the TUC conference rather than the STWC conference. It's my mistake but doesn't alter the fact that the SWP and its allies are now saying different things about trade union solidarity than they were only a few weeks back.

'Hama Rules'

Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times (registration required) that “Nothing drives a dictatorship like Syria's more crazy than civil disobedience and truth-telling: when people stop being intimidated, stand up for their own freedom and go on strike against their occupiers. The Lebanese can't play by Hama Rules and must stop playing by the old Lebanese Rules. They must start playing by Baghdad Rules. Baghdad Rules mean the Lebanese giving the Syrian regime - every day, everywhere - the purple finger.”

The assassinated former Prime Minister Hariri stopped playing by "Lebanese Rules" and openly challenged Syrian imperialism. The message from the Syrian regime to Washington, Paris and Lebanon's opposition is clear "You want to play here, you'd better be ready to play by Hama Rules - and Hama Rules are no rules at all… we blow up prime ministers here. We shoot journalists. We fire on the Red Cross. We leveled one of our own cities. You want to play by Hama Rules, let's see what you've got. Otherwise, hasta la vista, baby."

The Lebanese “must unite all their communities and hit the Syrian regime with "Baghdad Rules," which were demonstrated 10 days ago by the Iraqi people. Baghdad Rules are when an Arab public does something totally unprecedented: it takes to the streets, despite the threat of violence from jihadists and Baathists, and expresses its democratic will”.

Urmee Khan

Coalition building in Iraq

Aaron Glantz reports for IPS, the main victors in the Iraq elections appear to be Shia politicians, however, the final results deny a clear Shia majority; forcing talk of coalition with either the Kurds or interim prime minister Iyyad Allawi.

Al-Hakim, Head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has indicated a preference for a coalition with the Kurds, who demand autonomy in the North. But opinion is divided, a Kurdish editor explained "A coalition between the Shia and Kurd is good... The Shia are in the south and the Kurds in the north. The Sunni are between us, so we will never fight." In contrast, a Baghdad columnist says "The main goal of the Sunni is to avoid a government supported by Iran". He believes that keeping Allawi in power will be the most stable solution for Iraq - even if it is not the most popular.

The only consensus is the need to get the 150,000 U.S. troops out of the country. "No dignified person is willing to see foreign troops in their country," al-Hakim said, "and the Iraqi people are no exception.”

Urmee Khan

Mental illness in Iraq

Urmee Khan looks at recent exchanges on Iraq in Parliament

Labour MP Llew Smith has tabled written questions asking the Government the following: (1) what assessment has made of levels of mental illness in Iraq (a) before and (b) since March 2003; and what assistance his Department is providing for mental health services in Iraq; (2) what assessment has been made of the numbers of livestock owned by Fallujah residents that were killed in recent military action in Fallujah; and what steps are being taken to assist residents of Fallujah who have lost their livelihood as a result of military action.

Gareth Thomas answers as follows: In its 'Health in Iraq' report of September 2004, the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH) states that accurate data on mental disorders are scarce. However, the MoH notes that clinical impressions suggest a substantial problem, especially in relation to post-traumatic stress. It also notes the lack of mental health services and that new approaches to community mental health are needed. A national workshop, conducted by the MoH in June 2004, discussed priorities for mental health promotion and strengthening of services.

Improving all types of health services in Iraq will take time. However, steady progress is being made. The MoH has produced Planning Guidelines for 2005, with support from donors. The UN and World Bank managed multi-donor trusts funds, to which DFID has contributed £70 million, provide support to the health sector. DFID has also provided technical assistance to the MoH, directly and through the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Regarding the situation in Fallujah, Gareth Thomas answered as follows: Information about numbers of livestock killed in Fallujah is not available.

Since the end of hostilities in Fallujah, DFID has been providing
technical advice to the Iraqi Government's Fallujah Core Coordination Group (CCG) which has led on humanitarian and reconstruction work in Fallujah. The CCG is working closely with military forces and local leaders to ensure that compensation payments are made and essential services restored to enable normal life and economic activity to resume. Financial resources for reconstruction are being made available from the Iraqi budget and United States' sources.

This exchange appears in Hansard for 10 Febuary 2005

Iraq: Are payments to the poor and unemployed in line with increase in food prices?

Urmee Khan looks at recent exchanges on Iraq in Parliament

Labour MP Harry Cohen has tabled a written question asking the Government the following: (1) has the Department undertaken research to assess whether cash payments to the poor and unemployed rise at a similar level as prices for food, in circumstances where cash payments have replaced food rationing; (a) what assessment he has made of whether this will happen in Iraq; (b) and if he will make a statement

Hilary Benn answered as follows: DFID has not undertaken research specifically into the issue referred to in the question. DFID is at present researching best practice towards social welfare protection measures generally in developing countries, and aims to produce a policy paper in October 2005.

In Iraq, DFID is providing technical assistance to help prepare for future decisions by the Iraqi Government on the reform of the public distribution system for food. Our aim is to enable the Iraqi Government to establish a welfare system targeted at the poor and unemployed, which ensures that families in need are properly supported while removing the economic distortions and inefficiency created by the present system. The actual levels of cash welfare payments at any time will be for the Iraqi Government to decide in view of prevailing circumstances.

This exchange appears in Hansard for 10 Febuary 20

"Journalism is the police force of democracy."

Said Zuhair Al-Jazairy from the Iraqi Journalists' Union fears the press freedoms gained since the fall of Saddam are under threat.

He told the recent TUC conference on solidarity with Iraqi unions that: "The occupation is bad but we have the freedom to speak and to write. We can even criticise corruption in the government. Most of us are still careful about what we write. We don't want to give support to the terrorists or be accused of doing so."

He added: "I cannot say for sure there's a mood to extend these freedoms. There may be increasing military and theocratic pressures inside this and future governments. They may wish to restrict us by, for instance, restricting our representation of women in line with religious teachings."

"We will have to struggle to maintain freedom of the press and a strong union will help."

He added: "Only this week, the Government interfered in our internal affairs after some member asked them to because they feared financial irregularities. This shows how far we have to go not only to protect our freedoms but also to develop the type of union attitudes which solves our own problems and does not expect governments to do it for us." (Jane Ashworth)

Can the camera lie?

Simon Pottinger examines the meaning of a photo and its caption in the upside-down world of the SWP

Most eye catching about Lindsey German’s latest article in the Socialist Worker is not the headline but the accompanying picture. The title of the piece simply reiterates the “troops out” demand, the call to arms for the next StW demonstration. The article is largely rallying support for this. Whilst her contention, that this is “still the key demand after the election” does halt you in your tracks it is the picture, and its caption, which takes your breath away.

Lets start with that caption; “Crushing democracy. A British tank on the streets of Basra, Iraq”.

Now mentally Google “crushing democracy” and “tanks” and see what image you come up with? Probably the first is either Tiananmen Square or Hungary in 1956 or Prague 1968, probably the last is Basra. The bag-carrying student confronting the tank is probably the most enduring political image since those of napalmed children in Vietnam. Both Tiananmen and Hungary occurred during the SWP’s (and its precursors) “Neither Washington nor Moscow” days. From memory, they held anti-tank and pro-democracy positions well within mainstream left responses. That aside the images we recall are of occasions where Russian and Chinese tanks actually and physically crushed democratic movements.

Now this cannot be what Lindsey German can be claiming here, can it? Even those capable of the wildest inversion of reality, something of which she and her comrades are well capable, could do no other than fairly report the truth; the troops in Iraq created a fragile security environment in which over 8 million Iraqis could, in scenes of celebration, vote for the first time in generations. Democracy was not “crushed” quite the opposite it was allowed to flourish against a background of murderous intimidation. The purple fingers, arguably now the most powerful political image since Tiananmen, were raised in defiance of those who would suicide bomb them outside polling stations.

Those bombers are of course part of a “resistance” for which parts of the far left have continually reiterated their support. Here we do have an inversion of reality. Those they champion in Iraq had every intention of “crushing democracy”, whilst those accused of this, prevented it.

There is insufficient space here to rehash the widespread condemnation of the pro-resistance leadership of the StWC it might however be worth recalling Michael Ignatieff’s words on the day of the election: “This makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates – fascists”

In a world where Bush=Hitler and secularism is a form of racism it seems perfectly plain that soldiers protecting voters from fascists is “crushing democracy”.

Hopes for secular politics

Iranian writer Amir Taheri writes in the Times that “an election that was not supposed to happen because the so-called resistance in Iraq — and its sympathisers in the West — did not want it has produced results that the doomsters did not expect.” He believes that “the new assembly will be organised on the basis of political programmes rather than sectarian and/or ethnic identities with Arab nationalist, Islamists and liberals-conservatives blocs forming. But those who have known the new emerging Iraqi leadership for years know that almost all its members are united in their rejection of any new form of despotism. Having been liberated from Saddamism, few Iraqis would want to return to a state of virtual servitude, whether in the name of God or political ideology.”

Sunnis to join the political process

The Guardian’s Baghdad correspondent Rory Carroll quotes Sunni leaders saying that Iraq's Arab Sunnis will do a U-turn and join the political process despite their lack of representation in the newly elected national assembly.

Syrian Ba'athism

Veteran Guardian Middle East Correspondent David Hirst examines the position of the Syrian Ba’athists after the murder of the former Lebanese Premier. He says that “For decades now Syria has been losing card after card in a steadily weakening strategic hand. Its domination over Lebanon is one of the last and most vital of them. Ultimately it will perhaps be a bargaining counter in some grand deal to be struck with America that secures the Ba'athist regime's future in the evolving new Middle East order.”

The state of Fallujah

Labour MP Tom Cox has tabled a written question asking the Government the following: (1) what assessment his Department has made of how many people have returned to live permanently in Fallujah since the recent military action in the city; and if he will make a statement; (2) how many people living in Fallujah have access to water and electricity; (3) how many hospitals are open and treating patients in Fallujah; and if he will make a statement; (4) how many schools in Fallujah are open and are teaching pupils; and if he will make a statement; (5) what recent visits have been made by officials from his Department to Fallujah; when each visit took place; what reports have been sent to him following such visits; and if he will make a statement.

Hilary Benn answered as follows: The Multi-National Force Iraq estimates that around 30,000 people have now returned to live in Fallujah. Safe drinking water is available to everyone living and working in Fallujah from standing water tanks which are filled daily. Bottled water is also available for all citizens at humanitarian assistance sites. Piped water supplies are being restored.

Reconstruction of power transmission and distribution is continuing. Mains electricity and street lighting have been reconnected in some areas. However, most residences are not connected. Power is being supplied to hospitals from stand-alone generators.

Fallujah general hospital and the Jordanian hospital on the outskirts of Fallujah are open and treating patients. Three primary care clinics and one mobile clinic are also in operation.

15 schools are open in Fallujah, with around 670 pupils as of 7 February. The Iraqi Ministry of Education is increasing efforts to publicise the opening of schools in order to encourage greater attendance.

DFID staff and consultants based in Baghdad have been visiting Fallujah regularly since military operations concluded, to participate in weekly co-ordination meetings and monitor the situation on the ground. The first meeting in Fallujah attended by DFID took place on 6 December and the most recent on 7 February. DFID humanitarian and conflict advisers have also visited the city. Reporting and analysis based on these visits are provided regularly to London.

This exchange appears in Hansard for 10 February.

Harry Barnes MP on Purple Power in Iraq

This article appears in today’s Yorkshire Post

The genie is out of the bottle, so to speak. The successful Iraqi elections could provide the tipping point for long overdue reform, workers' and women's rights in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

The concept of one party Arab states such as Syria setting up polling stations and carrying electoral adverts for Iraqi expats cannot be uninvented.

How and when the Iraqi example is followed is unclear. Social change may sometimes seem glacial but can suddenly shock when, as Marx put it, "all that is solid melts into air."

The Iraqi elections certainly took place in circumstances not of anyone's choosing and 50 people lost their lives. But the turnout exceeded expectations and was sizeable in Sunni areas, despite boycotts and intimidation.

As one who voted many times against the original invasion, I understand why some are sceptical about the origins and organisation of these elections.

Democratic norms took decades to develop in the west. In Britain, the labour movement participated in imperfect elections until full adult suffrage was established in 1928 but that didn't invalidate using the process.

And Arab democracy need not mimic the Westminster model but find its own means of overcoming tyrannical and feudal regimes and reconciling religion with equality and freedom, although democrats elsewhere should support the reformers.

Purple Power - the Iraqis' mass defiance of the anti-democratic "resistance" - gives some reason to hope that terrorism's days are numbered.

Marginalising the broader "resistance" and winning over elements of the dispossessed and fearsome Sunni minority will be made easier if three conditions prevail.

First, Iraqi sovereignty is fully regained with foreign troops staying or going on Iraqi terms only.

Secondly, federalism and Iraqi unity are protected in the formation of the new government and the framing of the new constitution.

And, thirdly, both are buttressed by the growth of a just and non-sectarian civil society including trade unions.

It is argued that the presence of foreign troops fuels the insurgency. There is some truth here but it is not the whole picture. Most Iraqi parties recognise that the premature withdrawal of these forces, without a sufficient Iraqi security capability, will benefit those who wish to reinstate Baathist rule or turn Iraq into a medieval theocracy.

France, Germany and Islamic countries could send troops to help protect the new Iraqi state.

A clear understanding that all such troops will go when requested is vital to undermine the notion that Iraq is just a military base and/or petrol pump.

Iraq was dominated for decades by a minority of the minority Sunni population. Those who gained power, privilege and wealth are loath to lose it. The new Iraq seems keen to develop an inclusive society.

This is why so much rides on winning Sunni participation in the new government and protecting Sunnis in the framing of the new constitution.

A key issue is the role of religion in the constitution. Those who say that Islam should not be the only source of wisdom should be heeded.

Stabilising Iraq's fledgling democracy is not merely a military matter but requires a new politics, after years of totalitarianism.

An Iraqi friend once told me that oil was a bane rather than a boon to Arab society because it allowed ruling elites to rely on terror and ignore civil society.

But we have seen an appreciable growth in Grassroots Iraq in the last year or so.

A key part of Iraq's new civil society is the free trade union movement, in which the biggest component is the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). It has put down deep roots within Iraq and has won support from major national and international trade union centres.

It has built 12 individual unions and attracted at least 200,000 members, no mean feat against a background of massive unemployment, dislocation and terrorist murder and intimidation.

The old enemies of free trade unions in Saddam's security apparatus have targeted the unions as part of a concerted attempt to liquidate the leadership of the emerging Iraqi labour movement.

Shamefully, anti-war leaders like George Galloway have abused the IFTU
over its support for the UN political process and ludicrously described its leaders as collaborators. Such sharp words here have been mirrored by foul deeds there, as we saw with the torture and murder of the IFTU leader, Hadi Saleh.

Trade unions in Iraq can help activate civil society and by uniting workers on class and economic grounds increase the power of non-sectarian issues.

They will also be at the forefront of ensuring that the new Iraq isn't fleeced by foreign investors and privatisers, even if a country that relies on a decrepit oil industry for 97% of its wealth must win private and foreign direct investment to rebuild its infrastructure whilst also ensuring that Iraqi people have a fair share of the country's wealth and decent welfare provision.

We can now respect the Iraqi voters, respect the organisations that sought to make the elections work and retrieve our own self-respect by uniting to pour in huge moral and material solidarity to Iraqi unions, not least via the TUC's appeal.

Solidarity shouldn't be about doing favours for Tony Blair or George Bush but supporting our natural allies in Iraq, who have suffered for so long.

Harry Barnes is a Joint President of Labour Friends of Iraq

TUC report of an ICFTU fact-finding visit

Iraq: unions and the law by Owen Tudor, Head of the TUC European Union and International Relations Department, member of the ICFTU delegation.

1 The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) sent a fact finding mission to Iraq from 14-25 February 2004. The mission was designed to identify developments in the Iraqi labour movement, and to assess what practical support the world trade union movement could provide, as well as to identify what progress was being made on labour law issues. The mission was led by P Kamalam, Middle East officer of the ICFTU, and consisted of representatives of the TUC, the AFL-CIO, the UGTT of Tunisia (with the support of the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions - ICATU), and two global union confederations - the ITF (transport) and the EI (education). The delegation travelled to Iraq from Jordan by road, spending most of its time in Baghdad but splitting for three days to visit Erbil In Kurdistan and Basra in the south of Iraq.

2 The ICFTU has co-operated closely with ICATU throughout, and both have made it clear that the global trade union movement, which opposed the war (a point which was reiterated to many of the people met by the delegation), should operate multilaterally with regard to involvement in Iraq. The TUC and the AFL-CIO have therefore resisted suggestions that they should intervene in Iraq unilaterally - a point which seems to be better understood in the British trade union movement than in the US labor movement. Certainly ICATU support would be jeopardised by unilateral efforts. However, the UK and USA governments provided useful support and assistance for the delegation, including setting up meetings - the FCO and the future British Ambassador to Iraq were particularly helpful.

3 The delegation met with a range of different organisations and individuals, covering governmental, non-governmental and union bodies as well as ordinary workers in various workplaces, and including on occasions employers:

trade union organisations - the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, nationally and in Basra; the General Federation of Trade Unions; the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Trade Unions; the Iraqi Teachers’ Association; the Kurdish Teachers’ Association; the Kurdish Chemists’ Association; and the Kurdish Agricultural Engineers’ Association.

workplace visits - an oil refinery and two railway depots organised by the IFTU; a food oil manufacturing plant and a hotel organised by the GFTU; and the port at Um Qasr, organised by the IFTU.

government organisations - the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs and the secretary to the Committee for the Advancement of Women; Sir Jeremy Greenstock (the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Iraq); Coalition Provisional Authority officials in Baghdad (Scott Carpenter, an assistant to Ambassador Bremer, and representatives of the USA International Development Department - USAID - and the Department of Labor); Erbil and Basra.

the ILO’s unofficial representative in Iraq, a member of the council of the Iraqi Federation of Industries, and a representative of 'Hope', a women’s organisation involved in providing aid.

History
4 The labour movement in Iraq has a long and powerful history, dating back to the first half of the 20th century. Iraq has a tradition of industrialisation and secularism which provided trade unions with fertile ground, and under the British mandate many trade unions were established. By 1958 when the British-installed monarchy was swept away, the Iraqi General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) was able to mobilise a million people for its May Day demonstration - about 5% of the whole population. Today, the majority of the Iraqi population is urban, with a quarter of the population living in Baghdad, a further fifth in Kurdistan and a large number in and around Basra in the south (these three more or less coherent areas account for nearly two thirds of the Iraqi population).

5 The GFTU was communist-dominated in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Iraqi Communist Party was a major component, with arab nationalists and proto-Ba’athists, of the forces which overthrew the monarchy. But as the Ba’athists assumed control of the country, opposition was increasingly restricted, and in 1968 the Ba’ath Party took sole power, nationalising most of the economy and preparing the ground for Saddam Hussein to become the sole source of power at the end of the 1970s. Until that point the GFTU continued to have some autonomy and power, as evidenced by the 1971 labour code which was very pro-union, and conformed at the time with ILO conventions (indeed at that time the main deficiency was probably the absence of a powerful employer’s body, and that has remained true to the present). In 1979, the communist-led leadership of the GFTU was swept away and replaced by Ba’ath supporters and unions became effectively merely a front for the government (indeed, many of the former GFTU leaders were executed or imprisoned, and many fled into exile).

6 In 1987, a new labour code was introduced which redefined public sector workers as 'employees' and removed their right to form trade unions. The unions which remained under the GFTU were provided with substantial incomes from compulsory subscriptions deducted from workers’ pay, and developed a large asset base (mostly buildings) in return for which the GFTU acted as a transmission belt to workplaces and workers for Ba’ath Party policies, also acting as ambassadors for the regime globally. As wages were controlled by the state, unions had no role in collective bargaining, and were as often involved (according to reports) in repressing workers as in settling their complaints about mistreatment at work (although clearly that work continued to be done in some areas).

The current state of the Iraqi labour movement
7 After 9 April when Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, Iraqi trade unionists who had been in exile began to return, those imprisoned had been freed, and those working underground were able to emerge. A Workers’ Democratic Trade Union Movement which had at least been active abroad (and possibly internally) emerged and held a meeting reported by them to be 350 strong which called for the recreation of the Iraqi trade union movement. Initially and sometimes since calling themselves the GFTU, this body is now generally referred to as the IFTU. It has been particularly active in Britain, and has received some support from British trade unionists. In addition, the GFTU - which was affiliated for many years to the World Federation of Trade Unions and ICATU - and an organisation which was originally active as the Union of Unemployed in Iraq, but which has now emerged as a broader Federation of Workers Councils and Trade Unions (FWCTU) have been in contact with the TUC and British unions. Further, In Kurdistan, two trade union movements (aligned with the parties in the two regions of Kurdistan) have been active for over a decade since the region attained practical autonomy after the first Gulf War.

8 In December, the ICFTU held a meeting in Jordan where trade unionists from around the world met all these organisations as well as representatives of the Teachers and Journalists’ Associations. That meeting was reported to the January TUC Executive Committee, where it was noted that none of the confederations active in Iraq seemed to have a significant membership base, and that the Kurdish unions seemed to be based mostly in small craft workplaces. It was agreed at the Jordan meeting that trade union solidarity should primarily be with sectoral organisations on the ground rather than award a 'franchise' to one of the competing national organisations.

9 On arrival in Baghdad, the ICFTU delegation found that as well as the organisations listed in paragraph 7, the General Secretary of the GFTU had left the organisation and was attempting to establish a union movement based around the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI) one of the main Islamic political parties - although the founding meeting which was allegedly wholly made up of ex-GFTU officials had broken up. The ICFTU delegation never managed to make contact with this putative organisation, but met all the other Iraqi national confederations.

10 The Iraqi organisations (GFTU, IFTU and FWCTU) are all attempting to take over the financial assets, buildings and membership lists of the old GFTU (this is one reason why the IFTU sometimes characterises itself as the GFTU). In addition, Iraqi and arab tradition usually provides, in law, for only one national union confederation, and the GFTU held that position until December when all pre-9 April organisations were disbanded and required to re-register. In January, the Interim Governing Council (IGC) agreed (although the CPA has not accepted this position which means it has no legal force) to grant sole recognition to the IFTU - partly because of its non-Ba’athist past, and partly because it is led by members of parties which are represented on the IGC (the Communist Party, the National Accord and the arab nationalists). However, none of the organisations has formally registered (partly because of the dispute over access to the GFTU’s old assets) and therefore none of them can access organisational bank accounts. The Iraqi Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is recognising the IFTU on a temporary basis, and consulting with it - neither the GFTU nor the FWCTU recognise the IGC or Ministry’s legitimacy and therefore will not deal with either.

11 ICATU has held a formal position for some months that, on the basis that there should be only one trade union movement per country, the IFTU and GFTU should merge. The IFTU has refused to do so because of the presence in the GFTU leadership of Ba’athists and those who collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s regime, but there is some evidence that the GFTU is reforming itself from within to displace those elements (it is extremely difficult to assess how true this is, but the delegation certainly saw some prima facie evidence for it), and some sections of the IFTU leadership are reported to be willing to merge on that basis - both organisations talk about elections being held in workplaces after the Iraqis regain control of the country on 1 July, to settle who should lead the trade union movement. The ICFTU is of course content with a pluralist trade union movement, but is fiercely opposed to a unitary trade union movement being enforced by law (not least because this would breach ILO conventions).

12 On top of this there is the issue of Kurdistan. The union confederations in Kurdistan are merging along with the main Kurdish parties and the organs of government - probably sometime later this year. Some of the Kurdish professional associations (see below) are already merged, although with considerable regional autonomy. They are implacably opposed to merging with organisations in the rest of Iraq, although they are keen to have good relations with them. They favour the IFTU because of its lack of Ba’athist associations, along with the equivalent professional associations. The Kurdish trade unions appear to be fully functioning, democratic organisations - they are formally independent of the state although they are closely linked, but the delegation generally considered this to be a product of the current political situation, and unlikely to remain as a problem. CPA officials in the north confirmed that the unions were real, vibrant organisations, strengthening as the economy develops, and independent of political parties despite the national confederations having formal links (it was noted that these links were more at the confederation level - the individual sectoral unions are pretty independent of the political line of the confederations). The delegation formed the view that there was an urgent need to ensure that GUFs link up with the relevant sectoral bodies in Kurdistan.

13 In addition to the union confederations, Iraq and Kurdistan have large and active professional associations, several of which the delegation met with. In practice, these are trade unions in all but name (and often they have adopted and are proud of the label of a union), covering sectors such as teaching, journalism as well as more traditionally 'professional' organisations such as doctors and lawyers. In many cases, the difference is between white collar organisations (associations) and blue collar (unions), which is hardly unusual in the rest of the world. But it also has to do with the banning of public sector trade unionism under Saddam Hussein, the nature of education law and so on (teachers’ salaries and teachers’ organisations are laid down in that law rather than in labour law generally) and as both of these change over the next few months, the trade union nature of the associations will change too. Whether they decide to become part of the confederations of blue collar unions, however, is less likely in the short term as they are jealous of their autonomy.

14 Crucially, however, the ICFTU delegation wanted to see evidence of trade union activity in workplaces, and this is one of the most positive signs that we saw. In several workplaces visited (admittedly selected by the confederations we met) we came across lively, muscular (even argumentative) trade union grassroots. In some cases such as the former public sector where unions had been banned in 1987, these organisations were barely months old, although many of the people involved had memories of trade unionism beforehand (in Kurdistan, the construction and contractors unions are strongly influenced by workers returned from exile, who have experienced trade unionism more recently in other countries). In other workplaces, such as education and the hotels, workers have thrown out managers (and head teachers) and union leaders strongly aligned with the Ba’ath Party, and created more active trade union organisations, often breathing new life into formal legal provisions such as on industrial democracy (the hotel we visited had two trade unionists from the workers’ committee, both non-Ba’athists, on the board of nine). Wages have increased in many places by ten-fold, and although prices have also risen, wage increases are outstripping them. Unions are dealing with problems of vandalism (train drivers and airport workers slept on site during the worst of the looting to protect their workplaces), unemployment (running at over 50% generally, partly because of the demobilisation of the army) and inadequate management - failure to pay wages on time and so on.

15 In terms of the national confederations, the trade unionists met at the workplaces visited were aligned either with the IFTU or the GFTU (the FWCTU had little time to organise such visits but admitted that most of their 350,000 claimed members were unemployed, with only patchy membership in other workplaces - which they blamed on the CPA, IFTU and GFTU). In Basra and Um Qasr, there only seemed to be IFTU members, and in Kurdistan, although all three Iraqi confederations claimed a few members, it seems clear that the soon-to-be merged Kurdish trade union movement is genuinely the only organisation besides the professional associations (with whom it is in formal alliance anyway, through an umbrella group of civil society organisations). What seems to be the case is that where trade unions in particular workplaces have political (in the case of the IFTU) or historical (in the case of the GFTU, except where anti-Ba’athist activists have created links with the IFTU) links they are aligned to one or other of the main confederations. In workplaces where people are developing trade unionism themselves, it seems to depend who knocks on the door first - but there were no reports from anyone about worplaces which had both IFTU and GFTU members.

16 Nevertheless, it was clear to the delegation that the Kurdish unions, the professional associations and the IFTU and GFTU had genuine links with workers in workplaces, and were more or less representative of ordinary workers. There are some doubts about the extent of political domination of the IFTU by the Communist Party (although it is quite likely that the leadership is in fact pluralist or just run by people who happen to be associated with the Communist Party), and some more important doubts about the extent of de-Ba’athification of the GFTU.

17 The main needs expressed to the ICFTU delegation were about practical solidarity. Unions need help with training (especially about areas where they have no recent experience such as collective bargaining, but also on union organisation and recruitment, on vocational training and on developments since Iraq became isolated from the world), with material support - especially communications: vehicles, ICT, printing facilities - and with exchanges of information and knowledge. In part, this reflects the need to restore the image of trade unionism, tarnished by compulsory membership and slavish adherence to the government, among Iraqi workers generally - although as the paragraphs above show, there is no lack of enthusiasm among activists.

18 In particular, the trade union movement needs help with increasing the involvement, especially in leadership positions, of women. Many of the unions met had majorities of women members (especially education and public services, but also those manufacturing workplaces where twenty years of armed conflict has reduced the male workforce considerably), but few had women in leadership roles. The leaderships recognised this as a problem and had various more or less believable excuses (many of the leaderships we met had been elected at times when violence on the streets was at its height and few men, let alone women, ventured onto the streets) - one union said that they knew it was a problem and they would do something about it, but said that even if they didn’t, the women would force their way to the top! The ICFTU delegation discussed the possibility of joint work with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs’ committee for the advancement of women who were supportive, and that channel may get round problems of picking trade unions to work with.

Labour law
19 The other main strand of the ICFTU delegation’s mission was to address the issue of labour law. As indicated above, the laws relating to trade union organisation under Saddam Hussein’s regime were repressive and contrary to ILO conventions, but there are other laws which were formally positive (although drained of benefits for workers by failure to implement or by the general state of trade unionism). The delegation discussed this area with trade unions, with the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, with the Iraqi Federation of Industries and with CPA officials, as well as the ILO.

20 The main law in Iraq in the near future will be the Transitional Administrative Law, which was published a few weeks after the mission. At the time, Sir Jeremy Greenstock mentioned (as shown in the ICFTU release) that the draft contained freedom of association and freedom to strike, and the final version agreed by the IGC and adopted by Ambassador Bremer is quite explicit in confirming 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.

21 In terms of the labour code itself, the CPA is drafting a revised version of the 1987 code, but without any clear understanding of what is wrong with it - because CPA officials were unaware of the scope of trade union organisations, and, frankly, scared of too much engagement with ordinary Iraqi workers because of the security situation. The CPA draft is therefore being developed in isolation and on a purely theoretical level, but until 30 June, they make the law. They intend to consult with the US and UK governments and with the World Bank on their draft as well as with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, and then hand it to the ILO for comments, leaving the ILO to involve unions and employers.

22 Meanwhile, apparently completely independently, the Ministry is discussing its own revised draft of the labour code with the IFTU and the Iraqi Federation of Industries (although through bipartite meetings rather than tripartitely). They too intend their draft to meet ILO conventions, and will also submit their draft to the ILO - a meeting which the ILO plans to hold in Jordan (they are still restrained from entering Iraq formally by the UN decision to withdraw after the August bombings) will probably be the key to this process. Trade unions (although which ones is not yet certain) and employers will be invited to that, and ILO bodies such as ACTRAV (the workers’ bureau) will also be involved.

23 Opinions differed about whether the trade union movement would be better off with a labour code adopted before the 1 July transfer of power or not. Clearly the CPA process is unhelpful, although the TUC will want to intervene in any UK government response. All the trade union movements seem to prefer to work from the 1971 code than the 1987 code as the CPA and Ministry want, but it may well be that the 1971 code is too biased towards unions to succeed - it has more historical legitimacy but again is therefore likely to be outdated. The ICFTU will need to press for the maximum involvement of all union interests (no one we met envisaged involving the professional associations or the Kurds, albeit that the government in Kurdistan may not consider anyone to be bound by an Iraqi labour code) as well as employers, and may need to press the ILO to make sure that the Jordan meeting involves labour experts from the ICFTU or ICATU as well as employers.

Conclusion
24 The global trade union movement can do an enormous amount to help the trade union movement in Iraq. The main problems faced by the movement are the splits within it (characterised in some cases by outright hostility and a desire to attain sole legal status, and in others by ignoring other groups like the professional associations and the Kurds), and the challenges of recruiting Iraqi workers and addressing the economic challenges of rebuilding the economy (issues like privatisation and unemployment are barely being dealt with at the moment - but clearly some privatisation is unlikely to be opposed by the trade unions in what is an almost wholly nationalised economy).

25 The TUC will want to press the rest of the global trade union movement to ensure that it backs work by Global Union Federations to support sectoral organisations in Iraq and Kurdistan, and will want to ensure that British unions are informed and involved, and that the British government continues to play what is a clearly positive, pro-trade union role. Any links which can be made to foster these processes should be supported: for instance, the FCO facilitated a meeting between the TUC and the Iraqi Minister for Labour and Social Affairs when he visited the UK, at which we pressed again for trade union and labour rights.

26 A further report will be made once the ICFTU has completed its analysis of the mission’s findings.

ICFTU Press Release

International Trade Union Mission Returns from Iraq 27/2/2004

A first international trade union mission*, has returned from a 10-day fact finding mission in Iraq. The main purposes of the mission were to gain a clearer understanding of trade union developments inside Iraq, and to raise key concerns about the reconstruction process with officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and Iraq’s Governing Council. The mission met with workers and trade union officials in Baghdad, Erbil (Iraqi Kurdistan) and Basra in the south. Meetings were also held with the Minister for Labour and Social Affairs Sheik Samy Azarh Al-maajoun, CPA officials, UK special envoy Sir Jeremy Greenstock, and employers from the Iraqi Federation of Industries. They visited workers in the education, food manufacturing, hotel, petroleum, road transport, port and railway sectors.

Everywhere, they found an appetite and a need for trade unionism. Workers are organising unions in workplaces where they were forbidden under Saddam Hussein's laws, and revitalising union structures previously dominated by the Ba'ath party. The mission met with new trade unionists, and trade unionists returned from exile or re-emerging from prison or the underground. In Iraqi Kurdistan, the established role for unions as an integral part of civil society was seen as an important basis which could be developed elsewhere in the country. The need for women to be enabled to play a more active role in the Iraqi trade union movement was stressed.

However, trade unionism in Iraq faces many challenges.

The economy has been devastated by sanctions and the war, with a lack of infrastructure and raw materials resulting in most of the workforce being unemployed. The burden on Iraqi women is especially heavy. Trade union activity is resulting in better wages in some sectors, however conditions for the vast majority of Iraqi people remain harsh.

The labour laws inherited from the previous regime, which among other things banned trade unionism in the public sector (most of Iraq's economy at the time), present many obstacles for trade unions. The mission stressed the need for the administration to involve workers through their trade unions, in the development of new labour laws. Tripartite involvement in drafting these laws should help lay strong foundations for social dialogue in the future. A primary role for the UN’s International Labour Organisation in drafting the legislation, and in other relevant aspects of reconstruction, is particularly important. This will help ensure that the legal framework, and the application of these laws, conforms to international standards, and in particular the core Conventions of the ILO.

The mission also welcomed news that the current draft Transitional Administrative Law includes freedom of association, free speech and the right to strike.

The international trade union movement will continue to work to assist Iraqi workers and their unions at the sectoral, regional and national levels. A strong a vibrant trade union movement will be a key foundation for the development of democracy in the country, and in ensuring social justice and equitable and sustainable economic development.

*The mission included representatives from the:

ICFTU (Ms P Kamalam)
UGTT Tunisia/International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (Mohamed Trabelsi)
Education International (Nicolas Richards and David Dorn)
International Transport Workers’ Federation (Bilal Malkawi)
TUC-Great Britain (Owen Tudor)
AFL-CIO/ACILS USA (Harry Kamberis)

The ICFTU represents over 150 million workers in 233 affiliated organisations in 152 countries and territories. ICFTU is also a member of Global Unions: http://www.global-unions.org

David Hirsh on the need for clear thought

Marcia Saunders writes in a letter in today’s Guardian that the current situation in Iraq can be understood as a conflict between a ‘foreign army of occupation’ fighting a ‘national insurgency’. If it were all as simple as this, then of course solidarity with Iraq would simply involve solidarity with the ‘national insurgency’.

There are two problems. Firstly, nationalism is never as straightforward as it claims to be. Nationalism is an ideology that claims the existence of nations – groups of people whose interests coincide. And nationalists always claim to speak in the name of the nation, pretending that ‘national interest’ over-rides people’s other concerns – such as interests as workers, as women, as lesbians and gays, as Muslims, as Christians, as democrats. Sometimes, there are genuine national anti-colonial movements, where the political demand for national self-determination is one that is agreed by a large majority of the ‘nation’. Even in a genuine movement for national independence, there are different interests, identities and politics that all too easily get subordinated by those who claim to speak as the authentic voice of the nation. People outside such a nation also often recognise the sole legitimate authenticity of one voice that claims to speak for the whole. Whether it is to make solidarity or whether it is to demonise the movement, it is often convenient for outsiders to pretend that the nation is one single homogenous group – that is, to accept the story of those who claim leadership of the nation, and to accept the silencing of other voices.

All too often, the ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ has shown itself to be something much more ambivalent and dangerous as things developed – look at Robert Mugabe, look at the history of Jewish nationalism, look at Ba’athism itself.

The second problem is that the current situation in Iraq does not even approximate to this classical picture of the ‘national liberation struggle’. Even the three categories of Sunni, Shia and Kurd do not tell the whole story, since, of course, within these three groups there are also huge differences and political struggles. Our political and social identities are not defined by our ethnic or national group – why should we assume that this is the case for people in Iraq? Indeed, the project of progressive movements in Iraq is to fight for a politics that breaks out of simple religious, ethnic and national identifications. The ‘resistance’ is supported by a small minority of Iraqis. It is not a national liberation movement, but consists of a number of different militias, some based on the politics of Sunni supremacism, some are religious movements that claim that the only way to be a real Muslim is to seek state power for a version of Islam, some are based on a nostalgia for the Saddam regime, some are based on an idea of anti-imperialism – most are mixtures of the above.

The world in general, and Iraq in particular, are more complicated than the simple schemas of good (oppressed) nations and bad (oppressor) nations, imperialist and anti-imperialist forces. We have to abandon these simple old formulae and we have to think instead.

What is the best way forward, today, for those fighting for a democratic Iraq, for those fighting for a kind of democracy that transcends the rhetoric of the American Republicans?

What is the best way forward for the embryonic Iraqi women’s movement? How can Iraqis for whom ‘Sunni’, ‘Shia’ and ‘Kurd’ do not define their entire political identity have their voices heard? These are real and complex questions, being addressed by people who risk their lives to address them. They need solidarity from people in other countries, not tired old certainties. They do not need the kind of thoughtless and self-satisfied solidarity that gives political support and legitimacy to those who are trying to kill them – ‘the resistance’.

Report number one on TUC’s Iraq Conference

Labour Start’s Eric Lee reports on the TUC Iraq Solidarity Conference on 14th February.

Approximately 70 trade unionists from Britain and Iraq attended an all-day conference organized by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), held in its headquarters in London.

The event was preceded the evening before by a memorial meeting organized jointly by the TUC and the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in memory of the IFTU International Secretary, Hadi Saleh, who was tortured and murdered in his home in early January by Ba'athist terrorists. Speakers at the memorial meeting included Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, Hadi's widow, Abdullah Muhsin, foreign representative of the IFTU, and David Bacon from US Labor Against the War.

The morning session featured speakers from the International Labour Office (ILO), the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), Labour Friends of Iraq (LFIQ) and the IFTU.

Walid Hamdan, from the Middle East region of the ILO, opened by asserting the ILO's commitment to the creation of independent and democratic trade unions in Iraq. Amaya Fernandez, who is coordinating the ICFTU's work on Iraq, reported on a series of meetings between international and Iraqi trade unionists, and emphasized the importance of trade union unity in Iraq -- and the ending of the occupation. Harry Barnes MP, one of the founders of Labour Friends of Iraq, spoke about the importance of British support for efforts to create a new Iraq. Ghasib A. Hassan from the IFTU spoke about the challenges facing the Iraqi trade unions following decades of Saddamist rule.

This plenary session was followed by a series of workshops in which Iraqi trade unionists were able to speak directly to their British colleagues.

The workshop I attended was opened by Hangaw Abdulla Khan from the Kurdish unions, who spoke in Kurdish, which was then translated into Arabic, and from that to English. His union represents some 100,000 workers in Kurdistan, which achieved autonomy in 1991 following the Gulf War. When asked what British unions could do, the Kurdish unions had prepared a list of 12 requests, including items for their trade union offices and training both within Iraq and abroad. They urged British unionists to visit Kurdistan.

Ali Sharif Ali from the teachers union then spoke. The union claims some 400,000 members; 75,000 of them in the Baghdad region alone. He spoke about the Ba'ath era when the union existed as an arm of the regime, promoting its values. He offered some examples of practical solidarity, including courses on modern technology organized together with the American Federation of Teachers. He said that for every opening on that course, which would be held in Kurdistan, there were over 100 applicants. When discussing the union's needs, he emphasized the need for training.

The Iraqis were asked about obstacles to organizing and emphasized the lack of a labour code, protection of union rights in the constitution, and other issues. Attacks by the "resistance" were also mentioned. Workers are prevented from attending union meetings and even going to work because of these attacks. Extremely high unemployment is also a key issue.

They reported that the proposed labour code would be presented to the interim national assembly. The unions expressed some reservations about the proposed code.

The Iraqi unions attending the conference included the IFTU, the Kurdistan Workers Syndicate, the Iraqi Teachers Union, the Iraqi Journalists' Union, the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions of Iraq, and -- suprisingly -- the General Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions (GFITU), the national trade union centre controlled by the former Saddamist dictatorship. Colleagues who attended the workshop in which a GFITU representative spoke said that the answers he gave to questions about the organization's Ba'athist past went unanswered.

In addition to representatives of the ILO and ICFTU, there were also delegates from two global union federations (the International Transport Workers Federation and the ICEM), and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.

At least 16 British unions sent delegates, including the CWU, PCS, Unison, GMB, Connect, NASUWT, NATFHE, T&GWU, FBU, Amicus, Prospect, NUJ, TSSA, NUT, RMT, and Community. In a least two cases, these unions were represented by their general secretaries (NATFHE and RMT).

Resistance like OAS

Over at Normblog, Jeff Weintraub argues that “what happens next will depend to a great extent on two factors that remain uncertain: (1) The political skill, effectiveness, and moderation of the Iraqi Shiite leadership, political and religious. And (2) whether or not, and to what extent, the central axis of Iraqi politics now comes to be shaped by an effective coalition between Shiite Arabs and Kurds (which, among other things, would also strengthen those tendencies in Iraqi Shiite politics that are least theocratic and least tied to Iran). It may be that both of these factors will turn out badly, but at the moment it doesn't appear to be inevitable.”

He also discusses the character of the so-called resistance and makes an interesting comparison with the ultra-right diehards of the Secret Army Organization in French Algeria a lot more than the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.

Reactions to the results: part 1

Jonathan Steele says in today’s Guardian that “Iraq has gained a relatively stable foundation for drawing up a new constitution after yesterday's election results” and that “The figures show that no group will be able to railroad its proposals through the drafting process. The watchwords will have to be dialogue and compromise.”

Oddly, he writes that “The turnout figure of 58%, announced yesterday, is high enough to give credibility to the new assembly, though it is much lower than hoped by those who hailed the poll two weeks ago as a triumph of freedom.” The consensus seemed to be then that 60% had turned out to vote which doesn’t seem much lower to me.

And the Guardian runs an editorial called Shia delight which says that “The announcement by the electoral commission in Baghdad heralded a new era - whatever you think of how and why Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the motives and honesty of George Bush or Tony Blair, and whether it has all been worth the cost in blood, misery, chaos and endless international acrimony.”

The leader concludes that “Iraq is still trapped cruelly between occupation and insurgency. Much will now depend on whether its politicians can match the aspirations of 8.5 million voters for security, jobs and prosperity after living with tyranny and war for so long.”

And here the role of unions and Grassroots Iraq will be vital as will our own solidarity. (GK)

Iraqi workers seek TUC help to rebuild unions

TUC Press Release, 14th February: Iraqi trade unionists will call for British trade unions to support the rebuilding of the Iraqi trade union movement at a TUC conference in London today. The eight Iraqis will be asking for financial support, training for union representatives and leaders, and advice on recruitment, tackling unemployment and privatisation.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: 'Trade unions offer ordinary Iraqi and Kurdish workers a voice they are being denied by the continued military occupation and climate of fear perpetuated by ‘insurgents’. Unions represent the true spirit of a tolerant Iraq. And strong unions will be the measure of freedom.

'Iraqi and Kurdish workers need the rights and protections the unions have won for the UK workforce. Unions in Britain will work with Iraqi and Kurdish unions to help them rebuild themselves and help rebuild democracy, freedom and the Iraq economy.'

The eight Iraqis come from three union confederations in Baghdad: the Basra oil workers’ union, the teachers’ association and journalists’ union of Iraq, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Syndicate. Forty years ago, the Iraqi trade union movement had a million members and was the strongest trade union movement in the Middle East until it was smashed by Saddam Hussein.

The conference will be also be addressed by Harry Barnes MP who set up Labour Friends of Iraq and did his national service in Basra. The event will be chaired by TUC General Councillor and NASUWT Hon Treasurer Sue Rogers, who grew up in Kirkuk.

UNISON Deputy General Secretary Keith Sonnet will also speak alongside representatives of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the UN workplace organisation, the ILO. The conference will be attended by all the major British trade unions, and by the global unions covering oil workers and transport workers.

Unions at the conference will be urged to raise money for the TUC Aid for Iraq Appeal, and provide practical assistance in the form of training, material support and security. Initiatives could include paying for an IFTU (Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions) theatre bus to tour Iraqi workplaces and explain the case for joining trade unions; refurbishing damaged union buildings; providing mobile phones, faxes and laptop computers; and printing materials on subjects as diverse as labour law and improving the position of women in the unions. The TUC will also be proposing that British unions twin with their sister organisations in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Iraqi trade unionists are: Ghasib Hassan, President of the Railway and Aviation Union (IFTU), Zuhar lal Jazairy, Journalists’ Union and Editor of Al Mahda newspaper, Ali Shari Ali, Teachers’ Union, Hassan Jumaa al Jawad, President of the Basra Oil Workers Union, Hangaw Abdulla Khan, Head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Syndicate and Sdeeq Ramadhan Hassan, Executive Bureau member, Falah Alwan, Federation of Works Councils and Trade Unions in Iraq ,Jabar Faris, General Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions

Tony Blair's remarks on Iraq today

Labour Leader Tony Blair told the party conference in Gateshead that "I learnt that on some issues, sometimes you just have to agree to disagree, like Iraq, though hopefully now, with 8 million people in Iraq coming out to vote, we can all agree, however we got here, we should stay as long as the Iraqis want us to help ensure democracy not terror determines their future."

LFIQ brings together people who took different sides on the war but we are determined to play a positive role in assisting post-war Iraq to rebuild itself and we believe that Iraqi unions are a key part of this process of democratic reform.

8 Million votes - Iraq Election Results: Seat Allocations in National Assembly

Based on the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq's Rules and Regulations No. 17 'Seat Allocation', today's results would see the National Assembly seats distributed as follows:

List Name -List Number/Number of Votes/Seats Won

Islamic Labor Movement in Iraq - 111/43,205/2. The Kurdistan Alliance -130/2,175,551/75. The United Iraqi Alliance -169/4,075,295/140. The Turkomen Iraqi Front - 175/93,480/3. Assyrian Christians - 204/36,255/1. Iraqis - 255/150,680/5. The National Democratic Alliance - 258/ 36,795/1. The Islamic Kurdish Society - 283/60,592/2. The Iraqi List - 285/1,168,943/40. Reconciliation/Liberation Entity - 311/30,796/1. The Communist Party - 324/69.920/2. National Independent Elites and Cadres Party - 352/69,938/3.

TOTAL - 8,011,450/275

Basic Explanation

Seat allocations for Iraq's 275-member National Assembly are calculated as follows:
• The total number of valid votes cast (8,456,266) is divided by 275 to give an initial quota of 30,750.
• Any list which has less votes than the initial quota is excluded. All those that have as many votes of more than the initial quota are filtered out.
• A new total votes is calculated based on the total number of votes cast to the filtered out lists (8,011,450).
• A seat quota is then calculated by dividing the new total by 275, which is 29,132.55.
• The number of votes a filtered party received is divided by the seat quota to give the total number of seats. Remainders are dealt with by giving an extra seat to each list in order of highest remainder until all 275 seats are allocated.

With thanks to the Iraqi Prospect Organisation, a network of young Iraq men and women working to promote democracy in Iraq.http://www.iprospect.org.uk

Christians in Iraq

Aaron Glantz of the IPS news agency examines the position of the Christian minority in Iraq, reporting that thousands of Christians have fled Arab parts of Iraq. One man is quoted as saying that "It's not so bad for the men, because we can blend in with the Muslims. But the women, they don't wear Islamic headscarves."

Thomas Friedman on the Iraqi example

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman looks at how progress in Iraq could undermine the threat or terrorism and why US Democrats need to start thinking seriously about Iraq. His strictures apply here too.

"Here's the truth: There is no single action we could undertake anywhere in the world to reduce the threat of terrorism that would have a bigger impact today than a decent outcome in Iraq. It is that important. And precisely because it is so important, it should not be left to Donald Rumsfeld."

He analyses “things Democrats should be excited about.”

The first is “the first attempt - ever - by the citizens of a multiethnic, multireligious Arab state to draw up their own social contract, their own constitution, for how they should share power and resources, protect minority rights and balance mosque and state.”

He adds that “if Iraqis succeed in forging a social contract in the hardest place of all, it means that democracy is actually possible anywhere in the Arab world.”

The second is the beneficial impact on Iran: “If we can help produce a representative government in Iraq - based on free and fair elections and with a Shiite leadership that accepts minority rights and limits on clerical involvement in politics – it will exert great pressure on the ayatollah-dictators running Iran.”

Friedman argues that “The war on terrorism is a war of ideas.”

He says “What Arabs and Muslims say about their terrorists is the only thing that will protect us in the long run. It takes a village, and the Iraqi election was the Iraqi village telling the violent minority that what it is doing is shameful. The fascist minority in Iraq is virulent, and some jihadists will stop at nothing. But the way you begin to drain the swamps of terrorism is when you create a democratic context for those with good ideas to denounce those with bad ones.”

He hopes that the Iraqi example will spread: “Watch how the progressives and those demanding representative government are empowered in their struggle against the one-man rulers in Egypt and Syria - if the Iraqi experiment succeeds.”

He concludes: “We have paid a huge price in Iraq. I want to get out as soon as we can. But trying to finish the job there, as long as we have real partners, is really important - and any party that says otherwise will become unimportant.”

The article appeared on 10 February. The NYT requires registration and the article my now be difficult to find. The URL is www.nytimes.com

Iraqis will make the fundamental decisions

In this incisive article on Alternet an initially sceptical Jonathan Schell asks how “how did a decidedly popular election occur under the auspices of a decidedly unpopular occupation” and says that “the election was a full-throated, long-suppressed cry by millions of oppressed and abused people against tyranny, torture, terrorism, penury, anarchy and war, and an ardent appeal for freedom, peace, order and ordinary life.”

At last, a voice on the left who can look clearly at what’s happening in Iraq without hoping for the worst so that others can be humbled.

He candidly admits: “There was, I confess, a momentary temptation for someone like me, who has opposed the war from the start and believed it would lead to nothing good, simply to scant the importance of the event, or react to it defensively, or speed past it on the way back to an uneasy
confirmation of previous views. But the impulse passed. After all, hadn't I been irked that the war's promoters, including the President, had refused to admit a mistake when they had not found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when they had failed to foresee the insurgency that soon broke out after Baghdad was taken, when American forces, encouraged by memos penned at the top levels of the Administration, had committed widespread acts of torture? More important, when masses of ordinary people act with courage to express deep and positive longings, shouldn't one give them their due? But most important of all, wasn't full acknowledgment of the magnitude of the event necessary for any real understanding of what might happen next in Iraq?”

He concludes a detailed analysis of Iraq’s renewal by saying that “The rudiments of a new governing authority in Iraq have appeared for the first time since the war that felled Saddam. It's unknowable whether such an authority can surmount the sectarian divisions it faces – in effect, creating an Iraqi nation – or, if it does succeed, whether it will invite American forces to remain. What we can know is that from now on it is Iraqis, not Americans, who will be making the most fundamental decisions in their country.”

LFIQ rebuts MP's claims in Independent

Solidarity with Iraq

Sir: Alice Mahon (letter, 31 January) says that Labour Friends of Iraq (LFIQ) would be more convincing if we had commented on the bombing of Fallujah and abuse of prisoners.

A quick glance at our website shows that we carry a regular feature called "Bush doesn't get it", where we propose an absolute ban on torture. We also issued a model motion on Fallujah before the attack, which condemned its aerial bombardment, demanded political and humanitarian means to prevent civilian casualties and added that a flourishing democracy in Iraq would powerfully undermine terrorism. It is preposterous to say that LFIQ is an apologist for the war: most of us opposed it, but post-war solidarity is the priority.

More importantly, Iraqis have moved on by giving the purple finger to the fascist gunmen and bombers and voting in huge numbers. So let all those who took different positions on the war unite to provide huge moral and material solidarity to Iraqi unions and civil society.

GARY KENT
Director, Labour Friends of Iraq
Reading

David Hirsh asks the left: anti-Americanism or internationalism?

In 1915, Karl Liebknecht wrote ‘The Main Enemy is at Home’ - ‘the main enemy of every people is in their own country’. Everyone should fight against the First World War by opposing their own government’s involvement and propaganda.

This principle has been transformed by the way in which some on the contemporary left use it. It has shifted, unnoticed, from an internationalist slogan into a new kind of nationalist one.

The main enemy is the USA – and its obedient ally, the UK. Some have gone further – the only enemy is the USA – and all other enemies were either created by it or are understandable reactions to it. One result of this kind of thinking is that an internationalist concern for all people’s struggles for freedom tends to lose out to a focus on the universal fight against American imperialism.

The Socialist Workers’ Party were recently putting up posters asking the question ‘Can the resistance defeat America?’ It is as though the SWP were more interested in the defeat of America than in what happens to Iraq. Military victory for ‘the resistance’ over America would be a catastrophe for Iraq. It would mean the end of the democratic movement. It would mean the end of the fledgling women’s movement, the end of efforts to build a workers’ movement, the end of the fragile and tentative space that has been built up in some parts of Iraq for free association. But these British socialists are more interested in the defeat of America than in the fate of Iraq. The only thing that is important is the defeat of the USA.

Jonathan Steele’s piece in the Guardian yesterday is headed ‘Iraq's illegitimate election did not justify the invasion, nor did it make occupation popular’. Already, from the headline, we can see the priorities of the writer. He is interested in the Iraqi election in terms of its effect and use in the British and American debate about the war and the invasion. Events in Iraq are analysed not in terms of what is good for Iraq, or how things may develop in Iraq, but in terms of the important business – the refutation of Condoleeza Rice’s threatening rhetoric about Iran.

Steele comments that it was unsurprising to see a high turnout in Kurdish and Shia areas because ‘their areas have not seen much violence’. It is hugely surprising to me – and exciting - that these two huge swathes of Iraq which experienced genocidal assaults under the Saddam regime are now described in this way.

Steel says, ‘embarrassed and humiliated that foreigners rather than Iraqis had toppled [Saddam], they seemed proud that the election was an Iraqi show. I heard no one thanking Bush and Blair.’ Again, the historic event, the holding of an election that was felt to be an Iraqi show, is not interesting in itself, but only as an element of the critique of the USA policy.

Naomi Klein, in today’s Guardian, is similarly more interested in conscripting events in Iraq to the global ‘war against imperialism’ than in current politics and possibilities in Iraq. ‘Now it seems that two years of bloodshed, bribery and backroom arm-twisting were leading up to this: a deal in which the ayatollahs get control over the family, Texaco gets the oil, and Washington gets its enduring military bases (call it the "oil-for-women programme"). She understands the future of Iraq as having been wholly determined by the USA and the multi-national corporations in co-operation with religious fundamentalists. There are no movements for change, which may or may not have successes; there is only the imperialist power that determines everything.

Part of the problem with seeing the USA as the beginning and end of all evil is that it leads to a fatalistic acceptance that nothing better is possible, anywhere in the world, until America is defeated. Another part of the problem is that in the UK and the US, it leads the left into an inverted nationalism – the struggle with our government comes first – the struggle against Saddam or Mugabe, Milosevic or Kim Jong-il will have to wait because the struggle against our enemies, here at home, are more important. Some versions even understand the regimes of these great leaders as part of the anti-imperialist struggle. Struggles against repression in parts of the world that are understood as victims of American imperialism take second place.

Currently, the fate of the democracy movement in Iraq, of the workers’ movement in Iraq, of the women’s movement in Iraq, is entirely subordinated to the central project – seeing Iraqis give American capitalism a defeat – at whatever cost to the future of Iraq.

Troops out when?

Stop the War leader Lindsey German explains in this week's Socialist Worker why "Getting the troops out is still the key demand after the Iraqi election." She says that "Every major political party had the end of the occupation as a central plank of their campaign. Therefore, you can only conclude that Iraqis voted for the troops to go." Iraqis want the foreign troops to go but not immediately, regardless of the security situation. When will the SWP acknowledge this and stop abusing those who are trying to rebuild their country through a UN mandated process? (Gary Kent)

Art and politics

Over at Normblog, there’s an analysis of art and political commitment based on the work of Richard Barrett

Norm concludes that [this] “just goes to show that being a composer who says NO doesn't necessarily mean one is politically clued up. Like Tony Blair should have gone down the demo and listened to the marchers, rather than bothering with all those cumbersome mechanisms of democratic government, like - oh - Parliament and such. Barrett says: As a socialist, I also have an idea of where we could take it [the world], and a vision of the possibility of a society where something like human dignity is taken seriously.” Norm acidly remarks: “A 'society where something like human dignity is taken seriously' doesn't immediately remind me of pre-war, Baathist Iraq.”

Honesty and Solidarity after the Iraqi elections

In yet another article in the Guardian criticising the elections, their veteran foreign correspondent
Jonathan Steele argues that Iraq's illegitimate election did not justify the invasion, nor did it make occupation popular.

He makes a number of fair observations including the fact that there were few international observers due to security fears, suggestions of fraud. He examines the differing motivations of Iraqis. He says, for instance, that: "in Basra, many Shias treated it as historic, saying it marked the real end to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Embarrassed and humiliated that foreigners rather than Iraqis had toppled him, they seemed proud that the election was an Iraqi show. I heard no one thanking Bush and Blair."

He adds more generally that "Most gave mundane reasons for their vote:
patriotism, a sense of duty, concern over joblessness and power cuts, and the hope that the election might be a first step towards change. There was also a strong underlying feeling that having an elected government could hasten the restoration of sovereignty and an end to the occupation. This was certainly the view of those supporters of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who decided that voting mattered more than the risk of legitimising the occupation."

If these are mundane, I hate to think what profound would be!

LFIQ was amongst those who argued that the elections were a triumph in the circumstances but that does not mean one should be triumphalist. Iraq has only begun a process and there is a huge job of reconstruction ahead. It is one thing to be honest about shortcomings and errors and another if people then take this as a reason for not giving solidarity to Iraqis as they fashion their destiny after
decades of repression and misery. It's a long hard road and may not succeed and our solidarity will be a relatively small part of this but it remains a priority.

Who will salute their indefatigability?

David Hirsh looks at today’s vote and women’s rights in Saudi Arabia

Last week we saw a glimpse of a possibility of a brighter future for Iraq when most Iraqis voted in the election. Today is election day in Saudi Arabia. Half of the seats in local councils in Riyadh will be contested; the other half will be selected by royal appointment. The royal family will continue to rule the country, select the ministers and make the decisions; the new councils, whose powers are yet to be defined, will play a consultative role. There are no political parties in Saudi. Three male reformers who publicly called for a constitutional monarchy in the country were arrested last year and remain in prison.

Women do not have citizenship in Saudi Arabia in any meaningful sense. Every Saudi woman has a male guardian – her husband, father, brother or son. Her ability to travel, her access to education and her access to an ID card is legally dependent on his consent. Women are not allowed to hold a driving license.

Public space is rigidly segregated by gender. Even in Starbucks or McDonalds, there are doors marked “singles” (exclusively for men) and “families”. At university, women students will see their male teachers only via video link or a mirror window. Women are not allowed to stand as candidates in today’s elections and are not allowed to vote in them.

There are genuine movements for women’s emancipation and for democracy in Saudi Arabia. There is some space in the media that allows discussion of issues such as violence against women, legal reform and democratisation. There are many women and men in Saudi Arabia bravely committed to changing the situation. These people risk their life and liberty to speak openly, to campaign and to come together in semi-clandestine political movements.

Why is there no significant international scandal about the situation in Saudi Arabia? Why is there no huge Saudi Arabia Solidarity Campaign? There is a liberal sensibility that “We” in “The West” should respect “Difference”, which accepts the Saudi authorities’ right to present itself as the authentic voice of the Saudi people, and which rejects the right of people outside the country to comment. There is an anti-imperialist sensibility, which believes that to argue for change in Saudi Arabia would be hypocritical and a manifestation of an ideology of white superiority. There is a capitalist pragmatic sensibility, which holds that the most important thing is a government in Saudi Arabia that allows the oil to be produced and sold at a reasonable price and without interruption. And there is a fundamentalist sensibility, which believes that the Saudi regime’s version of an Islamic state is not sufficiently religious.

Where do these sensibilities leave those women and men fighting for their rights in Saudi Arabia? The liberal version understands them as inauthentic Arabs.

The anti-imperialist version understands them as puppets of international capital. The capitalist version understands them as a threat to business. The fundamentalist version understands them as agents of the global war against Islam. Who will stand up and embrace their courage? Who will salute their indefatigability?

In Iraq many women and men believed it was worth risking their lives to vote.

Don’t expect to see pictures of veiled Saudi women with purple fingers on the front pages of tomorrow’s papers.

The facts in this piece come from this article in today’s Independent and this piece in Saturday’s Guardian

Harry Barnes MP examines the Lancet claim and asks for truth about Iraqi deaths

I don't follow Stalin's dictum that "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Every death of a human being is an immeasurable loss to all humanity.

I strongly opposed the war, whatever was said about weapons of mass destruction, because I felt that there would be a large number of deaths. The anti-war case was decent and honourable and I can say that the consequences of the invasion included these predictable tragedies. But we must tell the truth about Iraqi deaths.

The Lancet figure of 100,000 civilian deaths is so often used by some anti-war figures that it is commonly accepted as a fact. It isn't. There were serious methodological faults with the Lancet research. They actually suggested that the deaths were in a range of 8,000 to over 200,000 so the 100,000 figure is just an average of an improbable range. The loss of so many lives, on a daily basis, would have been noticeable in hospitals and the whole of society. They could not have been easily absorbed.

The Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister claimed last year, from medical records, that there have been 3,803 civilian deaths in the 6 months up to 5 October. If the same rate applied to earlier deaths, then nearly 13,000 deaths will have occurred since the invasion. But these are from medical records and some burials may have escaped the medical system.

"Iraq Body Count" claims that over the whole period up to 27 November 2004 there were between 14,563 to 16,742 deaths. These seem to me to be the most dependable figures available. They are disastrous enough but only up to 17% or so of the Lancet's favoured figure.

We need the Iraqi interim government and the Coalition to undertake a full count. The causes of death also need to be covered – the Coalition attacks or terrorist activity. The Iraqi Government claims that the latter is dominant.

The anti-war case would still be strong if we accept that the Lancet figure is wide of the mark.

It's bad enough that, say, 20,000 people have died but the use of exaggerated figures shows that some anti-war leaders are more concerned to win points, regardless of truth, than to make an intellectually rigorous assessment.

Likewise, their attempts to rubbish the elections do them no credit either. One can have been strongly opposed to the war and yet recognise that Iraqis have now shown that they wish to take back their country from both the "resistance" and foreign troops. Both motivations were present. And who can blame the Iraqis for wanting what we all want, democracy free from foreign interference, after so many decades of one of the most awful regimes on earth.

And while we're doing some straight talking, let us also remember that the troops are in Iraq under a legitimised mandate from the UN which runs out at the end of this year. So whilst it's understandable to call for troops out now, it does buck international law, which says that the Iraqis should decide on this matter.

None of us who opposed the war likes how we got here but we must face the facts if we are to provide solidarity to Iraqi democrats in their hour of utmost need. My plain message to those on the left who abuse statistics and rubbish Iraqi democracy because they cannot stand the idea that Tony Blair or George Bush get some sort of credibility from them is to get real and do so quickly.

As Bob Dylan put it:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

LFIQ meets leader of Basra Oil Union

Harry Barnes MP and Gary Kent for Labour Friends of Iraq met Hassan Jumaa al-Asaadi (General Secretary, Southern Oil Company Union and President, Basra Oil Union) on 8th February.

Hassan is in Britain at the invitation of the TUC and will attend the TUC Solidarity Conference on 14th February. He is also working with Iraq Occupation Focus and was accompanied at the meeting by Ewa Jasiewicz of that group and a translator.

We discussed the development of the Oil Union since the fall of Saddam, the problems it had had with Baathist managers, the strike action it took to help remove one such figure as well as the general problems of the oil industry.

Hassan stressed his belief that the mooted privatisation of the oil industry could be resisted mainly by industrial means. Harry Barnes suggested that political means to influence the Iraqi government on this and to improve the labour code could be fruitful.

We discussed his union's reported relations with the IFTU. He stated that the Oil Union was not part of the IFTU but was semi-independent although it co-ordinated with the IFTU and others, on a non-hostile basis.

Some hostages found and freed

Wires report that Egyptian hostages have been freed in raid on Baghdad house.

Iraqi Vote Mirrors Desire for Democracy in Muslim World

“Pew Global Attitudes Project surveys conducted in 2002 and 2003 found receptiveness to democracy in nearly all of the 17 Muslim populations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa covered by the polls."

Hat Tip: Normblog and Matewan

Faleh A Jabar on the Macabre Death of Hadi Saleh

Faleh A. Jabar is one of Iraq’s most prominent sociologists and this moving obituary appears on the IFTU’s web site (see bottom for link).

I recall a prophetic line of verse that roughly reads: My life is a long row of candles; warm, lively candles are my coming days; consumed and burnt are those of bygone days; and I would not turn back lest I see the horrible row of burnt candles growing larger and larger. Substitute graves for candles. I had few tombs in my memory in exile; upon my return to Baghdad, they developed into a massive cemetery. I could not realize how prolific wars and tyranny are in this macabre enterprise that makes life seem so fragile, so accidental. The last new grave was that of my friend and colleague, the unionist, Hadi Saleh (1949-2005).

A group of five, most probably, ex-security men, broke into his house in Baghdad, waited for him in the dark and preyed on him the moment he stepped in. They killed three times: first they strangled him with a wire; second they riddled his body with bullets; lastly they burnt him. This was not an ordinary killing. Unlike show beheadings that mark ‘resistance’ in Iraq, this was a triple vengeance: in the 1970s Saleh was condemned to death for clandestine unionism, he was amnestied years later, now the Ba’ath security men working in clandestine for restoration reneged on their amnesty.

They also took vengeance for the successes Saleh achieved in rebuilding trade unions (The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, IFTU) that stand now at some 200,000 membership, a formidable democratic social movement defying all sorts of fundamentalist, communal or other parochial identities. Lastly, they wanted to hush him and his colleagues who pursue a twin line of peaceful action for the restitution of Iraq’s sovereignty and building an all-inclusive, federal democracy.

Perhaps he was born with a smile; and simply forgot it was there. I never saw him appearing without that innocent grin. We rubbed shoulders at the ICP printing house in Baghdad that ran the only non-governmental publications in the 1970s. He was a printing worker, and later, an expert, I was a fledgling writer. My first book appeared there. He was on the production line ready with a helping hand. In exile in Beirut and Damascus, we worked on a daily basis to produce the ICP’s monthly, al-Thaqafa al-Jadida.

After his return from Sweden in 2003 with his wife Corea and two kids, the offices of the Iraqi unions were raided by the coalition forces for no apparent reason. I was worried about him. Following the macabre series of kidnapping and beheadings in 2004, my worries grew even sharper, and he had this reassurance to offer at our last encounter in Baghdad in November 2004: ‘I am a worker and unionist not a politician, who on earth would wish to target me. They are killing your lot, writers and intellectuals‘.

I wish he were right. He was on the hit list by the very murderers who raped the nation for thirty odd years and who reemerged now with the gold they dug from the Central Bank, their family networks and the criminals of the underworld, putting a false mantle of ‘resistance’.

Millions of Iraqis are resisting the occupation peaceably. Their collective wisdom is that restitution of sovereignty should go hand in hand with popular mandate, and block restoration. Hadi Saleh’s death is a wake-up call for all those who rightly opposed the war, but wrongly support post-conflict violence. The millions of Iraqis who defied death to vote reiterated Saleh’s message and sacrifice for those who may see in bombing utilities, gas stations, union offices, voters and voting stations as ‘anti-imperialist’ endeavours. Skeptics should ask at least one question: if insurgents genuinely enjoy massive popular support, as they seem to claim, why do they fear the ballot?

Sistani's vision for democratic Iraq has cricket but no chess

Patrick Cockburn in today’s Independent analyses Ayatollah Sistani’s views and the debate on the Mosque and the State in the framing of a new Iraqi constitution.

The bankruptcy of some left thinking

Norman Geras once more puts his finger on what is so wrong with parts of the left in a wise and substantial piece in the US socialist Dissent magazine. LFIQ is mainly concerned with encouraging solidarity with the Iraqi labour movement and democrats but, as they say, Geras gives much food for thought.

He wants to know why so many on the left to come down each time on the side they do: morally and politically, “in my own view, the wrong side” and “leads the Western left, time after time, to campaign for courses of action that would leave the most hideously repressive regimes in place, whether in the countries they rule or in those they invade; and which seemingly forbids-as in Kosovo or Sierra Leone-Western interventions to halt ethnic cleansing, mutilation, and widespread murder? Why does the category of "imperialism" so dominate and exhaust the thinking of a section of the left as to lock it into these regrettable positions?”

He cites a primordial anti-Americanism in which America is identified as “the source of all worldly wrongs and a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly.”

He criticises “the practical reductionism by which the wrongs of the world are lightly referred back to their alleged causes, whether in U.S. foreign policy, or economic hardship, or grievance, or whatever; on the other hand, a disinclination or refusal to acknowledge in their full magnitude and moral significance the political evils for which other states, organizations, and movements are responsible.”

LFIQ Diary: they cannot be serious!

This is the first in an irregular and irreverent column which will take a look at those who fail to get real about Iraq.

‘Bah Humbug!’: Sidney Blumenthal as Ebenezer Scrooge

“A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!
“Bah” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

Sidney Blumenthal was President Clinton’s ‘senior advisor’ according to the Guardian. Or, if you believe other people, he was “a somewhat peripheral figure in the Clinton White House”. One of 24 such assistants, “Blumenthal was Clinton's big-ideas man, the guy who got whisked into the Oval Office whenever the president wanted to consider his place in the cosmos. Blumenthal's principal task was to organize a series of conferences on the ‘Third Way,’” (Timothy Noah, Slate, May 20 2003)

Whichever was Blumenthal’s main role then, today is to scoff at the Iraq Elections. Writing in the Guardian (February 3) he offers a master class in the six ways to rubbish the elections:

1. Be Sarcastic: ‘Who would not want it to be true that the courageous people of Iraq, as one body, have defied bloodthirsty fanatics in order to establish a thriving democracy in Iraq…and the glow from that fire will not light the whole world”. Now, this is a very old trick. Say something in a very sarcastic voice and lard it with hyperbole and hope that the reader will miss the fact that what you thereby dismiss is actually...true. Just look again at the quote. Everything he mocks is basically true. Election workers were gunned down in the street. Voters were murdered while they queued (can you imagine what would have happened in the UK or US if the TV reported that suicide bombers were infiltrating polling stations and blowing up voters?) The Iraqi people were courageous. They did defy bloodthirsty killers. They did do this in order to establish a democracy. They example should light the whole world. Blumenthal’s sarcastic dismissal of their example is a bloody disgrace.

(“What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough”, said Scrooge.)

2. Underplay the scale of the success: ‘The Iraqi election went more or less as expected’, says Blumenthal, as if auditioning for an Olympic ‘Being Underwhelmed’ Team.

(So he said “Pooh, pooh!” and closed it with a bang)

3. Minimise the benefits of the vote: ‘The morning after the Iraqi state received the nod of legitimacy it is no more capable than before of providing security’. The first election in Iraq, held after thirty years of totalitarianism and war, in defiance of threats and murders and bombings, saw a turnout most remarkable in the circumstances. All this is reduced by Blumenthal to a ‘nod of legitimacy’. But my question is this: how did a man who thinks being elected makes no difference to a government’s ability to enforce security ever get to advise anyone on anything anyway? Of course it will make a difference. You just see.

(“Don’t be cross, uncle”, said the nephew. “What else can I be in a world of fools as this?”, said Scrooge)

Blumenthal is right to point out that the Interim Government is under attack for its treatment of detainees. But does he think elections irrelevant here as well? The elections are to appoint a body to draw up a constitution. The protections afforded to all who are held under the rule of law are already being debated and the Kurds have proposed a raft of measures for the new constitution. Of course a vote in and of itself does not guarantee rights. But elections matter.
(“Its humbug still!”, said Scrooge, “I wont believe it”)

4. Play up the ‘insurgency’: ‘Most of the Sunnis are sympathetic to the insurgency’, says Blumenthal. This is untrue as most opinion polls make clear again and again. But notice also that Blumenthal does not condemn he ‘insurgency’ for scaring Iraqis away from the polls, stealing from them the documents they needed to register. He just mocks the idea that voters ‘defied blood-thirsty fanatics’

5. Change the subject: Blumenthal does what maybe a couple of hundred commentators who were scoffing before the election have done since the election: change the subject to Iran.

(“What should I put you down for?”, “Nothing!” Scrooge replied)

6. Psychoanalyse your opponents: of those overjoyed at the Iraq election, Blumenthal says, ‘Euphoria…is symptomatic of a disorder’.

(“Why did you get married?” said Scrooge. “Because I fell I love.” “Because you fell in love! growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than Christmas. “Good Afternoon!”)

So, no euphoria for Ebenezer Blumenthal. No ‘utopian cul-de-sacs’. Maybe that is why, as Joseph Lelyveld noted in his review of Blumenthal’s 802 page book about Clinton’s foreign policy, The Clinton Wars, ‘[Blumenthal] has room for decorative filler but no room to tell us in more than a page on the Rwandan genocide that the Clinton administration opposed the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers and insisted on the withdrawal of the small UN force on the scene’ (New York Review of Books, Volume 50, Number 9, May 29 2003).

(AJ, with help from CD)

Brutalized and brutalising

That is a synopsis of an important article in the New York Times (registration needed) of two American academics’ report into the medical care and living conditions in American run Iraqi jails.

M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks describe the health care provided to detainees as little better than in Iraq under sanctions. For instance, one in five Abu Ghraib inmates needed psychiatric care but got none as there was no psychiatric service. And when a psychiatrist was assigned to Abu Ghraib for a few months he treated no patients; that wasn't his job. He was supposed to help military intelligence make interrogation plans.

And again, dentists were forced by necessity to perform heart surgery; invasive tubes and instruments were re-used without sterilization. And as in the film MASH, officers had to barter for basic supplies and work out how to use the state of the art machinery which they did not order or understand.

It was in these conditions that some of the most iconic images of the war were manufactured. Abu Ghraib’s prisoner-on-a-leash was one of these mentally ill patients. Without a strait-jacket and with no-one competent to administer the powerful pychotic drugs that were available, the soldiers said they came up with using the leash as a way of protecting the detainee from himself. Now, you might want to ask what kind of mind came up with that idea, and you might also want to ask what type of conditions lead people to think it a realistic option. You might also have a predisposition towards assuming soldiers tend towards the brutal…. but whichever way you tend to lean yourself Bloche and Marks are right to say that, ‘In Abu Ghriab the Army all but abdicated its responsibility to provide care to the thousands of people it kept in custody. This neglect bred dire conditions and desperate measures.’ (JA)

More on abducted left-wing Italian journalist

Reporters without Borders says it is "extremely worried" by the abduction of the left-wing Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena of the daily Il Manifesto and called for immediate expressions of support and concern. Voicing its solidarity with her family and newspaper, the organization said action in support of Sgrena should be "immediate and massive."

Purple finger mugs and badges on sale now

The Hak Mao blog has started selling mugs, badges and fridge magnets with the Purple Finger on it, as on the left of this web site, with the proceeds going to the IFTU and the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party

Is this what ‘Whatever means they find necessary’ means?

This article analyses those ‘insurgents’ who kidnap someone suffering from Downs Syndrome, strap explosives to him, and send him to a voting centre. When he became frightened and turned away, the ‘insurgents’ used the remote control to blow him up.

A further glimpse into the work of the ‘insurgents’ is given in an article about a suicide bomber who survived. He drove a vehicle to the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, his ‘comrades’ in another vehicle used the remote control to set off the explosive hoping he would ‘become’ a suicide bomber. Unfortunately for them he was blown out of the windscreen, survived and started talking. Following his information several of the Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi group have been captured, including his chief bomb maker. They in turn also talked to the Iraqi authorities and confirmed that it was Zarqawi’s group that detonated the bomb that killed Ayatollah Muhammed Baqr al-Hakkim and over 85 of his followers in Najaf – and that the motive was sectarian war against all Shiites. (DCB)

Iraqi political activist Kawa Besarani urges solidarity

Iraqi political activist Kawa Besarani says “It is time for the Left to take a clear stand to show support and solidarity to the Iraqi people, especially to the progressive and democratic forces to build a democratic federal Iraq without occupation or any future military bases. It is a time for the Left to expose the barbaric nature of so called “resistance” and their leftist ally here in UK.”

Who is really prolonging the occupation of Iraq?
Trade Union Leader was tortured to death by “resistance”

I last saw Hadi Saleh just five days before he was murdered. We were sitting in Baghdad with a few friends. He was talking patiently and very calmly about the challenge they were facing. How to rebuild a strong and viable trade union movement after 35 years of Saddam’s atrocities, the coming elections, the participation of working class organisations such as the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and his own participation in the World Trade Union Congress in Japan just two weeks before with the TUC and many other unions. He didn’t have any illusion on the enormity of the task he was facing it. At the end he paid the ultimate price, his life.

What is ironic, he said, is that the same people who were used by Saddam Hussian to repress the Iraqi working class, the yellow trade union of Saddam, are still invited to some of these international meetings where their friends try to promote them.

He said it’s like Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat is escorting you and listening to what you are saying and reporting back to their boss, and that is was exactly happened.

And Hadi was tortured and killed in the same way that the Mukhabarat did to the Iraqi people over the last 35 years.

A gang of 4-5 broke into his house and waited for him to come back. then they bound him hand and foot and they blindfolded him. Then they beat and tortured him to the death.

He knew what he was talking about; that those people are not just some fellow trade unionists with different views, but people used to be part of Saddam’s regime and now link up with the “resistance”

Nevertheless, he was always adamant to expose terror of Saddam and the plight of Iraqi working class, and he was patient to get solidarity to Iraqi workers, putting his personal safety and life at risk.

He has no illusion on the task he was facing. Rebuilding truly new democratic independent trade union in Iraq, a pillar of new civil society, being able to defend the rights of Iraqi workers in the face of mass unemployment, new liberal economic policy, occupation by more than 150,000 foreign soldiers and campaign of terror facing Iraqi workers.

Just one day before his murder, 18 workers were killed in cold blood. They were unemployed workers from south and Baghdad areas who went to Mosul to seek work, their bus stopped, kidnapped and shots one by one. This is part of a continuing and a well planned escalated campaign of terror against Iraqi working class by the heroic “resistance”.

All this is happening under the eyes occupation forces and the interim Iraqi government. This elite is safe behind the protected walls of Green Zone, even their limited movements are by helicopter within Baghdad. What is more surprising is that the occupation forces neither able to provide safety and security nor allow people to defend and protect themselves.

It is like sitting duck waiting to be picked off one by one or you have to be grateful for the occupation to protect you? I wonder what the purpose of this policy is. Isn’t it to prolong occupation and control every aspects of life?

For Hadi, it was very clear as he said that terror is actually helping occupation to stay longer and giving them good pretext for staying and preventing Iraqi workers to contribute in building new Iraq.

He wasn’t like some of those armchair revolutionaries abroad who lecture Iraqis on how to resist occupation. People like Galloway and his friends and those few individuals who have hijacked Stop the War Campaign, writing articles attacking Iraqi Trade unions or who booed and hissed an Iraqi trade unionist, Subhi al Mashahdani who had been jailed by Saddam for ten years, as they did at the European Social Forum, with Stop the War leader Lindsay German standing on the platform, screaming her support for the heroic Iraqi “resistance” .

These “international comrades” are prepared to welcome Saddam thugs because as they are “resisting” American Imperialism, but attacking people like Hadi Salih and Mashahadni who both spent years in Saddam prisons.

I wonder why they are not trying to “liberate” Britain from so many American nuclear and military bases? Is it not part of this colonial and supremacy mentality to lecture people of developing country, rather to show them, especially to the democratic forces, solidarity and support to rebuild their country and end of occupation?

Hadi Salih stood against the war and occupation, he never participated in any action or event to support the war and he knew very well, that the war will not bring democracy to Iraq and he knew that best way to end occupation is through rebuilding strong Trade union movement and give the chance to Iraqi people to build its democratic institutions not through supporting Saddam’s thugs or the new fanatics whom wants to build new Talaban in Iraq.

The irony is that Hadi and his comrades in the Iraqi trade union movement and all progressive and democratic forces, were not only victims of Saddam in the last 35 years, but victims of terror of “resistance” supported by armchair revolutionaries abroad.

Both have the same aim, to silent Trade union leader to speak and work. They did in London, by silencing Subhi Al Mashadani from European Social Form platform, and in Baghdad they silenced Hadi Salih.

I wonder who support and prolong occupation. Hadi and his comrades or the sectarians and their opportunistic ally in their actions against the Iraqi people.

It is time for the Left to take a clear stand to show support and solidarity to the Iraqi people, especially to the progressive and democratic forces to build a democratic federal Iraq without occupation or any future military bases. It is a time for the Left to expose the barbaric nature of so called “resistance” and their leftist ally here in UK.

Left-wing journalist kidnapped in Baghdad

Giuliana Sgrena, a correspondent working for the largest circulation far left Italian daily paper, Il Manifesto has been kidnapped in Baghdad while carrying out interviews in the street. LFIQ hopes that she is released unharmed and urges maximum publicity on this.

Plaid Cymru criticised

Labour Assembly Member and the Deputy Minister for Communities, Huw Lewis, laid into the Welsh Nationalist Party Plaid Cymru at a recent session of the Welsh Assembly for "knee-jerk anti-Labourism, cloaked by the populism of knee-jerk anti-Americanism" and using "the dreadful issue of war to recruit supporters from the left, who, it feels, are disillusioned with Labour on the issue of Iraq."

He added that "Many on the Welsh left saw all along the fascist criminality of Hussein's regime. Campaigners like Ann Clwyd pointed to the horrors of genocidal policies against the Marsh Arabs, and the use, many times over, of weapons of mass destruction against the Iraqi Kurds. However, whereas campaigners like Ann have remained true to their convictions, and, post-occupation, have supported the struggle of those who would deliver democracy to Iraq, there are those that have abandoned their natural allies on the Iraqi left to indulge themselves in Blair-bashing and the worst kind of unthinking
anti-Americanism."

Huw Lewis also quoted Baram Salih, the former Prime Minister of Kurdistan, and a graduate of Cardiff University who said 'Like those who shunned us in the eighties- 'us' being the Kurds- our former friends find the martyrdom of the Iraqi people to be an irritant. They avert their eyes from the grisly truth of our suffering while claiming concern at the human cost of war'.

Huw continued: "Abandon the Iraqi left now, by howling at Blair, while neglecting to face the reality of what must be done to achieve democracy and, in reality, you advocate turning that country over to the oppressors of women, racial minorities, trade unionists and democrats of any stripe. There have rarely been harder choices for the soul of the left in Welsh politics than those that face us now as fanatics crawl like maggots over the body of Iraqi civil society.

However, think for a moment where the counsel of Plaid Cymru and its fellow poseurs would lead us. Between now and January, Iraqi election workers, at risk to their lives, will show great courage as they try to act as midwives to democracy and a new era for their country.

They will do so in the hope of attaining freedoms for their people that we take
for granted. Perhaps, one day, they will campaign for the removal of a democratically elected leader without being placed in fear of their lives-a privilege that Leanne and her party already enjoy. I just hope that they will have a better cause than the abandonment of those seeking freedom for the sake of headlines. Plaid Cymru's record on foreign affairs stinks to high heaven."

Hak Mao unearths report of resistance to the resistance

Hak Mao carries a report of Iraqis literally fighting back against the “resistance.”

“It would appear that people are getting sick of the insurgency. I understand, though, that this is the first report of Iraqis confronting insurgents and actually fighting back in such a way.”

Tony Blair says that Iraqis should control their own economy

LFIQ strongly agrees with the Labour Leader Tony Blair that Iraq now has a chance to “establish democracy, with their own security forces, their economy under their own control, in charge of their destiny, as a democratic country. If they do that, the impact will be felt not just in Iraq, but across that region and even on the security of this country.”

The election was a major success but there’s no room for complacency on the possibility of major sectarian division on the ground and in framing the constitution. Clearly, the state of the economy and the position of the oil industry, in particular, form a major part of the backcloth. One neglected area of debate, apart from the issue of Saddam’s odious debts, is the way in which the Iraqi economy works and how it will be run. The overall principle for us is that working people secure full union rights and good welfare provision. We invite readers to give us their views and to point us to people – activists, academics, pressure groups etc - who are examining this vital area.

Extract from Prime Minister’s Questions on 2 February.

Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab): Yesterday, I met a constituent of mine who came from Iraq. He proudly showed me his ink-stained finger and told me how he and his family had voted and how it was one of the proudest and happiest days of their life. Will the Prime Minister give the House an assurance that we will continue to support the Iraqi people for however long it takes, so that they can establish a democratic and peaceful Iraq?

The Prime Minister: I thank my hon. Friend for that. She is right. It was heart-warming to see millions of Iraqis, whatever the intimidation and the threats against them, disprove everybody who put forward the theory that there are some people who are in favour of democracy and others who are not. The truth is that given the chance, human beings everywhere want to live in a democracy, not a tyranny. What the Iraqis have done is magnificent, but my hon. Friend is right. We must stay there—not quit the course, but stay the course—and make sure that we see them establish democracy, with their own security forces, their economy under their own control, in charge of their destiny, as a democratic country. If they do that, the impact will be felt not just in Iraq, but across that region and even on the security of this country.

Guest Post: Norman Geras on the Iraq Election

The writer Norman Geras has a reputation for ‘careful textual analysis and cogent advocacy’. For many of us his has been one of the most important voices on the left in the last quarter century. Here he considers some differing reactions to the historic Iraqi election. (AJ)

Extract: "Speaking bluntly, the game is now up. The 'illegal war' and/or 'unnecessary war', the war most of whose opponents just couldn't (try as they might) summon into their understanding a moral case for it they could respect, this war has led via several stages, including yesterday's election, to a new prospective set of interim arrangements that will have the endorsement which matters most. The assembly to follow from the election and which is to oversee the drafting of a new constitution will have the endorsement of the Iraqi people, and in conditions in which they had to risk no less than life and limb to express their views. Let people who will quibble over the democratic validity of this endorsement shame themselves as they choose."

The Iraq election was a joyful day not only for Iraqis but for anyone who was following it and whose (let us just say) political alignments weren't causing them indigestion over what they were having to digest. A very happy day. And the happiness of it was not only, in a manner of speaking, necessary but also sufficient. Today, it's already the day after and some initial reflections are in order.

The UN Secretary General has called the election a beginning:

“... not the end of the process [but] the beginning of transition, of political transition, which eventually should see the day when Iraqis run their own affairs and take charge of their own destinies...”.

Well, that's fair enough. It is only a beginning; but then so are the first faltering steps of a young child, generally cause for much family celebration. Back in September Carlos Valenzuela, who led the UN team that organized the Iraqi elections, said that if these could be held, they might contribute to altering the security situation for the better. It remains to be seen whether he turns out to have been right. But in any event if we consider what yesterday's election signifies from a different - although related - angle, it rather does resolve something. The angle I'm talking about here is the angle of legitimacy. As it is, the transitional arrangements currently in place in Iraq have behind them a couple of UN resolutions, but for reasons known to everyone, residing in the division of opinion over the war which liberated Iraq from the regime of Saddam Hussein, those resolutions weren't enough for a lot of people.

However, and speaking bluntly, the game is now up. The 'illegal war' and/or 'unnecessary war', the war most of whose opponents just couldn't (try as they might) summon into their understanding a moral case for it they could respect, this war has led via several stages, including yesterday's election, to a new prospective set of interim arrangements that will have the endorsement which matters most. The assembly to follow from the election and which is to oversee the drafting of a new constitution will have the endorsement of the Iraqi people, and in conditions in which they had to risk no less than life and limb to express their views. Let people who will quibble over the democratic validity of this endorsement shame themselves as they choose.

All those who have expressed their support, in one way or another, for the 'glorious resistance' in Iraq now have some hard thinking to do. Up to this point, even in spite of the political character and the murderousness of the forces composing it, the Western supporters of that 'resistance' have been able to trade on ambiguities about legitimacy resulting from the fact that an invading and occupying army had ushered in the transitional arrangements currently in force. No longer will they be able so to trade. Henceforth, they will be supporting - those who do continue to support it - an 'insurgency' against an attempted transition to democracy that has the express will of the Iraqi people behind it; an 'insurgency' not merely criminal (under all civilized codes and norms) in its methods, but also without a shred of democratic legitimacy. How many good liberals, how many on the Western left, will be willing to go this far it remains to be seen. So does it remain to be seen how, if at all, the weight and direction of commentary will change coming from those who, though they have not supported the 'insurgency', have aimed the greatest volume, and the warmest, of their condemnations at the political leaders whose decisions opened the way to yesterday's election.

But it was impossible not to notice a certain reserve, verging on self-strangulation, in some quarters in response to the triumph - yes, triumph - that was yesterday's election in Iraq. A people that has had to endure decades of the most brutal oppression, punctuated by wars, and whose intending voters were under threat of death or terrible injury should they dare to take the path of democracy, faced down those threatening them and, in what is widely reported to have been in some places a festival atmosphere, recorded its democratic will. What else to call this but a triumph? It was a day to be enjoyed and celebrated by anyone with the interests of the Iraqi people at heart, whatever grave difficulties still lie ahead of them.

But for some the better option was apparently not to do this; or it was the urging of more cautious, hard-headed analysis upon those - a lot of us - who felt they wanted to share in the celebration of so many Iraqis. One site of such urging, as you might expect, was this morning's Guardian editorial page. Savour it, do - because even in its convolutions it is a thing of purity. The lead editorial opens, ringingly, thus:

“The most obvious message to draw from yesterday's elections in Iraq is that it will be a long time before it becomes clear who the real winners are”.

There you go. That is what is most obvious about yesterday, and nothing even a tad more inspiring (whoa, steady there - Ed.)... oh all right, encouraging. Then the editorial goes with Kofi Annan: that this is 'only a first step', and 'it would be foolish to draw definitive conclusions'. However...

“Those looking for grains of good news from the election will find it in the fact that the polls were held on time and - given the bloodshed of recent months - without death and destruction on the scale some had feared”.

Grains of good news, that's as much as one might look for, and these grains are timeliness and less bloodshed than feared. Nothing else. A long segment follows according to which some people might think there's something more positive here, but the Guardian leader for its part is back and forth and then back again, with its 'even ifs' and its 'yets'; the upshot of all of which is that...

“When a nation holds its first elections after a long period of dictatorship, a temptation is to rejoice at the mere fact of its happening... It would be too simplistic to transfer that romance [appropriate it seems to 'the countries formerly encased in Europe's Eastern bloc, as well as... South Africa and Ukraine'] to Iraq...”

No...

“Even if the elections have been some sort of success, we are still no closer to knowing when US and British forces will withdraw from Iraq.”

'Even if' and 'some sort of' success - not just a success, let alone a triumph.

Many entirely reasonable people may want to say here: So what's wrong with it? Really? Cautious, hard-headed analysis never did anyone any harm. It can even be of benefit. Joyful illusions are still illusions; realities have to be faced.

Indeed. But there is joy and there is illusion, and the two don't have to be shackled together. Liberals, democrats, people on the left, who could not yesterday, and cannot today, find it in themselves to rejoice about what Iraqis, in their millions and after all they've been through, bravely did... how miserable, what unfortunates. Just think how many of these same people would have been overjoyed had, say, George Bush lost last November to John Kerry. Would they have foregone immediate expressions of that joy for cautious, hard-headed analysis of the upcoming Kerry presidency? Would they hell. They would have been whooping it up from New York to San Francisco, from Auckland and Sydney to Berlin. The analysis, in that event, would have waited until tomorrow or the day after, or else been allowed to stand side by side with fulsome sentiments of celebration. But for the people of Iraq, different rules.

No, the truth, the thing that so many cannot digest or stomach, is that the road to what happened yesterday was opened by a Republican US president whom they despise and a New Labour prime minister whom they hold in only slightly higher regard than that, while they themselves were marching and otherwise disporting themselves in a way that would have closed off that road for who knows how long. Well, if you could not take pleasure from what happened in Iraq yesterday, I extend my commiserations. For Iraqis and a lot of other people who felt able to share in their celebration it was a very good day.

'Nothing Less Than Inspiring': Marc Cooper on the Iraq Election

Marc Cooper, veteran left-wing US commentator, and friend of Labour Friends of Iraq, has written an excellent article in the LA Times about the Iraq Election. You can find 'Iraq's Triumph' at Marc's website (scroll down).

Marc sends this message to those who opposed the war: "Those who opposed this war and who want to see the U.S. troops withdrawn — either immediately, soon or eventually — should unequivocally encourage the tenuous political process now underway in Iraq. We should stand for more and better elections, not fewer. We should be encouraging the writing of a fair constitution, an inclusion of the Sunnis into the process to reduce the violence, and a bolstering of civil society (as a safeguard against fundamentalism). If we merely write off the vote as only Potemkin-village-like or charade elections we take ourselves out of any serious debate and we degrade the legitimate aspirations of the Iraqi people". (AJ)

A new service from Labour Friends of Iraq

Ask LFIQ: We can provide background material and answer queries for your next speech, debate, motion or letter. We are happy to lend a hand organising internal party debates and training sessions. We will try to get back to you within 3 days with top-tips, resolutions, copy, speeches, quotes, references and so on. Please email us.

Labour MP Harry Barnes suggest a new left approach to Iraq after the elections

“The decent left should heed the voice and the vote of Iraqis, who have now issued a powerful message by braving the gunmen and the suicide bombers and voting in huge numbers for democracy and sovereignty. We are with them or not.”

Given that the Iraqi turnout was the same or even larger than the last UK election, the left must do some urgent rethinking on Iraq or be morally sidelined whilst our natural comrades there fight for non-sectarian democracy, without the massive and direct solidarity they urgently require.

It was one thing to oppose the war, as I did in every single Commons vote. I don’t regret backing the other superpower – world public opinion against the war.

But history has moved on, with Iraqis trying desperately to salvage a new society after decades of Saddam Hussein’s fascist-type rule and his wars - together with the predictable consequences of UN sanctions, invasion and occupation.

But some left-wingers seem content just to say “I told you so” and fail to respect if not always support the decisions of Iraqi progressives.

After Saddam was overthrown, I contacted the then fledgling Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), which has soared from a small clandestine movement to up to 400,000 members in the last year or so.

I organised meetings in the Commons and joined with others to increase support for the IFTU’s efforts to rebuild a free labour movement as part of a vibrant civil society – what we call “Grassroots Iraq.”

We recently formed a new campaign group for this new civil society called Labour Friends of Iraq (LFIQ). Other parties should establish equivalent organisations.

LFIQ seeks to unite party members who were pro-war and anti-war in favour of supporting post-war Iraq. I joined with Ann Clwyd as Joint President to symbolise such unity.

We back the new unions in Iraq. Such unions were once very powerful. Fresh from the million strong anti-war march in February 2003, I heard of an Iraqi who had participated in the May Day rally in Baghdad in 1959, which attracted similar numbers in a society of around ten million people.

Free unions were, however, crushed after this and under Saddam, so much so that the very term “union” is often associated with totalitarian terror, modelled on both Stalin and Hitler.

But brave working class activists were able to pick up the threads against huge odds.

One problem was the antagonism of US occupying authorities. They attacked the IFTU’s headquarters in Baghdad and arrested several of its leaders in December 2003. The leaders were released without charge but the offices were closed. This caused a worldwide outcry and a year later the IFTU re-occupied its offices. No decent explanation has been given.

They opposed the war but the IFTU decided that the best way to strengthen civil society was to support the electoral and political process sanctioned unanimously by the United Nations Security Council.

The IFTU has rightly been accorded a great deal of support by the British and international labour movement but a small minority of ultra-leftists and armchair revolutionaries has behaved disgracefully by attacking groups like the IFTU.

Unfortunately, sharp words here were mirrored by foul deeds in Iraq where the so-called resistance has attacked, kidnapped, tortured and murdered IFTU members.

Those who fingered the Iraqi labour movement as Vichy forces and hailed the murderous resistance as Maquis should no longer have any credibility or respect in the labour movement.

The decent left should heed the voice and the vote of Iraqis, who have now issued a powerful message by braving the gunmen and the suicide bombers and voting in huge numbers for democracy and sovereignty. We are with them or not.

No one should pretend that the conditions in which the elections were held or the electoral system were perfect. But the turnout, despite intimidation, was superb - perhaps better than the turnout here. And a third of the candidates were women, which is certainly better than here.

The next question is the presence of the foreign troops. It may be unwise to set a precise deadline for withdrawal because that will be exploited by the so-called resistance. The idea of withdrawing foreign troops to barracks is superficially plausible but not if it endangers civil society. But the US and the UK should make it absolutely clear that they won’t overstay and will help Iraqis build political and security capability before leaving.

Whether we supported or opposed the war should not overshadow the central task of the British and international labour movement and that is to pour in direct assistance to Grassroots Iraq and the IFTU and, not least via the TUC’s appeal. Solidarity is the watchword.

Harry Barnes MP is a Joint President of Labour Friends of Iraq

‘We are Everywhere!’

Mohammed over at Iraq the Model writes of his joy, his hopes and his fears, after the election.

The day after.

What happened yesterday was an extremely significant turning point that will leave its marks on the future of the region.

The world stood astounded at the sight of the masses that challenged death yesterday to plant the seed of hope in those boxes and now the enemies of the change cannot deny all that; the people have said their word clear and loud in their purple finger revolution.

Why was the world surprised? And what were the motivations of the people who have never experienced democracy before?

There were so many misconceptions about Iraq and these were the reasons why viewers from outside as well as many Iraqis were surprised. In the past few months, the media have played a big role in reflecting a blurred image about the will and preparations of Iraqis to hold the elections, not to mention exaggerating the size of the "militant groups" and their capabilities.

The world has discovered yesterday-Iraqis are included here-many facts that correct those misconceptions; now it's become clear the weakness of the terror groups and their limited geographical distribution and I think that the low number of attacks we witnessed yesterday wasn't the result of the security measures alone but largely because of the limited areas these groups exist in and this rendered them capable only of launching attacks within their strongholds as the roads between provinces were blocked. Thus I believe that yesterday's attacks have identified the places where the terrorists mainly reside.

The over exaggerated estimations for the strength of terrorists have also contributed to intimidating the people but even with that, the silent majority moved forward led by the natural human desire for freedom and by the belief that elections can make their lives better. The people think of elections as a one day struggle that can prevent suffering on the long term.

The silent majority has realized that elections are good and serve the people's interests; they don't know much about practicing democracy as they never lived under one but it's the common sense of the people who see how democratic nations enjoy stability and prosperity that led them to this conclusion.

Maybe the "fatwas" from the religious leaderships contributed to this too but I don't think "fatwas" were the main reasons behind the excellent turnout. I expect the results to reveal that many Shea't voters didn't vote for the lists favored by the clergy. Even the list of the "united national alliance" which is expected to be among the big winners wouldn't have gotten all this popularity among voters if it had included too many clerics as less than 10% of the candidates in this list are clerics while the rest are technocrats, Sunni, Kurds, Turkmen and people from other religious minorities; without this variety in the list, it would've been resting now at the tail of the choices list.

What happened yesterday reminds me of the fall of Saddam and they way Iraqis expressed their delight on the 9th of April, only that yesterday's carnival was greater, louder and more specific. Are we going to learn the lesson from yesterday?

I am afraid from being trapped in an ecstasy that directs our attention away from making use of the achieved victory; this victory is represented now by the feeling of Iraqis that freedom lovers and democracy supporters are the majority and they're everywhere and that there exists a strong unity among Iraqis against terror threats.

Every person has realized that he's not fighting alone in this battle and that all Iraq, from the very north to the very south is sharing this view even in the cities where security is a big concern, like Diyala, Mosul, and Tikrit; even in Fallujah, the boxes weren't empty.

The majority wasn't silent yesterday and the people's confidence now is at its peak and we should encourage and invest this feeling now and rebuild the bridges between us, I mean the government, the coalition and the people so that we can find the best way to exterminate the terrorists and the criminals who we know now how few and isolated they are.

The joy of victory can make us lose important positions if we allowed it to delay us from making use of the advantage we achieved over the terrorists now.
What we do need now is balanced optimism and a search for new and improved methods to deal with the remaining tasks.

On the other side, all those who stood against the change will regroup again and launch another campaign to criticize and lessen the significance of this revolution and they will try to find gaps in the process to shake the confidence and the determination of the people.

I also call those who are pessimistic about the situation to make their pessimism balanced if they want to find solutions for the problems they expect to erupt.

The reaction of the dictators and the enemies of freedom remains predictable; the neighboring countries and the Arabic media will try to find new weapons to use against the ongoing democratic process and these new weapons could be even more cruel this time.

We here remain assured that we've put our feet on the right track and that the bright future we wish for Iraq has become much closer after the 30th of January but we all have to reevaluate our previous assumption according to the new facts on the ground in order to find the best way we can push the process to further successes.

The Left as Chelmite Villager

The reaction of some on the left to the Iraq election reminds Alan Johnson of the Yiddish parable, ‘The Right Spot’, one of many wonderful ‘Tales of Chelm’.

You need to know this about the village of Chelm. When they made the world the angels sprinkled souls in equal proportions. A handful of wise, another of the foolish, so that no community would be given too many souls of one kind. But over Chelm the angels made a mistake. An angel’s sack was caught on the top of a mountain and out spilled all the foolish souls over Chelm.

Here is the parable of ‘The Right Spot’

A Chelmite once went about on the outskirts of the town, searching for something on the ground.

“What are you looking for?” a passer-by asked him.

“I lost a ruble in the synagogue courtyard, so I’m hunting for it.”

“You poor Chelmite,” the stranger mocked him, “why are you hunting for it here, when you lost it in the synagogue courtyard?”

“You’re smart, you are!” the Chelmite retorted. “The synagogue courtyard is muddy, whereas here the ground is dry. Now where is it better to search?” (from A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg)

The left is searching for answers to Iraq on its own preferred ‘dry ground’. Listen to this poor Chelmite, Sami Ramadani, writing within hours of the Iraq poll, when the tears of joy were barely dry on Iraqi faces:

“On September 4 1967 the New York Times published an upbeat story on presidential elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet regime at the height of the Vietnam war. Under the heading "US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror", the paper reported that the Americans had been "surprised and heartened" by the size of the turnout "despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting". A successful election, it went on, "has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam". The echoes of this weekend's propaganda about Iraq's elections are so close as to be uncanny”. (Sami Ramadani, writing in the Guardian, February 1 2005)

Ramadani is typical of the Chelmite left. His ‘anti-imperialist’ arguments are dry ground. But he has as much chance of finding there a democratic future for Iraq as the Chelmite does of reclaiming his lost ruble.

The left are reluctant to search in the mud. After all, it’s muddy down there!

And this is true. We slip and slide while making solidarity with the democrats in an Iraq under occupation. We reach for the opportunities of the UN-backed political process and sometimes we fall. And we look a bit of a mess, don’t we? The Chelmites notice our clothes and call us names (‘Look at them, they are filthy! What a scandal!).

But when we find the ruble it will be here, in the mud of the synagogue courtyard. Now, will you please leave the dry ground, join us down here in the mud, and help us find that ruble?

Alan Johnson

Thanks to Hak Mao

Many thanks to the blogger Hak Mao for the 'Give Fascism the Finger' icon on the left. We urge all our readers display it in their workplace.

Gary Kent examines the left and the murder of of Hadi Saleh in the Belfast Fortnight magazine

Hadi Saleh was a quietly spoken man whom I had the privilege of meeting last year.

Hadi was an active trade unionist under Saddam Hussein's regime and was sentenced to death in 1969. The sentence was commuted but he served five years before exile in Sweden. He opposed the invasion of Iraq but returned even before the war began.

After the war, he became the International Secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), which replaced clandestine networks that operated against state-run yellow unions that were part of Saddam’s apparatus of repression.
The IFTU is one of several new independent federations but the most broad-based and biggest with up to 400,000 members.

Saddam’s men hadn't forgotten Hadi, though. Last month, Saddam loyalists broke into his house in Baghdad. They bound, tortured and strangled him in classic secret police style.

This was not a one off murder but part of a clear plan to eliminate the leadership of Iraq's emerging labour movement, which includes the IFTU and the Iraqi Communist Party, of which Hadi was a long-standing member.

There is a macabre logic to this strategy if you a Sunni supporter of Saddam who wants to exploit those despairing through mass unemployment and to return to a Baathist dictatorship or a clerical fascist who wants to return Iraq to more medieval times. You foment sectarian hatred, liquidate efforts to create a unified and democratic Iraq at the elections in late January, and intimidate those who wish to make the UN backed election process work.

So the grossly misnamed “resistance” targets UN and aid workers, communists, trade unionists and election workers. Fear is sown and democrats are intimidated. The cold-blooded murder of three election workers in a busy Baghdad street brought back memories of the Provisional IRA's murder of the young census collector, Joanne Mathers in 1981. The more gruesome the death the better.

There’s more than a little déjà vu with old arguments over the IRA and troops out in the 70s and today’s bitter arguments on the left. Just as then, you have a determined minority who support physical force against imperialism, whatever people on the ground think.

What is most ironic is that ultra-lefts support the resistance because they oppose the Americans in a re-run of the “enemy’s enemy is your friend” at the same time as the US is starting to abandon this any old son of a bitch policy, so prevalent in the Cold War.

The Human Rights campaigner Peter Tatchell sees clearly through the muddle: the anti-war left “justifies this carnage in the name of “national liberation” (sic). Motivated more by hatred of the US and British governments than by love for the Iraqi people, many so-called leftists support a “resistance” that, if victorious, would bring to power Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists and pro-al-Qaeda militants. Is that what the left now stands for? Neo-fascism, so long as it is anti-western?”

Most Iraqis opposed the war although most people in Iraqi Kurdistan saw it as a liberation. But my Iraqi friends really object to being lectured by lefts who think that they know better. They see it as a form of cultural imperialism.
They have utter contempt for those who are known in Baghdad as “the people of the slogans.” Civil society groups recognise that the premature withdrawal of troops would cause a bigger bloodbath and that supporting the UN endorsed elections is a better way of keeping Iraqi sovereignty and then removing the troops.

Yet there is a moral void on the left when it comes to backing Iraqi democrats. Of course, one reason for this is the continuing bitterness with Blair and Bush about their decision to invade. If you have 45 minutes, I'm perfectly happy to rehearse the arguments. But Iraq is moving on and getting stuck in that groove does nothing to assist the Hadi Salehs of the world.

The real crime, for the "resistance" of Hadi was that he and his comrades decided to participate in or support the interim structures set up after the war. So Communists became ministers. It's regime change, Jim but not as we know it.

As is usually the case, trade unions are a bedrock of both civil society and non-sectarianism: they emphasise common class interests rather than origin and belief. That’s why totalitarians hate them.

We can expect such hostility from the “resistance” but it is shameful that larger parts of the western left have joined them. So a leading Iraqi trade unionist has been described by George Galloway as a “Quisling” and the SWP has described the IFTU as a “fake” union.

The Stop the War Coalition Officers circulated a statement saying that the Coalition “reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends”.

When the Coalition’s officers issued this statement, Mick Rix the former hard-left leader of the railway union publicly resigned from the leadership of the group, which once mobilised a million or more but which has now degenerated into an ultra-left rump, with fast evaporating credibility.

He slammed the “deliberate, archaic, violent, and plain downright stupid” language Stop the War leaders used when describing Hadi’s organisation and added, in words that now have a deep poignancy, that such comments had “placed these good trade unionists and socialists at a terrible risk”.

Unfortunately, Rix was right and it is likely that more trade unionists will be murdered. In an echo of the Peace Train, railway workers in Basra are striking for increased protection and the release of kidnapped members.

It is a watershed moment for the left: it must decide which side it is on, that of Iraqi democrats such as Hadi Saleh or those who murdered him.

Human rights of all vital

The Independent reports that American troops killed four inmates and injured others in a riot at a prison in British-controlled southern Iraq. We agree with Bakhtiar Amin, Iraq's human rights minister, who is quoted as saying, "If we are convinced there was no justification for the degree of force used then we want them to be tried. If there is a mistake, then those in charge should be brought to account."

How the elections were spun in the Arab world

Joseph Braude at the New Republic says that election day in Iraq "must have been a rough day at the office for editors of the Arab world's pro-government newspapers. How do you spin democratic elections in Iraq when your boss is an authoritarian ruler with a restive population?" See www.tnr.com

‘None of us seemed to be afraid’

A friend of Labour Friends of Iraq, Matewan, has alerted us to this very illuminating comment thread on the BBC web site. The comments on the Iraqi elections from non-Iraqis, outside Iraq are mixed (though it seems mainly positive), while the comments from Iraqis are,.. well, just read them below.(AJ)

Good news, Talib Khadim has been released

The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) have announced that Mr. Talib Khadim Al Tayee, the kidnapped President of the Iraqi Mechanics, Metalworkers & Printworkers Union (IMM&PU), has been released on 1 February 2005 in Baghdad.

On 27 January 2005, Mr Talib Khadim was on union business with workers of the company when the gunmen attacked him, hitting him repeatedly on the head using the butts of their guns. They tied his hands and legs and kidnapped him, taking him to an unknown location. All this happened in front of workers, after locking the company security guards in an office.

The IFTU Executive Committee would like to thank the international labour
movement for their efforts in demanding the release of Talib Khadim. With
the help of our international labour movement colleagues, the IFTU will
continue to campaign to end terrorism against those brave patriotic working
class fighters who are striving to organise Iraqi workers.

Further information will be made available on the condition of Mr. Talib Khadim and the circumstances of his kidnapping and his release as soon as possible.

LFIQ Joint President Harry Barnes comments on the Iraqi elections

Harry Barnes asked the following question in the Commons on 31 January: “We will have to wait only a short while before the new Iraqi Government and the new Iraqi Parliament express their views about the withdrawal of troops. I hope that, however uncomfortable their decision is, considered from different points of view, it is accepted and acted upon because it will be a democratic decision. Many commentators are saying that this is the most democratic election in Iraq for 50 years. I was there 50 years ago and it was a feudal monarchical regime that merely had a democratic cover. These are the most democratic elections that have ever been held in the history of Iraq, imperfect as they are and despite all the difficulties that are associated with them. That is an extra reason why we should accept the decisions made by the new Iraqi Government and the new Iraqi Parliament."

The rise of Iraqi communists?

William Wallis in Basra for the FT examines the rise of the secular Iraqi Communist Party which ”a quarter of a century after Saddam Hussein executed its leaders and drove their comrades underground or into exile the Iraqi Communist party has resurfaced and looks set to make a respectable showing once votes are counted in Sunday's elections.” He quotes ‘a senior British diplomat returning from the province of Dhi Qar, north of Basra last week, said it would not surprise him if the ICP picked up 20 per cent of the vote there. "Everywhere I went there seemed to be someone quoting Marx or George Bernard Shaw."’

Michael Gove looks at the broader picture

Michael Gove, in the Times, trenchantly and controversially examines who won and who lost the Iraqi elections and says that “Iraq won” and goes on to examine the state of the Middle East, arguing that “The September 11 attack underlined, in the most terrible fashion, the consequences of our not-so-benign neglect of the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. From Morocco to Iran a huge swath of humanity was sunk in oppression, denied not just democracy but freedom of speech, property rights, freedom of association, freedom from fear and freedom to hope. All that this region exported was oil, refugees and terror. Within this region dictators left their people in misery, pocketed Western aid and used their country’s natural resources to pursue, whenever they could, chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons programmes. Some of these regimes were direct sponsors of state terror. Others, such as Saudi Arabia, incubated terrorism by maintaining a corrupt and oppressive rule that gave fanatics a cause and then paid them to divert their energies elsewhere.”

Telling the truth

David Aaronovitch warns against pro-war or anti-war groupthink, “attempting to minimise every negative and emphasise every positive, until you are in danger of losing all sight of the truth,” takes a swipe at Menzies Campbell’s “sophistry” and urges us to back Iraqi democracy.

Purple Power: Ann Clwyd in Basra

Ann Clwyd MP gives an eye witness account of the heartwarming atmosphere on election day in Basra