Author: garykent

MPs David Taylor, Bob Wareing, Rudi Vis, Lynne Jones, Martin Caton, Syd Rapson, Ernie Ross and Win Griffiths (five opposed and three backed military action) are the latest to back the Commons motion in support of the LFIQ Global Appeal on Nozad Ismail and support continues to come from around the world. The Commons adjourns today for Easter and probably only has a few days left until it is dissolved before the election, when all Commons motions fall. We may revive this motion in the next Parliament. The motion has been backed in roughly equal numbers by those who took … Continue reading More Labour MPs back Commons motion in support of LFIQ appeal for Nozad Ismail

Robert Worth in the New York Times

MPs Harry Barnes, Mike Gapes, John Mann and Kevin McNamara are the first to support an Early Day Motion in the Commons backing the LFIQ appeal. That this House supports the Labour Friends of Iraq global appeal, which has been supported by numerous rank and file trade unionists and others across the world, to publicise the severe threat to the life of Nozad Ismail, the President of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions in Kirkuk, who has twice escaped assassins and who receives regular death threats; believes that the self-styled resistance in Iraq is deliberately targeting the leadership of the … Continue reading MPs back LFIQ Global Appeal on Nozad Ismail

More than 35 Iraqi NGOs participated at the NGO meeting held at the Palestine Hotel on Saturday the 19th of March 2005. With the intention of holding the first in a series of meetings to establish an umbrella group, NGO representatives from across Iraq were invited to discuss the role and structure of the Association. Each NGO was given the opportunity to introduce its field of work, air its concerns, and advance its ideas. NGOs represented work in areas of focus such as human rights, agriculture, civil society, gender issues, children, etc. Their web site is being constructed but will … Continue reading New NGO Association (NA) formed

Andrew Casey gives an Australian perspective on solidarity with the Iraqi Labour Movement in an article for an Australian Labor Party journal, Challenge

The Iraqi ambassador to Canada, Howar Ziad wrote this important and moving piece in the National Post of Canada on March 17, 2005. (GK)

Andrew Murray (Comment, March 16) wants “full sovereignty restored to the Iraqi people”, but rubbishes the election in which 8.5 million Iraqis defied the bombers. It was right to oppose the invasion, but wrong for the anti-war movement to ignore solidarity with the new and independent labour movement, women’s groups and democratic political parties that desperately need our support. Alan Johnson Labour Friends of Iraq The letter was slightly edited. Alan here describes his own position on the invasion. LFIQ has no collective view and seeks to unite those who took different positions on the invasion.

This article by Harry Barnes MP appears in the current edition of Socialist Campaign Group News

The IFTU web site reports today that workers at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad staged a successful strike action in which they won a wage increase and that union officials have resumed negotiations with the management to better working conditions, wages and pensions.

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 … Continue reading Iraq: moment of truth is coming