Hadi Salih was killed on Tuesday last week. He had tried to get some independent trade union activity going in Iraq under Saddam - who had regarded trade unionists, as the good pupil of Stalin's that he was, as an extension of his Ba'ath Party and his state's power: 'transmission belts' to carry the orders and ideology from top to the masses. Once the Ba'ath tyranny was removed, he was able to operate freely once more. He thought.
I had met him once, when he came to London on a tour of Europe to garner support for the establishment of the post-dictatorship unions. He was reserved, slow moving, dignified; he spoke no English, and so conversation was stilted. He thought he could get unions going among the oil workers in the south; among state employees; in transport. He thought there would be a lot of support for the idea. But, he added - according to the notes I took at the time - "people are still frightened. It will take time to end that".
Murder, not time, ended him. He was murdered because the work he was
involved in was an attempt to give to working people what unions did when they were first created in the early 19th century: a sense of solidarity in labour, and a strength to bargain with employers and the state which otherwise would have too much power over them, if viewed only as individuals. Unionism at its best was not anti-, but pro-individualist. It sought to allow people who might be - were - treated as mere factors of production to gain some basis for a life outside toil; what we now call private life, or leisure - that which makes an individual more fully an individual.
His murderers hate such individualism. They are the inheritors of an ideology which demanded either total obeisance to the state or to a version of Islam dictated by men who use the religion, just as brutally as did the medieval monarchs and nobles who tortured and burned their states free of heretics, or individualists, as we would call them now. It is no accident that the missives sent into the airwaves by Osama bin Laden or his lieutenants talk still of
'Crusaders' as, with Jews, their main enemy: the world they wish to recreate is one where faith could be allied to power to exact and retain total obedience, on pain of death.
That is what is at stake in the coming election, and this past week's murder makes that rather more brutally clear than it was before. Focusing on the possibility or not of the elections later this month, we tend to ignore the indispensable partner to free choice of representatives - that is, civil society. And civil society is the warp and woof of individuals' lives when they live together freely in society: the associations, networks, arrangements, private deals, negotiations, local markets, clubs, societies, religions ... and trade unions. Those things which humans all over the world have developed or copied, to give themselves a sense of themselves as more than just atomised individuals or families, with nothing else between them and the state, or them and the state church.
The heirs of Saddam who committed the murder do not just hate America, or the West. They hate the possibilities which civil society brings, once it begins to spring up. Civil society is always subversive of totalitarian or authoritarian power: in democracies, it sets limits on the exercise of legitimate power. It demands diversity, difference, debate. It cannot work without respect for difference, whether that be of sex, of politics, of religion or of race. It does not have to be 'western' in the way it does this: it can draw on Muslim and other
traditions of co-existence. Muslim societies, as Morocco, have (with restrictions) had Jewish communities live among Muslims for centuries - even if, as in Christian countries before modern times, the two peoples were discouraged or forbidden to intermarry.
Is this possible? The signs are not good, at least in Baghdad and in the 'Sunni triangle' all about it. There were many murders this past week, both of Iraqis and of US soldiers. A bomb destroyed part of the office of Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, on Monday – which shows with what impunity the insurgents can operate in the capital. Worse, those election officials who had been supposed to oversee the polls in the Sunni areas have resigned in their dozens, fearing that they will be targeted.
Many of the Sunnis seem likely to withdraw - either fearful of the consequences of a vote, or genuinely believing that to vote is to legitimise a US-backed, Shia-majority rule which will make matters worse for them in the long run. The posters calling for an election are themselves Western inspired: one shows a big-eyed, charming baby, and has the slogan 'it's their right to dream of an independent Iraq'.
It doesn't seem to be charming many of the Sunnis: a policeman in the Sunni town of Salman Pak told reporters earlier this week that "everyone [in the town] supports the resistance and everyone rejects the elections because they will prolong the occupation".
The hope must lie elsewhere in the country's south, in the Kurdish north and even with the Sunni groups who still seem determined to take part in, rather than support the wrecking of, the political process. For these Sunnis, and most of the Shias, the prospect of a society which we have come to call 'normal' is less identified with the occupation, more a matter of having a free life, with some security, some material prospects and some possibility of human solidarity beyond family and clan.
Trade unions are, in fact, one of the best means of achieving such solidarity. They have done so in the past - when, as in this country, they brought together Catholics and Protestants in Britain and Ireland who might otherwise have been fiercely opposed; when they organised Muslims and Israelis in Israel, before the Intifada and the Israeli retaliation made it impossible; when they brought in blacks to what had been white unions in the US, before and after the last war. They were always opposed, precisely for these reasons, by groups who wanted the rival ideologies of nationalism, fundamentalism or race superiority to remain in force. They are being opposed again in Iraq, and that opposition has claimed a brave life. It will claim more.
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