British trade union delegation to Iraqi Kurdistan

Report by John Lloyd in the Financial Times.
Kurdistan, in north-eastern Iraq, is one of those AK-47 lands. All along its roads, shortish men in camouflage fatigues stop cars and peer in at the passengers, the AK clips on their shoulder straps scratching against the windows. Eventually, they wave the drivers on. Clumps of the same men sit in restaurants, scooping up rice and lamb, their AKs resting on the plastic table tops. These are the peshmergas, the guerrilla fighters who fought off Saddam Hussein's security forces and are now the Iraqi Kurds' army. Their name means, literally, "facing death". They are tense, watchful and looking for trouble - one reason why there is relatively little of it among Kurdistan's five million people.
At the end of last month, a small group of British trade unionists came here for a week-long trip. It was the first union delegation to travel through Iraqi Kurdistan since the 2003 war, although short visits had been made to Baghdad in the immediate aftermath. Officially at least, they have come to report for the Trades Union Congress, the umbrella organisation of Britain's unions, on the state of the Iraqi union movement. As it turns out, they have other reasons for coming as well.
There are five in the group, four men and one woman. And they are, in a word, uncertain. Each is accustomed to disputes and conflict, but the sort that can be bargained and negotiated over in meeting rooms. The Iraqi conflict - guerrilla warfare, bombings, men with assault rifles - is not their kind of struggle. Moreover, all five belong to unions that opposed the war. In the case of Keith Sonnet, the most senior member of the group, opposition to the war has led him to become one of several vice-presidents of the Stop the War Coalition, the militantly anti-war group that mobilised more than a million people on to the streets of London. Sonnet, an ironic man in his mid 50s, is deputy general secretary of the public service union Unison, the biggest and among the most left-leaning in Britain. He is also on the general council of the TUC, known - when unions were more powerful than now - as "the general staff of the labour movement".
Another Unison official, Nick Crook, the youngest of the group, with the mild manners that intellectuals adopt when in the service of unions, works in the international department. He is here to further Unison's assistance to the Iraqi unions - which, in an undemonstrative way, he appears to achieve by the end of the trip.
Mary Davis, the delegation's sole woman, is on the executive of the university and college lecturers' union NATFHE, as well as the TUC Women's Committee and the executive committee of the Communist Party of Britain. In her late 50s, with a sharp, humorous face, Davis is one of a vanishing world: that of leftwing East End Jewry, mostly East European immigrants, the quarry of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts in the 1930s and now largely gone from the East End and from revolutionary politics.
The other two group members, Brian Joyce and David Green, are on the executive committee of the Fire Brigades Union, also traditionally on the left. I am here as an observer; unlike the officials, I had been in favour of the war, and remain so - indeed, I learn on my return that a book published by the Stop the War Coalition named and criticised me for my position, as one of a small number of journalists identified with the left - including David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens - who had supported the war.
I have a couple of inconclusive arguments about it with my fellow travellers but my main purpose is to listen rather than speak. I had been invited by a remarkable man whose name is Abdullah Muhsin, a sturdy Iraqi of about 50, with thick curly hair and a ready smile, except when worried - which he had much cause to be. A student union activist, he fled Iraq in 1978 and settled in Britain. After the fall of Hussein, because of his fluency in English and contacts abroad, Muhsin was appointed international representative of the Iraqi Federation of Workers' Trade Unions (IFTU). This group was set up after the war by activists, mainly in the Communist party, who had been banned, exiled or repressed by Hussein, who permitted only his own, Ba'athist unions. Muhsin has worked indefatigably, with little money, to persuade the labour movements of the west to support Iraq's fledgling independent unions. Exhausting work, it is also dangerous. In January his friend and comrade, Hadi Saleh, the international secretary of the IFTU, was tortured to death in his Baghdad apartment by what Muhsin says was the remnants of Saddam's Mukhabarat (secret police). A trip to Baghdad planned for earlier in the year was cancelled after Saleh's death. In the end, it was rescheduled to Kurdistan, and Muhsin arranged for trade union leaders from Iraq proper to come to meet us at various points.
Although the members of the British delegation opposed the war, they feel themselves tugged by another loyalty - that of international solidarity, an old labour value. They reflect a conflict now common in the large anti-war constituency, as a dislike of the British-American action (and of George W. Bush) clashes with a realisation that a civil society is there to be built, and their help is being sought. None, including Sonnet, agree with the Stop the War Coalition's position of recognising the right of Iraqis to resist the occupation. A statement sent out to the news media in draft form last October, which said the Coalition recognised that the Iraqis had a right to resist "by any means possible", was later withdrawn, Davis and Sonnet tell me, because of fierce objections. Andrew Murray, Coalition chairman and also communications director of the Transport and General Workers Union, confirms that the statement had been pulled "because it could be misunderstood". He says the Coalition "was against the killing of civilians". I ask if that meant killing soldiers was permissible, and he repeats that Iraqis had a right to resist "an occupation seen by almost everyone as illegal".
Muhsin says he is continually under attack from leading members of the Coalition, who he says view the IFTU as pro-American stooges. However, Murray says the coalition takes no view on whether the IFTU or the General Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions (the successor to the Hussein-era Ba'athist unions) should be supported: "that's a matter for Iraqis". However, he says the coalition had criticised "an intervention" by Muhsin at the Labour party conference. According to Murray, Muhsin's speech at a fringe meeting and an article in the bulletin circulated to delegates, together with pressure from the Labour leadership, had helped defeat a motion demanding that the government set a date to withdraw troops. At one point in our trip, Muhsin shows me an e-mail he received from Australia on his borrowed Blackberry. In broken English, amid many insults, it calls him a poodle of American imperialists. In Iraq, it is much worse: if insurgents spotted him, they would try to kill him.
Only one of the five Britons - firefighter Brian Joyce - has been to Iraq before. Tall, with a head of snow-white hair, Joyce likes to call himself a "hard bugger" - a transparent ruse for a man whose generous emotions are deeply stirred by Iraq. He has been to Basra in the south, to Baghdad and Kurdistan, each time travelling with Muhsin. Everywhere he goes on this trip he is embraced and kissed as a trusted comrade, in scenes that see him and his welcomers speak words of endearment in mutually incomprehensible languages, none of which seems to dull his appetite for more and longer such encounters.
The rest of the group has no idea what awaits them in Iraq. What would solidarity actually mean in such a place? Could civil society, in which trade unions play a very large part, be reconstructed? They begin to find out at the end of their first full day in the country, in the northern Kurdish city of Dohuk, where we spend the night in the heavily guarded Zhian Hotel, Dohuk's finest. By Muhsin's arrangement, we meet four Iraqi union officials who have driven up the dangerous road from the nearby city of Mosul, where the insurgents are strongest. The four men are members of the executive committee of the Mosul branch of the IFTU. The group's leader, branch president Saady Edan, is a rotund, balding man in his 60s - a craftsman who, in spite of the prowling peshmergas out back, retains an anxious air. That is no wonder: soon after we settle into deep sofas in a lounge, he tells us the story of his kidnapping.
Edan had been driving from his home on January 26 when a car with two people in it suddenly stopped in front of him. Another car blocked him from behind. In it was a man armed with a heavy machine gun."I tried to get away, but realised they would have shot me. They forced me into the boot of the car and took me to a house in the Zingili district of Mosul - a section where the extremists are. They put me in a room. They told me very clearly not to work for the IFTU. I was told to leave or my life would be in danger. Now I no longer live at home - I live with my son. We have received many threats, often in letters." He says he thinks that his kidnappers were members of Ansar al-Sunna, an insurgent group strong in the Mosul area, made up of former Ba'athists.
Edan says his union's largest threat comes from the GFITU, membership of which had been compulsory under Hussein, as it seeks members again. According to Edan, they have far fewer supporters than the IFTU and haven't held elections. But they are funded by Syria and the Arab Federation of Trade Unions and make life difficult for the independent unions.
"These people have occupied trade union buildings with guns," says Edan. "They are defying the law, they are making threats in schools and hospitals. They don't have the membership we have but they do have pressures. They threaten the stronger people, the activists. The weaker ones they buy off with TVs or a fridge." Under Hussein, he says, workers in areas such as Mosul - where support for the regime was strong - had a lot of work and regular pay. This is not the case now: unemployment is between 40 and 50 per cent.
After listening to Edan, Sonnet asks if he wants the US-led occupation of Iraq to end - the question around which anti-war movements throughout the world have mobilised, all of them demanding rapid withdrawal. When the question is translated, there is an exchange of looks among the four Iraqi unionists, and tight, complicit, smiles. Both sides, it seems, know this is an awkward question. Edan replies: "We want the occupation to end. But if it ends now, it will bring chaos. Once the Iraqi security forces are capable, then the occupation should leave. But they are not yet." With that, the executive committee of the Mosul branch of the IFTU departs, going back on the dark and dangerous road to their dark and dangerous town.
The next day is Sunday and we are driven to the Kurdistan capital of Erbil. The road passes through vast plains that end in sudden eruptions of mountains: as we drive, lines of women and men dance by the road to music from car stereos, celebrating the Kurdish New Year.
Our hosts are leaders of the Kurdish unions - separate, as all things Kurdish, from the Iraqi unions - and they take us to a big restaurant out of town to meet five members of the executive committee of the IFTU, who have driven up from Baghdad. The restaurant is vast, full of men eating from big dishes of rice, lamb and chicken. The British delegation is taken to a private back room for the meeting. Sonnet, as the senior official, has assumed leadership of the group and opens with the speeches required by the formal courtesies of the hosts. On this occasion, he says the British labour movement was opposed to the war because it suspected the intentions of George W. Bush. "But we were always opposed to Saddam Hussein - we campaigned against him with no help from the Americans. Now he's gone, we're glad." He says there had been an important debate within the British trade union movement about working with the Iraqi trade unions. "Some people argue that we should work with the GFITU. I'm interested to know what you say."
He is given his answer by Hadi Ali, the vice-president of the IFTU. Ali is a weary-looking man of about 70, who was an active trade unionist before Hussein banned independent unions. He fled to Kurdistan in the 1970s, became a peshmerga and fought in the underground movement. After the 2003 war he became one of the principal founders of the new IFTU. Ali says the visitors need to understand that the GFITU does not represent Iraqi workers. "Unions were a transmission belt for the Ba'ath party. People must become aware of what free unions are. Our members don't know what negotiation is. We also need help from our brothers in the Arab federation of trade unions - we want them to understand us as well." When he is asked if he wants the occupying forces to go, Ali does not answer, but a leader of the Iraqi teachers' union steps in: "The infrastructure of trade unionism was totally destroyed by Saddam Hussein. The occupation was brought on us by the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. We are working to end the occupation; if terrorism goes, the occupation will too."
One day I show Muhsin something I'd read in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. The article, by neo-conservative writer Charles Krauthammer, is entitled "Arab democracy: not bad for a simpleton", and says "the left has always prided itself as the great international champion of freedom and human rights. Yet when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, killing and gassing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability. the international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism." Muhsin reads it carefully, then says: "Very good. I have written something like that for Tribune (a leftwing British publication)." Would they publish it? I ask.
"I don't know," replies Muhsin.
Most of the people we met were not Shia or Sunni Iraqis, but the Kurds themselves. These are a people who, in the 14 years since the first Gulf war, have done what any leftwinger would, in the past, have venerated (and which the neo-cons now do). They have fought against a cruel dictatorship and, after years of struggle and what came close to genocide, they won. Their revolt against Hussein after the first Gulf war had been sealed by a no-fly zone, policed by Britain and the US. Afterwards, the region's two main political parties - the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan - patched up a bloody quarrel and made their own state, the first such state the Kurds have managed to keep going for any length of time.
Thanks largely to Mary Davis, who insists that "the woman's question" comes up at every meeting, Kurdish society gradually reveals itself to the group. At an early meeting in a hall of union members in Duhok, Davis says, with a severe tone, "I'm very sorry I'm the only woman here." There is some whispered consultation and, some time later, two women join the crowd of moustached men. They say nothing, though both speak to Davis afterwards and tell her they work in the IFTU office. Later, during a drive between cities, Sonnet tries to explain to Hangaw Abdullah Khan, general secretary of the Kurdish unions, that women account for two-thirds of Unison membership and, under union regulations, any future Unison delegation would be two-thirds female. He says the union has also set up special forums for ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians. The translator finally seems to convey the points. Abdullah Khan, normally hugely loquacious, keeps driving silently, his eyes fixed grimly on the road.
But these cultural incongruities seem to be the exceptions. We meet women who - though clearly living in a society more dominated by men than in Britain - are nevertheless independent and articulate. Indeed, this proves to be a source of some dissonance as Davis keeps emphasising their rights as women, and they their duties as Kurds. At a meeting with parliamentarians and KDP officials, Kamilla Ibrahim, slight and poised and just elected to the Iraqi parliament, says: "I don't like to speak about women only. There are many problems for women, but not only for us. Women were not free during the Iraqi regime. It's better here now - women can work and travel freely alone - that doesn't happen elsewhere in Iraq. Kurdish women now want their rights to be protected. We must fight not as women but as Kurds." Ibrahim emphasises that many Sunni and Shia women, including deputies in the new parliament, share a similar revulsion to being put under any law that restricts their freedom or dictates a dress code.
The woman who has the deepest effect, however, is a trade union organiser in the southern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, which we reach after many weary hours on bad roads. We stay in a garishly uncomfortable guest house in the mountains outside the city - for security, our hosts say - and meet a group of union leaders and activists over breakfast. One of these is Baher Osman, a reserved but forceful woman in early middle age, who introduces herself as a beautician and organiser of workers in the city's beauty parlours and hair salons. She is adamant that women have the same pay, the same access to jobs - and she wants it to stay that way. "Men and women work together in the salons," she says. "That's unheard of in the rest of Iraq."
Osman, however, has a particular past. Just before the Kurds expelled the Iraqi forces in 1991, she was arrested and taken to the main security centre in Sulaimaniya where she was tortured. The centre is known as the Red House, a 1970s complex that is now a "torture museum". Our hosts have added this to our itinerary. In the dank and windowless concrete rooms, some of them wood-clad to muffle screams, we are shown the bars placed about three metres above the floor, from which victims were hung, arms manacled behind their backs, and given electric shocks to the genitals (a wax model is suspended from one such bar to help us visualise the horror).
Prisoners could hear their wives or daughters or mothers being raped in an adjoining room. In cells meant for seven or eight, rough plastic bowls are stacked in towers to show there were sometimes more than 100 in each cell - and their bowls were used for their food, as well as their excretions.
In one cell, a hand has written: "I was brought in here at 10, and I am now 18." Some people, like Osman, got out. Most didn't. It is one of the world's most appalling places and the visitors - used to seeing torture in Iraq represented by images of US soldiers degrading prisoners in Abu Ghraib jail - walk about the bloodstained floors mutely and grimly.
The delegation realises, too, the limits of their mission. The union leaders they came to meet, Iraqi Kurds and Arabs, are absorbed in life-and-death, national struggles. The Kurdish leaders are clearly also officials of, or closely linked to, the two main parties, the KDP and PUK. Indeed, in a session with Imad Ahmed, the PUK leader in the region, he gives the game away by saying "the unions are weak: they are dominated by the parties. They need to become stronger and more independent." The visitors wonder why a union movement that is poor and needs funds as well as training is able to drive them about in big Toyota Land Cruisers and BMWs.
Many of the people we meet aren't trade unionists in the British sense - rather, they are from professional associations feeling their way into independent life. At a final dinner in Erbil, where some 20 representatives of every kind of union - blue-collar, white-collar and entrepreneurial - turn up, the teachers' unions ask for teacher training as well as union training; the representative of the medical practitioners asks for cardiac equipment and the representative of the country's dentists asks for modern dental training.
Everywhere the British unionists go, they are congratulated on the virtues of prime minister Tony Blair. They, of course, are not fans. The trade union movement, especially on the left, takes the view that this government, if possibly better than a Conservative one, is not real Labour. "It's all very well going on about Tony Blair," says Davis, half drolly, half irritably, at one of the group's lengthy feasts. "We don't think he's so wonderful." (Davis's British Communist Party and its paper, the Morning Star, are fiercely hostile to New Labour.)
The trip does seem to make a difference to the group's views on the war. During a meal in a restaurant towards the end of the week, David Green, the younger of the two firefighters' union leaders, says: "I was against the war. I thought it was a bad idea and it shouldn't have been done." I ask him about his thoughts now. "Well, you see a different perspective. You see what these people have done."
Green and Brian Joyce have been tremendously active in arranging for British fire authorities to donate equipment to the impoverished Iraqi brigades. Joyce, in conversation, frequently recalls visits elsewhere in Iraq where firefighters were expected to work with ancient machines and wearing just overalls. He says they showed him the burns and wounds they had suffered, which they accepted as part of the job.
I join Green and Joyce at a fire station in Dohuk to see what has become of the equipment they had sent over. We step into the tiny, impoverished office of station commander Colonel Abdul Mohammed Rashid, who calls in a tall fireman dressed in protective gear. The fireman stamps his right foot as a kind of salute, stands to attention and turns around to show the logo on the back of his coat: "Sponsored by Bristol - protecting the world's firefighters".
Exploring the station's engine shed, Green and Joyce find two brand new Mercedes fire trucks next to a much older vehicle of indeterminate make. They also discover that much of the new equipment they had arranged to send here has not been used and the firefighters have not been trained to use it. The two officials keep asking why firefighters (in common with the civil police, of which they are part) are not allowed to join unions. They are assured later by a group of parliamentarians that a labour code passing through the Kurdish parliament would permit membership. But what the Kurdish firefighters really need is efficient and protective equipment. Both the British firefighters say they will continue working to supply it.
Shortly after we return home, the long-expected British general election is called. Polls and focus groups show that Blair is trusted less and less, and the main reason given is the basis on which he took the country to war in Iraq.
This has become the crucial issue in the constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in east London, where Labour party officials fear an upset. George Galloway, the former Labour MP, supported by fellow members of the Stop the War Coalition, is standing as a Respect candidate in the seat, which has a Muslim majority and whose sitting Labour MP, Oona King, supported the war. Galloway appears to be making good progress in a bitterly fought campaign.
"Trust", which Blair is deemed to lack, is defined almost wholly in terms of going to war in Iraq. If the Kurds see it as a war of liberation, the majority of Britons reportedly view it as a disgrace. But in the aftermath of their trip, the trade union delegation is determined to take a pragmatic approach. A report, drafted by Nick Crook, will recommend that the TUC and its affiliates help Iraqi unions through the IFTU with training in organisational skills, leadership and English, and give money for offices and equipment. It will recommend that unions should not work with the GFITU, because of its Ba'athist links.
There is a strong precedent for this sort of action. After the second world war, the British union movement helped rebuild the German unions - giving them (as many Labour politicians have ruefully reflected since) a structure much more rational and coherent than British unions have today. It was a parallel that occurred to several members of the delegation in Iraq, though all were born after the war. Through the decades, some deep imperative of solidarity seems to have asserted itself.