Solidarity with Iraqi workers!
Decree 875
In August Decree 875, issued on behalf of the Council of Ministers of Iraq, declared that “a government committee... must take control of all moneys belonging to the trade unions and prevent them from dispensing any such moneys”.
It also said it would lay down its own guidelines on “how trade unions should function, operate, and organise”.
The Iraqi government, as far as we know, has not yet actually seized any union funds, or shut down any union offices. The reason is the government’s general inability to carry through any decrees anywhere outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, rather than any rethink. The decree remains as a legal manifesto for suppressing the de facto freedom that unions have had in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.
US/UK troops hated
Iraqi trade unions and international trade-union bodies have protested, but so far there has been no comment by the US and British governments who said they would bring democracy to Iraq.
The US and UK have also assented to a draft Iraqi constitution which, in articles 2 and 39, lays the basis for Iraqi women to be subjected to sharia law in all family matters.
The occupying forces in Iraq are widely hated for their brutality, arrogance, and corruption. Iraqis want a free Iraq, without foreign troops.
“Resistance” targets workers, women, Shia, trade-unionists
But the Sunni-supremacist, Islamist or neo-Ba’thist, “resistance” is even worse. They inflict on the people of Iraq, every day, what people in London got just one taste of in the suicide bombings here on 7 July. Just in the week after those London bombings, in Iraq 31 suicide bombings killed 238 people.
As well as killing workers at random, and targeting sectarian attacks at Iraq’s Shia majority, “resistance” groups have assassinated trade unionists.
Support the Iraqi labour movement!
A new labour movement has emerged in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. Diverse, full of internal conflicts, and hard-pressed, it still exists. It has organised strikes, demonstrations, conferences, and factory agitation.
It is not only the necessary self-defence movement of Iraq’s workers, but also the force in Iraq which can mobilise the harassed majority, across Shia-Sunni-Kurdish sectarian lines, for a democratic, secular, and free Iraq. It is the positive alternative both to the US/UK occupation and to the reactionary “resistance”.
The new Iraqi trade unions urgently need international solidarity. Iraq Union Solidarity exists to organise that support.
Contact us! Web: www.iraqunionsolidarity.org. Email: iraqunionsolidarity@yahoo.com. Phone: 07979 421475. Postal address: c/o Pauline Bradley (convenor), 48 Grand Parade, Green Lanes, London N4 1AG.
No comments:
Post a Comment