• Voices from Iraq
• Iraq Health
• Experts on Iraq
• Phyllis Bennis
• Robert Fisk
• the website Electronic Iraq
• and the authors website which has some updates

26 January 04

Dear friends,
I’ve been writing this message for about two weeks. I am too lazy to finish it, and each time I leave the message for few days, some of its news become obsolete, I delete them and the message shrinks in size, so I wait few more days to add more news and so on. Another reason for not writing is thinking to myself: Ok I’ll write, then what? People will read this, feel sorry about us, then continue with their lives. If it has not been for some certain people who are insisting that I write something every once and a while, I will surely have stopped. At the beginning I used to write such messages because I felt a need to do so, now I write them only because I am asked to do so. I guess this greatly affected the style, and the type of news included. This one, will very likely be the last.

by Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies

The U.S. is eager for the UN to return to Iraq to provide political cover for its occupation. The quagmire on the ground in Iraq plus recognition that the rest of the world, and most Iraqis themselves, reject Washington’s claim of legitimacy is the basis for the Bush administration reversing its earlier anti-UN positions to beg the international organization for help.

Kofi Annan’s decision to send a technical investigative team to Iraq is partly in response to mounting pressure from the U.S., but also a response to shifting sentiments among Iraqis, particularly the call from Ayatollah al-Sistani for a UN assessment of political conditions. While Annan’s announcement indicated he was responding to the request of the U.S. occupation authorities and its hand-picked “governing council” to determine whether elections could be held by Washington’s June 30th deadline, he left open the possibility of a broader definition of “what alternative arrangement would be acceptable” if not.

WHY IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SO SET ON A JUNE 30TH “HANDOVER OF POWER TO IRAQIS”?

Ewa Jasiewicz
Occupation Watch

Across the Board Rise for Public Sector Workers Expected

Southern Oil Company workers won their three month struggle underpinned by the threat of an armed strike for higher and fairer wages this month. All oil sector workers in Iraq will now be receiving the SOC’s negotiated wagetable. The unity, solidarity and support of oil sector workers in the central and northern fields in Kirkuk, Baaji and Baghdad’s Daurra was key in achieving this victory. Plus the fact that the CPA/GC is heavily dependent on oil production and export from SOC, Iraq’s biggest and most lucrative oil company, following the inoperability of Iraq’s northern fields due to continuous attacks on pipelines and stations. The only Oil Companies exporting crude oil from Iraq right now are SOC and Basra Oil Company.

In December, union representatives told Occupation Watch that they had been telling workers since last month to save some of their wages in the event of strike action. When SOC workers saw that their wages were being decreed by the Occupation Administration (OA) as signed by Paul Bremer III in Order 30 on Employment Conditions of State Employees and that the wages were lower than the emergency payments the OA had been paying post regime fall, they decided to form their own wage scale based on market prices including the price of fuel, gas, rent and foodstuffs, work location, and level of risk. The CPA’s wage table slashed all family, risk and location payments workers survived on under the regime. In every workplace OW visited, workers were frustrated with their low, late and fluctuating wages, as well as the axing of all their ’survival’ payments and subsidies which sustained workers and their families.

Yesterday in Columbus, Georgia, Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness and three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was sentenced to three months in federal prison for enacting her habit of bearing witness against US military violence, this time by crossing onto the property of Ft. Benning military base in November of 2003, as a form of protest against the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHISC). You can read “Hogtied and Abused at Fort Benning” Kathy’s account of the inhumane treatment that she received by her arresting officers.

Statement before Judge G. Mallon Faircloth, who sentenced me to 3 months in federal prison after I pled not guilty but stipulated to the facts of a charge for a November 22, 2003 entry onto Fort Benning, an open US military base in Columbus, GA.

by Kathy Kelly
Columbus, GA
26 January 2004

I’m fortunate to have been influenced by the life and witness of some extraordinary individuals, many of whom have appeared before you in court, several of whom are now co-defendants.

Their witness in this court has been valuable, constituting a rich and sad drama.

It’s important to continue bringing before this court testimony from or about those who can’t appear, people whom we’ve met when visiting places directly affected by US expenditures on military training and military solutions. Quite often these solutions are based on threat and force, rather than considerations of mercy and compassion.