Ewa Jasiewicz
Occupation Watch
Occupied Basra

DU - What is it?

Depleted Uranium is a highly toxic heavy metal derived from nuclear bomb and fuel waste. It’s heavy weight and pyrophoric qualities cause it to burn-melt like a blowtorch through steel when a DU coated/loaded penetrator, self-sharpening by nature, strikes a hard target. It’s mainly used to incinerate battle tanks, and on contact pulverizes into breathable aerosol-like dust that can travel 26 miles and remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years.

Despite the name “Depleted” Uranium, DU has 60% the radioactivity of natural uranium, which is pure uranium, and all uranium whether “natural”, “depleted” or “enriched” is a chemical and radiological toxic substance emitting alpha, beta and gamma particles, all of which have a destructive effect on the cellular make-up of the human body, ie they attack the human body at the most essential, primary and vital levels.

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.

• 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.

I return from Mass to a Muslim home
on a bloodied street in the south of Iraq.
The family has gathered in the living room.
All the chairs are gone, sold years ago
for something essential. Food, perhaps.

Iraq is breaking up into rebels and collaborators, with a vast heap of innocent bodies turning up each day at the morgues
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad

Ever since Daniel Pipes - he of the failed American neo-cons - piped up last summer with his plan to install a “democratic-minded autocrat” (sic) in Iraq, I have been eyeing the Washington crystal ball for further signs of what the designers of this wretched war have in store for the Iraqis whom they “liberated” for “democracy” last year. And bingo, not long before Christmas, another of those chilling proposals for “New Iraq” popped up from the same right-wing cabal. Any predictions for Iraq this year may thus have to be based on the thoughts of Leslie Gelb, a former chairman of the United States Council on Foreign Relations, whose wretched plans for “liberated” Iraq call for something close to ethnic cleansing.