by Ewa Jasiewicz

There were some delegates and organisers at the European Social Forum who were shocked to see Subhei Marshadani, the General Secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) attacked by protestors when he tried to speak on a plenary platform titled “Ending the Occupation in Iraq”. Later some would label the action of the protestors as “fascist”. Others were not so shocked. The current government of Iraq, which Marshadani and his UK rep Abdullah Muhsin’s party, the Iraqi Communist Party, are part of, is generating a climate fertile for fascism. Many Iraqis regard the interim government as neo-Baathist. The Interior, Security, Defence and Prime Ministers in Iraq are all former Baathists. Those rebuilding and supervising the state apparatuses of control; the police, the army and the intelligence services are descended from a regime which depended heavily on these apparatuses. And the current collaborationist government is relying on them heavily again. History is doomed to repeat itself.

I met the leadership of the IFTU both in Baghdad and Basra. The men I met were all, without exception Communist Party Members. I incurred their displeasure when I organised the itinerary for the US Labour Against the War delegation in October. I had included visits to both IFTU sites and Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) (At the time called the Preparatory Committee for the Establishment of Workers Councils in Iraq), the Union of the Unemployed, which I had been protesting with in front of the occupation headquarters for weeks, plus un-unionised workers employed by the occupation. The IFTU reps tried to get me to cancel the visits I had planned for the FWCUI, denouncing it as a negligible organisation. I refused. And the USLAW delegation met as many workers as possible, in the oil sector, railway sector, vegetable oil factory, Baghdad Airport Military Base, brick workers, unemployed workers and leather factory employees. The TUC delegations which travelled to Iraq had their itineraries organised solely through the IFTU, seeing only the workplaces and union officials which the Federation/ICP wanted British Trade Unionists to see. Whilst the workers and unions which trade union reps met were nothing but genuine, it was nevertheless just one aspect of a wider, broader, contradictory and varied trade union movement in Iraq, generated by and through more traditions, political and religious, than just those of the Communist Party of Iraq. Basing policy, vision, definition and solidarity on the conclusions of a collective maximum of 4 -6 weeks spent in Iraq with trade unionists and workers belonging to a single federation, built along Communist Party cadre lines, in a post totalitarian country, and relying on Federation/Party translators is myopic.

Especially when that Federation’s leadership belongs to a party which has historically collaborated with the strongest forces in power in Iraq, including the Baath Party itself, and is at work collaborating with the current neo-Baathist government which is allowing atrocities - massacres, torture, routine humiliation and extra judicial killings to take place daily against a people struggling for liberation; both from an encroaching, trauma-compounding neo-Baathism armed with American artillery, and co-optive party political and reactionary Islamic party agendas. The fact is not lost on Iraqi people, both within and outside the country.

The IFTU’s UK representative Abdullah Muhsin called the Occupation’s interim constitution “a radical document” when it was released last June. Many Iraqis feel no new constitution; government or election can have any credibility, let alone represent any “radical” potential when created under occupation.

The IFTU has never opposed the Occupation’s Orders 39 (pdf) on Foreign Investment and 30 (pdf) on Salaries and Employment Conditions which allow foreign companies such as Halliburton and Bechtel to carry out 100% privatisation of public assets at zero profit tax and total profit repatriation. Order 30 sets the minimum wages for workers at 69,000ID, around #30 per month. Average rent is 25-50,000ID per month. 5 litres of drinking water costs 300-500 ID and barely serves a family for a day. Yet the Orders remain in place unchallenged. The Union which did challenge this order, the Southern Oil Company trade union, which comes under the Umbrella of the IFTU but declares itself as “free trade union which does not belong to any political party” and was, when I was working with it in Basra, the only Union in the IFTU Not headed by an ICP member, has received virtually no publicity through the IFTU. Why? It does not tow the Occupation’s agenda and defines itself and conducts itself as autonomous. I know this through my 4 months experience knowing SOC reps and living with the family of SOC General Secretary Hassan Jumaa in Basra.

I only found out about the SOC Union after a visit to the Basra Oil Company Union. The IFTU rep who accompanied me tried to recruit workers who’d taken wildcat strike action over low wages, into an IFTU union. They refused him point blank. Workers there sung the praises of the SOC Union, whereas the IFTU leadership remained strangely silent on it.

My agenda in Basra was to give as much information about the Occupation Orders passed against workers, ILO conventions and workers rights, and the history and profile of the companies privatising Iraq as possible. I wanted to work with workers as a grassroots level and help them in their struggle to form unions of their own choosing, free from any political party agenda influence. The IFTU leadership wanted me to go through them at every turn. I informed them that I was not in their pay or employment, I was an independent activist. An ICP member, in the offices of the IFTU, told me, coldly, to play ball or “get out of Basra”. I didn’t leave. They responded by spreading a rumour about me that my “mission was not clear”. When someone is “not clear” in Iraq, this is a euphemism for “suspicious” and marks someone as a potential spy. It is well known that such a rumour in paranoid Iraq can get someone killed. The leadership later also spread rumours about me being a member of the Worker Communist Party. Again, a dangerous rumour implying I was not independent and a member of a party which has had serious conflict with Islamic groups in the South. It was all designed to alienate me from workers and push me out of Basra.

The issue at stake is not whether workers in Iraq need solidarity and support, nor whether they are genuine or not if members of an IFTU union. The issue at stake is the political allegiances and agenda of their leadership. A union leadership solely allied to a party collaborating, perpetuating and benefiting from its empowerment by an Occupation government, calls into question its ability to be democratic, genuinely representative and open to workers struggle against that occupation and against its stooge neo-Baathi government.

The anger witnessed from those protesting against the General Secretary of the IFTU can be explained by the fact that Iraqi working class people are, for the first time in 35 years, in a position to form radical unions, new unions, unions which are capable of creating insurrectionary working class struggle, unions capable of combating privatisation, slave wages and the re-imposition of a Baathist bosses and a neo-Baathi government, and capable, even, of challenging the occupation itself. The possibilities exist for this. The conditions, given enduring 70% unemployment and no functioning infrastructure and the fact of actually keeping your workplace going rather than shutting it down is more of an act of resistance for most workers, are another story, but the organisational possibilities exist . There are workers in Iraq who believe in and are prepared to mount an organised challenge to the class system in Iraq, which is still Baathified. There is a belief that this is possible. Workers have challenged occupation-protected Baathist bosses in Najebeeya Electricity plant, Um Qasr, Maqal Port and locations in the Southern Oil Company.

The rage which propels people to defy and denounce the head of an organisation which falls silent when it comes to massive military onslaughts up and down Iraq but wax lyrical on the need for elections as soon as possible - clearly a route to securing and legitimising the Communist Party’s power in a new government - does and will enrage people. Opposition to the IFTU’s leadership and Communist Party and Occupation promoting agenda should not be confused with opposition to ordinary workers who are part of the unions in the IFTU. In Iraq now, as is the case with unions all over the world, the interests of the leadership and their members are often not the same. It is no wonder that more and more people, both within and outside Iraq, are viewing the IFTU, as it stands now, as an obstacle to genuine worker empowerment and direct, participatory democracy in Iraq and will oppose it, angrily and uncompromisingly.