Ewa Jasiewicz
Occupied Umm Qasr
January 27th 2004

It’s a grey blank day and the Highway of Death is sending us to Umm Qasr, Iraq’s most significant trade and passenger port, currently under the operation of Stevedoring Services of America or, in tune with the corporate trend here of spinning new aliases and name-changes - SSA Marine. My friend is recalling what he saw in 1990, after the US Central Command agreed to let their arch foes, the Republican Guard, fly over the strip of returning soldiers from the Kuwait front and massacre them into the asphalt for over 130 kilometers. 130 kilometers, from within Kuwait up to the mouth of Basra, a highway of corpses - The Highway of Death. Clearest in his mind is the sight of officers shooting the injured, lying on the road. Bang after Bang as un-rescueable soldiers were finished off by their comrades, staggering sights of strewn bodies for as far as the eye could see. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, just a computer game killing juggernaught and the only hope Iraq had for an end to 35 years of Baath fascism, swept away in blood. Respective dictators shook hands, closed the deal, and went back to business-with-the-Baath-as-usual, each side sharpening the long-knives for an attack another day, another bloodbath another day.

Inside Umm Qasr it’s “the boss first” always. We met him before, a man on the side of the Iraqi Port Authority’s Abdel Razzaq. Razzaq, a man once admired but now reviled by most of the 18,000 IPA employees in Basra, has withstood a number of attacks against him and his administration by wildcat striking workers. I tried no less than five times to see him to obtain his permission to speak to workers. Why? The end of October saw Razzaq issue a notice to all IPA staff informing them that any unsolicited communication with journalists or NGOs would be punished by dismissal. Not wanting to get anyone sacked, we returned time and time again to get his open-sesame word. But he was never there (despite our friends telling us he was). This time a friend of a friend of a friend has sorted us out. Workers were expecting us. The Manager will let us see the port, see whatever we like, ahlan wa sahlan. Captain Adell is his name and the first thing he wants us to be convinced of is the top-class security at the port, the very first thing. We nod politely, we’ve heard about the smuggling and the complicity of the US military, currently still running customs at the port, controlling everything coming in and out, signing along the dotted line for any contraband coming in. We’ve heard via an off the record well-placed source working within the CPA itself. It’s an old old story, it’s the same old story, post-war chaos, little market regulation, no government. Open borders mean free booty, controlling the borders means controlling the trade, and turning a blind eye or slipping a tip means a pocket full of cash, day in day out. The black market is soaring. And the pressure and intimidation againt Umm Qasr workers is gnawing.

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.

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
Occupied Amara 11/1/2004

It’s a bright-cold Tuesday morning in Amara and a man who’s too afraid to be named is talking to us frankly at a local kebab street caf. He’s a former Daawa party activist and current member of the Union of Political Prisoners, a nationwide group formed to pick up the pieces, collectively, of the lives and pasts of some of Iraq’s most obvious walking wounded. Regime-labelled as the enemies of Iraq; they were disfigured, thrown in acid, sliced open, stabbed with electric rods into involuntary limb flipping unconsciousness, stretched, torn, hammered and placed in rooms: dark rooms, dank rooms, rooms with floors turned black with freely and frequently spilt blood, rooms with hooks where a man would hang, broken shouldered in agony, rooms infested with cockroaches, rooms hidden underground unopened for decades, rooms locked behind urban underpasses, internees beaten daily in thick dank darkness to the sound of traffic streaming, the steady hum and sigh of cars passing by, life passing by to the daily corrosion and gnaw of being ignored, being so close to ordinary life but unable to see or touch it; and the insanity rooms, rooms painted red, bright red, with bright lights on every day, all day, for years.

Ewa Jasiewicz
Occupation Watch

Today saw thousands of former soldiers riot in the streets of Basra after being denied three months worth of survival payments from the CPA.

Approximately 2000 ex-service men amassed in the streets of Ashaar, a crowded market, hawker-mafia district, with sellers and junk stalls flanking a filthy river, and the home of the Raffidian Bank, aka pay-out HQ. Today was Iraqi Army Day - the annual celebration of over 80 years of soldiering and saluting to the beat of many a monarchy, authoritarian, general coup fought and dictatorship drum. For the thousands of ex-service men laid off in May and demonstrating outside CPA South HQ on a weekly basis, today had a deeper significance. It was also the deadline for their 10-day pay-or-face-our-organized-wrath vow over 3 months of financial destitution courtesy of CPA indifference.