Labor Pains

By Matt Harwood, AlterNet. Posted March 31, 2005.

Before the fall of Saddam Hussein, Abdullah Muhsin had not stepped foot on Iraqi soil for a quarter of a century. A student union activist, he fled Iraq in 1978 after Hussein waged a campaign of terror against all civil society organizations independent of Baath control, which included trade unions, student groups and women's organizations. After spending a few years in Italy, Muhsin made his home in England, where he's been ever since.

From exile, Muhsin took part in the Workers Democratic Trade Union Movement (WDTUM), an underground organization that resisted Hussein's Baath Party until its collapse. The WDTUM – a collection of trade unionists, intellectuals, liberals, communists, and civil society activists – collected information of Hussein's crimes against humanity and trafficked it to trade union centers around the world.

Muhsin is now the international representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. Not quite two years old, the IFTU's 200,000-strong membership is drawn from a wide range of ethnic and religious communities and are organized through out Iraq's core industries. Although the IFTU opposed the war and the U.S. occupation, it now supports the political process that has kept coalition forces in Iraq on the premise that it meets the UN-determined timetable for Iraq's transition to democracy. The organization's close association with the Iyad Allawi-led interim government – its president is a leader in Allawi's party – had led both some anti-war groups in the West and other Iraqi labor organizations to question its legitimacy. Nevertheless, its links to Allawi have not prevented the U.S. occupation forces from waging a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the organization. The greater irony is that IFTU's support of the January elections has now made its members a favored target for insurgents, who recently killed its international secretary, Hadi Saleh.

Muhsin spoke to AlterNet from his office in London about IFTU's position on the occupation, the insurgency, and the future of Iraqi labor.

Harwood: Many Americans opposed the invasion of Iraq and continue to call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. What is your organization's position on these issues?

We opposed the war ourselves from the beginning. While we opposed Saddam Hussein, we also opposed the war because the war would lead to occupation, lead to social disorder and chaos, and the further suffering of the Iraqi people who already suffered terribly under Saddam Hussein. However, we were extremely jubilant when Saddam Hussein fell.

So, for us, as Iraqis, what are the priorities? Our priority is to keep Iraq together, and make sure that extremism does not take hold in Iraq – especially after the borders were left open and the police and the army were dismantled, which were disastrous policies in our view. We need to move forward, keep Iraq together, and to build a lasting democracy.

Our brothers and sisters in the peace movement should understand this and support us now. There's no point in saying that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were wrong about the war. And because the war was illegal, therefore now we have to turn Iraq into anarchy and chaos in order to prove Bush and Blair wrong at the cost of Iraqi people and destroy Iraq as a country. The peace movement should help us and other genuine democratic Iraqis who want to build a genuine democracy in Iraq.

Building a democratic Iraq, of course, will benefit the Middle East. Where do you find a genuine democracy [in this region]? If Iraq succeeds in building a democracy, it will have an impact on regional countries, and I think that will be a positive thing.

In many ways, the IFTU stands for all the values – democracy, secularism, and tolerance – that President Bush claims to support. Yet your organization has been repeatedly harassed by U.S. forces. Why is that?

To be frank with you, we don't understand it ourselves. Our purpose in organizing is first to defend Iraqi working peoples' right to organize freely, to join unions, to form political parties. Second, to build a genuine and free trade union movement that can participate in building democracy in Iraq.

The American forces attacked our offices in Baghdad on Dec. 6, 2003. They ransacked the place, threw black paint on the name of our federation and even tore down posters in Arabic that condemned terrorism and called for building a genuine democracy in Iraq.

Matthew Harwood is a fellow at The Washington Monthly. He maintains the weblog Woodshavings: Musings on Politics, Culture, and National (In)Security. He can be reached at mharwood31@gmail.com.

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