Workers' Liberty

By Martin Thomas

According to the Iraq Freedom Congress, a grouping initiated by the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, oil workers in southern Iraq are planning a strike which “aims to bring security and build a free and democratic society in Iraq”.

The IFC reports: “The oil workers will strike for the following demands:

• Abolition of all contracts including privatisation imposed on the workers of Iraq, particularly oil workers;

• An end to the killing of workers committed by the armed militias in Iraqi cities.

• Redistribution of the ration food without taking away any item listed in the ration coupon.

• Redistribution of the profits among the workers in the oil sector”.

According to the IFC, “this strike will hit the occupation and its puppet government hard. It... will unite Iraqis against the sectarian gangs who aim to plant discrimination among the workers and the rest of the society”.

Exactly which oil workers’ organisations are involved, what sort of strike action (a one-day protest, or something longer) is planned, and when, is not clear.

A statement on the IFC website from Falih Abood Imara, secretary of the southern oil union, calls the current Iraqi coalition government “the most repulsive sectarian government in our history”, while another statement on the website of the British support group for the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions
(www.basraoilunion.org), signed by Federation president Hassan Jumaa, lists a different set of demands and calls Maliki’s administration “a legitimate elected government”.

Meanwhile, however, that government, using Decree 8750 of August 2005, has seized all the Federation’s bank accounts.

Any level of action by the southern oil workers on anti-sectarian lines will be a tremendous flash of hope in the gloom and chaos of Iraq.

In May and June there was a flurry of manufactured “good news” announcements from the US/UK occupation in Iraq.

None of the progress-talk had any grip. Sectarian conflict has increased steadily, interwined now with violent clashes between rival Shia-Islamist gangs in Basra. Water, electricity, and fuel supplies, and jobs, are all more scarce and unpredictable than ever.

The Islamic Accord Front (a coalition centred round the Iraq Islamic Party, the Iraqi offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood), which is the main Sunni-Arab element in the coalition government formed under Nouri al-Maliki in May, after five months’ negotiations, has withdrawn from the parliament and is threatening to withdraw its four ministers from the government.

The Maliki government has announced extended curfews in Baghdad, a month-long state of emergency in Basra during June, and a “security clampdown” in Baghdad. None of these have damped down the sectarian killing; if they have achieved anything, it is harassment of democratic civil-society opposition, with the seizure of the oil union federation’s bank accounts and a decree banning all political activity on university campuses (6 July).

US forces are clashing more with the Sadr movement — which has ministers in the government — and meanwhile the Sadrists have announced a bizarre plan to mobilise one million Shia to march on the mainly-Sunni city of Samarra and rebuild the al-Askari Shia mosque there, which was wrecked by bombing in February.

The simmering Shia-Sunni civil war is gradually coming to the boil. On Sunday 9 July, at least 42 people were killed in a bomb attack in the mainly-Sunni Jihad district of Baghdad. Sunni leaders blamed it on the Shia-Islamist Mahdi Army led by Moqtada al-Sadr. At least 66 were killed the previous Sunday, 2 July, by bombs in a market in mainly-Shia Sadr City.

Nir Rosen, author of a new book on the Iraqi militias, told al-Jazeera on 6 July that the call by Osama bin Laden on 2 July for Iraqi Sunni-Islamists to kill the Shia represented nothing decisive and new:

“Iraqi Shia are being killed every day anyway... Shia are resented because they are perceived as the beneficiaries of the occupation... and in many ways, they are in charge now [where for centuries before 2003 Sunni Arabs had dominated]...

“The [US] occupation is a daily crime, it is little Abu Ghraibs, little Hadithas, being forced to do what the Americans tell you to do. Having American machine guns pointed at you everywhere, having American security convoys shoot at you when you’re off the streets, having American tanks block off your roads, American concrete barriers block off your city, American helicopters fly over your house, American soldiers break into your house and raids.

“So many little acts and so many innocent Iraqis killed or arrested or humiliated or terrified. Probably hundreds of thousands have been traumatised by this, especially children.

“But now that I think the civil war is... open and intense... it’s possible that an American withdrawal would actually make things worse because there will be nobody patrolling the borders and would allow even more foreign fighters to come into the Sunni areas. It would allow greater intervention from Iraq’s neighbours which will only increase the civil war.

“I think the Americans should leave... but an American withdrawal wouldn’t make things better at this point because of the civil war.

“I think all mixed areas of Iraq are going to be unmixed, are going to be ‘cleansed’ like Bosnia before this ends... Sunni and Shia hatred at this point in Iraq are so intense that they are beyond the point of reconciliation...”

Splitting Iraq up into autonomous regions — as advocated by some Shia politicians, and some US strategists — is no easy answer, according to Rosen.

“It’s much more complicated because the Sunnis don’t want to have some form autonomous province. They want all of Iraq, just like the Shia want all of Iraq.

“Everybody wants Baghdad. Sunnis of course want the oil... Even if you divide [Iraq] into autonomous provinces what would you do with Baghdad and Kirkuk? ... There’s no solution at this point, I think”.

There is indeed no solution, unless the hard-pressed Iraqi labour movement can assert itself as a powerful force, counterposed both to the occupation and to the sectarian militias. Working-class, anti-sectarian action by the southern oil workers would be a tremendous boost to that possibility.