About 100 people joined a protest outside 10 Downing Street in London on Sunday 15 August.
It had been called at short notice by Voices in the Wilderness and Iraq Occupation Focus in response to the new US military offensive in Najaf.
AWL members joined the protest with a leaflet calling for support for the "Third Camp" in Iraq, against both the US occupying forces - whose offensives have boosted rather than reduced support for Sadr, and killed many civilians - and the clerical-fascistic Sadr movement.
Most of the organised left groups (SWP, SP, Resistance, etc.) did not join the protest, and the SWP's Stop The War Coalition has to date not responded to the Najaf offensive at all, not even with a posting on its website.
The speeches were mostly (not all) on the theme that the Islamist militias signify "the whole Iraqi people" rising up against the occupation. In individual discussion, however, many protesters were interested to hear about the existence of an independent Iraqi labour movement, and sympathetic to the idea that the threat posed by the "resistance" militias to that movement makes it necessary for socialists internationally to go beyond negative slogans like "troops out now".
Comments
The IFTU
In reply to IFTU backs Allawi by martin
I think that anyone wishing to build solidarity with the Iraqi workers' movement needs to think seriously about how it does this in relation to the IFTU. It's always been extremely clear that the Stalinist leadership of the IFTU is more than happy to capitulate to the imperialist occupation of Iraq - we therefore have the ICP taking a seat on the Governing Council and now calling Allawi (a fascistic Ba'athist criminal) a "democrat." Activists who have been in Iraq also report how the ICP leadership behaves in a typically Stalinist - that is bureaucratic, controlling, top-down - way within the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. This has even led to some unions within the Federation splitting off to become independent, and reports do seem to show that the healthiest unions within the IFTU are the ones in which ICP control is not quite so heavy.
I'm not saying that the IFTU is not - or does not have within it - genuine labour movement organisations. But when everyone - from the occupiers of Iraq themselves to the trade union bureaucracy in this country - seems to want to recognise the IFTU as the *sole*, official representatives of the Iraqi labour movement, revolutionaries like ourselves need to make doubly sure we tell the truth about the politics of their leadership and encourage solidarity with the non-mainstream, politically healthier workers' organisations such as those initiated and led by the Worker-Communist Party. We have to remember that, on a practical level, the WCPI led unions simply need our solidarity more. The IFTU now has the official backing of the IGC and has the now safe Stalinist/Social-Democratic ICP at its leadership. The Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq (FCWUI) by contrast has no such backing and its activists have faced consistent physical victimisation from both the imperialist troops and the extreme-right within Iraq. It needs our solidarity to survive.
Of course we should offer solidarity to all genuine workers' organisations in Iraq - including those grouped under the IFTU umbrella - without endorsing the politics of their leadership (just as we don't endorse the aspects of the WCPI's politics which are mistaken). But this doesn't imply that we have to remain silent on these politics, especially when - in the case of the Stalinist leadership of the IFTU - they are so glaringly class-collaborationist, dangerous and reactionary.
IFTU backs Allawi
The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, through its British representative Abdullah Muhsin writing to the Guardian on 18 August 2004, has backed not only the "transitional government" of Iyad Allawi but Tony Blair's rumoured plans to invite Allawi to Labour Party conference.
This stance is destructive for the IFTU's independence - Allawi is plainly a pro-capitalist figure of scant democratic credentials - and unwise in the narrowest tactical sense. According to latest reports, Blair has backed down on inviting Allawi because of the row the invitation would stir up at Labour Party conference.
It is not new for the Iraqi Communist Party (the leading political force in the IFTU) to take such a stance of seeking favour with the powers that be. Nor is it unusual for trade union movements worldwide to take such stances.
In no way should it lessen our class solidarity with the IFTU, which is based not on any approval for the particular politics of the IFTU's current leadership, but on the principle of solidarity with a genuine labour movement whatever its politics.
It should however remind us of the necessity of addressing our solidarity to all strands of the Iraqi labour movement - not just one, the IFTU, even if it is the majority. Other strands of the Iraqi labour movement, notably those influenced by the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, take a very different attitude to Allawi, while still remaining completely opposed to the Sadr militia and similar "resistance" forces.