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Kurdistan, in north-eastern Iraq, is one of those
AK-47 lands. All along its roads, shortish men in
camouflage fatigues stop cars and peer in at the
passengers, the AK clips on their shoulder straps
scratching against the windows. Eventually, they
wave the drivers on. Clumps of the same men sit in
restaurants, scooping up rice and lamb, their AKs
resting on the plastic table tops. These are the
peshmergas, the guerrilla fighters who fought off
Saddam Hussein’s security forces and are now the
Iraqi Kurds’ army. Their name means, literally,
“facing death”. They are tense, watchful and looking
for trouble - one reason why there is relatively
little of it among Kurdistan’s five million people.
At the end of last month, a small group of British
trade unionists came here for a week-long trip. It
was the first union delegation to travel through
Iraqi Kurdistan since the 2003 war, although short
visits had been made to Baghdad in the immediate
aftermath. Officially at least, they have come to
report for the Trades Union Congress, the umbrella
organisation of Britain’s unions, on the state of
the Iraqi union movement. As it turns out, they have
other reasons for coming as well.
There are five in the group, four men and one woman.
And they are, in a word, uncertain. Each is
accustomed to disputes and conflict, but the sort
that can be bargained and negotiated over in meeting
rooms. The Iraqi conflict - guerrilla warfare,
bombings, men with assault rifles - is not their
kind of struggle. Moreover, all five belong to
unions that opposed the war. In the case of Keith
Sonnet, the most senior member of the group,
opposition to the war has led him to become one of
several vice-presidents of the Stop the War
Coalition, the militantly anti-war group that
mobilised more than a million people on to the
streets of London. Sonnet, an ironic man in his mid
50s, is deputy general secretary of the public
service union Unison, the biggest and among the most
left-leaning in Britain. He is also on the general
council of the TUC, known - when unions were more
powerful than now - as “the general staff of the
labour movement”.
Another Unison official, Nick Crook, the youngest of
the group, with the mild manners that intellectuals
adopt when in the service of unions, works in the
international department. He is here to further
Unison’s assistance to the Iraqi unions - which, in
an undemonstrative way, he appears to achieve by the
end of the trip.
Mary Davis, the delegation’s sole woman, is on the
executive of the university and college lecturers’
union NATFHE, as well as the TUC Women’s Committee
and the executive committee of the Communist Party
of Britain. In her late 50s, with a sharp, humorous
face, Davis is one of a vanishing world: that of
leftwing East End Jewry, mostly East European
immigrants, the quarry of Oswald Mosley’s
Blackshirts in the 1930s and now largely gone from
the East End and from revolutionary politics.
The other two group members, Brian Joyce and David
Green, are on the executive committee of the Fire
Brigades Union, also traditionally on the left. I am
here as an observer; unlike the officials, I had
been in favour of the war, and remain so - indeed, I
learn on my return that a book published by the Stop
the War Coalition named and criticised me for my
position, as one of a small number of journalists
identified with the left - including David
Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens -
who had supported the war.
I have a couple of inconclusive arguments about it
with my fellow travellers but my main purpose is to
listen rather than speak. I had been invited by a
remarkable man whose name is Abdullah Muhsin, a
sturdy Iraqi of about 50, with thick curly hair and
a ready smile, except when worried - which he had
much cause to be. A student union activist, he fled
Iraq in 1978 and settled in Britain. After the fall
of Hussein, because of his fluency in English and
contacts abroad, Muhsin was appointed international
representative of the Iraqi Federation of Workers’
Trade Unions (IFTU). This group was set up after the
war by activists, mainly in the Communist party, who
had been banned, exiled or repressed by Hussein, who
permitted only his own, Ba’athist unions. Muhsin has
worked indefatigably, with little money, to persuade
the labour movements of the west to support Iraq’s
fledgling independent unions. Exhausting work, it is
also dangerous. In January his friend and comrade,
Hadi Saleh, the international secretary of the IFTU,
was tortured to death in his Baghdad apartment by
what Muhsin says was the remnants of Saddam’s
Mukhabarat (secret police). A trip to Baghdad
planned for earlier in the year was cancelled after
Saleh’s death. In the end, it was rescheduled to
Kurdistan, and Muhsin arranged for trade union
leaders from Iraq proper to come to meet us at
various points.
Although the members of the British delegation
opposed the war, they feel themselves tugged by
another loyalty - that of international solidarity,
an old labour value. They reflect a conflict now
common in the large anti-war constituency, as a
dislike of the British-American action (and of
George W. Bush) clashes with a realisation that a
civil society is there to be built, and their help
is being sought. None, including Sonnet, agree with
the Stop the War Coalition’s position of recognising
the right of Iraqis to resist the occupation. A
statement sent out to the news media in draft form
last October, which said the Coalition recognised
that the Iraqis had a right to resist “by any means
possible”, was later withdrawn, Davis and Sonnet
tell me, because of fierce objections. Andrew
Murray, Coalition chairman and also communications
director of the Transport and General Workers Union,
confirms that the statement had been pulled “because
it could be misunderstood”. He says the Coalition
“was against the killing of civilians”. I ask if
that meant killing soldiers was permissible, and he
repeats that Iraqis had a right to resist “an
occupation seen by almost everyone as illegal”.
Muhsin says he is continually under attack from
leading members of the Coalition, who he says view
the IFTU as pro-American stooges. However, Murray
says the coalition takes no view on whether the IFTU
or the General Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions (the
successor to the Hussein-era Ba’athist unions)
should be supported: “that’s a matter for Iraqis”.
However, he says the coalition had criticised “an
intervention” by Muhsin at the Labour party
conference. According to Murray, Muhsin’s speech at
a fringe meeting and an article in the bulletin
circulated to delegates, together with pressure from
the Labour leadership, had helped defeat a motion
demanding that the government set a date to withdraw
troops. At one point in our trip, Muhsin shows me an
e-mail he received from Australia on his borrowed
Blackberry. In broken English, amid many insults, it
calls him a poodle of American imperialists. In
Iraq, it is much worse: if insurgents spotted him,
they would try to kill him.
Only one of the five Britons - firefighter Brian
Joyce - has been to Iraq before. Tall, with a head
of snow-white hair, Joyce likes to call himself a
“hard bugger” - a transparent ruse for a man whose
generous emotions are deeply stirred by Iraq. He has
been to Basra in the south, to Baghdad and
Kurdistan, each time travelling with Muhsin.
Everywhere he goes on this trip he is embraced and
kissed as a trusted comrade, in scenes that see him
and his welcomers speak words of endearment in
mutually incomprehensible languages, none of which
seems to dull his appetite for more and longer such
encounters.
The rest of the group has no idea what awaits them
in Iraq. What would solidarity actually mean in such
a place? Could civil society, in which trade unions
play a very large part, be reconstructed? They begin
to find out at the end of their first full day in
the country, in the northern Kurdish city of Dohuk,
where we spend the night in the heavily guarded
Zhian Hotel, Dohuk’s finest. By Muhsin’s
arrangement, we meet four Iraqi union officials who
have driven up the dangerous road from the nearby
city of Mosul, where the insurgents are strongest.
The four men are members of the executive committee
of the Mosul branch of the IFTU. The group’s leader,
branch president Saady Edan, is a rotund, balding
man in his 60s - a craftsman who, in spite of the
prowling peshmergas out back, retains an anxious
air. That is no wonder: soon after we settle into
deep sofas in a lounge, he tells us the story of his
kidnapping.
Edan had been driving from his home on January 26
when a car with two people in it suddenly stopped in
front of him. Another car blocked him from behind.
In it was a man armed with a heavy machine gun.”I
tried to get away, but realised they would have shot
me. They forced me into the boot of the car and took
me to a house in the Zingili district of Mosul - a
section where the extremists are. They put me in a
room. They told me very clearly not to work for the
IFTU. I was told to leave or my life would be in
danger. Now I no longer live at home - I live with
my son. We have received many threats, often in
letters.” He says he thinks that his kidnappers were
members of Ansar al-Sunna, an insurgent group strong
in the Mosul area, made up of former Ba’athists.
Edan says his union’s largest threat comes from the
GFITU, membership of which had been compulsory under
Hussein, as it seeks members again. According to
Edan, they have far fewer supporters than the IFTU
and haven’t held elections. But they are funded by
Syria and the Arab Federation of Trade Unions and
make life difficult for the independent unions.
”These people have occupied trade union buildings
with guns,” says Edan. “They are defying the law,
they are making threats in schools and hospitals.
They don’t have the membership we have but they do
have pressures. They threaten the stronger people,
the activists. The weaker ones they buy off with TVs
or a fridge.” Under Hussein, he says, workers in
areas such as Mosul - where support for the regime
was strong - had a lot of work and regular pay. This
is not the case now: unemployment is between 40 and
50 per cent.
After listening to Edan, Sonnet asks if he wants the
US-led occupation of Iraq to end - the question
around which anti-war movements throughout the world
have mobilised, all of them demanding rapid
withdrawal. When the question is translated, there
is an exchange of looks among the four Iraqi
unionists, and tight, complicit, smiles. Both sides,
it seems, know this is an awkward question. Edan
replies: “We want the occupation to end. But if it
ends now, it will bring chaos. Once the Iraqi
security forces are capable, then the occupation
should leave. But they are not yet.” With that, the
executive committee of the Mosul branch of the IFTU
departs, going back on the dark and dangerous road
to their dark and dangerous town.
The next day is Sunday and we are driven to the
Kurdistan capital of Erbil. The road passes through
vast plains that end in sudden eruptions of
mountains: as we drive, lines of women and men dance
by the road to music from car stereos, celebrating
the Kurdish New Year.
Our hosts are leaders of the Kurdish unions -
separate, as all things Kurdish, from the Iraqi
unions - and they take us to a big restaurant out of
town to meet five members of the executive committee
of the IFTU, who have driven up from Baghdad. The
restaurant is vast, full of men eating from big
dishes of rice, lamb and chicken. The British
delegation is taken to a private back room for the
meeting. Sonnet, as the senior official, has assumed
leadership of the group and opens with the speeches
required by the formal courtesies of the hosts. On
this occasion, he says the British labour movement
was opposed to the war because it suspected the
intentions of George W. Bush. “But we were always
opposed to Saddam Hussein - we campaigned against
him with no help from the Americans. Now he’s gone,
we’re glad.” He says there had been an important
debate within the British trade union movement about
working with the Iraqi trade unions. “Some people
argue that we should work with the GFITU. I’m
interested to know what you say.”
He is given his answer by Hadi Ali, the
vice-president of the IFTU. Ali is a weary-looking
man of about 70, who was an active trade unionist
before Hussein banned independent unions. He fled to
Kurdistan in the 1970s, became a peshmerga and
fought in the underground movement. After the 2003
war he became one of the principal founders of the
new IFTU. Ali says the visitors need to understand
that the GFITU does not represent Iraqi workers.
“Unions were a transmission belt for the Ba’ath
party. People must become aware of what free unions
are. Our members don’t know what negotiation is. We
also need help from our brothers in the Arab
federation of trade unions - we want them to
understand us as well.” When he is asked if he wants
the occupying forces to go, Ali does not answer, but
a leader of the Iraqi teachers’ union steps in: “The
infrastructure of trade unionism was totally
destroyed by Saddam Hussein. The occupation was
brought on us by the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
We are working to end the occupation; if terrorism
goes, the occupation will too.”
One day I show Muhsin something I’d read in a recent
issue of the Wall Street Journal. The article, by
neo-conservative writer Charles Krauthammer, is
entitled “Arab democracy: not bad for a simpleton”,
and says “the left has always prided itself as the
great international champion of freedom and human
rights. Yet when America proposed to remove the man
responsible for torturing, killing and gassing tens
of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned
into a champion of Westphalian sovereign
inviolability. the international left’s concern for
human rights turns out to be nothing more than a
useful weapon for its anti-Americanism.” Muhsin
reads it carefully, then says: “Very good. I have
written something like that for Tribune (a leftwing
British publication).” Would they publish it? I ask.
”I don’t know,” replies Muhsin.
Most of the people we met were not Shia or Sunni
Iraqis, but the Kurds themselves. These are a people
who, in the 14 years since the first Gulf war, have
done what any leftwinger would, in the past, have
venerated (and which the neo-cons now do). They have
fought against a cruel dictatorship and, after years
of struggle and what came close to genocide, they
won. Their revolt against Hussein after the first
Gulf war had been sealed by a no-fly zone, policed
by Britain and the US. Afterwards, the region’s two
main political parties - the Kurdistan Democratic
Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan - patched
up a bloody quarrel and made their own state, the
first such state the Kurds have managed to keep
going for any length of time.
Thanks largely to Mary Davis, who insists that “the
woman’s question” comes up at every meeting, Kurdish
society gradually reveals itself to the group. At an
early meeting in a hall of union members in Duhok,
Davis says, with a severe tone, “I’m very sorry I’m
the only woman here.” There is some whispered
consultation and, some time later, two women join
the crowd of moustached men. They say nothing,
though both speak to Davis afterwards and tell her
they work in the IFTU office. Later, during a drive
between cities, Sonnet tries to explain to Hangaw
Abdullah Khan, general secretary of the Kurdish
unions, that women account for two-thirds of Unison
membership and, under union regulations, any future
Unison delegation would be two-thirds female. He
says the union has also set up special forums for
ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians. The translator
finally seems to convey the points. Abdullah Khan,
normally hugely loquacious, keeps driving silently,
his eyes fixed grimly on the road.
But these cultural incongruities seem to be the
exceptions. We meet women who - though clearly
living in a society more dominated by men than in
Britain - are nevertheless independent and
articulate. Indeed, this proves to be a source of
some dissonance as Davis keeps emphasising their
rights as women, and they their duties as Kurds. At
a meeting with parliamentarians and KDP officials,
Kamilla Ibrahim, slight and poised and just elected
to the Iraqi parliament, says: “I don’t like to
speak about women only. There are many problems for
women, but not only for us. Women were not free
during the Iraqi regime. It’s better here now -
women can work and travel freely alone - that
doesn’t happen elsewhere in Iraq. Kurdish women now
want their rights to be protected. We must fight not
as women but as Kurds.” Ibrahim emphasises that many
Sunni and Shia women, including deputies in the new
parliament, share a similar revulsion to being put
under any law that restricts their freedom or
dictates a dress code.
The woman who has the deepest effect, however, is a
trade union organiser in the southern Kurdish city
of Sulaimaniya, which we reach after many weary
hours on bad roads. We stay in a garishly
uncomfortable guest house in the mountains outside
the city - for security, our hosts say - and meet a
group of union leaders and activists over breakfast.
One of these is Baher Osman, a reserved but forceful
woman in early middle age, who introduces herself as
a beautician and organiser of workers in the city’s
beauty parlours and hair salons. She is adamant that
women have the same pay, the same access to jobs -
and she wants it to stay that way. “Men and women
work together in the salons,” she says. “That’s
unheard of in the rest of Iraq.”
Osman, however, has a particular past. Just before
the Kurds expelled the Iraqi forces in 1991, she was
arrested and taken to the main security centre in
Sulaimaniya where she was tortured. The centre is
known as the Red House, a 1970s complex that is now
a “torture museum”. Our hosts have added this to our
itinerary. In the dank and windowless concrete
rooms, some of them wood-clad to muffle screams, we
are shown the bars placed about three metres above
the floor, from which victims were hung, arms
manacled behind their backs, and given electric
shocks to the genitals (a wax model is suspended
from one such bar to help us visualise the horror).
Prisoners could hear their wives or daughters or
mothers being raped in an adjoining room. In cells
meant for seven or eight, rough plastic bowls are
stacked in towers to show there were sometimes more
than 100 in each cell - and their bowls were used
for their food, as well as their excretions.
In one cell, a hand has written: “I was brought in
here at 10, and I am now 18.” Some people, like
Osman, got out. Most didn’t. It is one of the
world’s most appalling places and the visitors -
used to seeing torture in Iraq represented by images
of US soldiers degrading prisoners in Abu Ghraib
jail - walk about the bloodstained floors mutely and
grimly.
The delegation realises, too, the limits of their
mission. The union leaders they came to meet, Iraqi
Kurds and Arabs, are absorbed in life-and-death,
national struggles. The Kurdish leaders are clearly
also officials of, or closely linked to, the two
main parties, the KDP and PUK. Indeed, in a session
with Imad Ahmed, the PUK leader in the region, he
gives the game away by saying “the unions are weak:
they are dominated by the parties. They need to
become stronger and more independent.” The visitors
wonder why a union movement that is poor and needs
funds as well as training is able to drive them
about in big Toyota Land Cruisers and BMWs.
Many of the people we meet aren’t trade unionists in
the British sense - rather, they are from
professional associations feeling their way into
independent life. At a final dinner in Erbil, where
some 20 representatives of every kind of union -
blue-collar, white-collar and entrepreneurial - turn
up, the teachers’ unions ask for teacher training as
well as union training; the representative of the
medical practitioners asks for cardiac equipment and
the representative of the country’s dentists asks
for modern dental training.
Everywhere the British unionists go, they are
congratulated on the virtues of prime minister Tony
Blair. They, of course, are not fans. The trade
union movement, especially on the left, takes the
view that this government, if possibly better than a
Conservative one, is not real Labour. “It’s all very
well going on about Tony Blair,” says Davis, half
drolly, half irritably, at one of the group’s
lengthy feasts. “We don’t think he’s so wonderful.”
(Davis’s British Communist Party and its paper, the
Morning Star, are fiercely hostile to New Labour.)
The trip does seem to make a difference to the
group’s views on the war. During a meal in a
restaurant towards the end of the week, David Green,
the younger of the two firefighters’ union leaders,
says: “I was against the war. I thought it was a bad
idea and it shouldn’t have been done.” I ask him
about his thoughts now. “Well, you see a different
perspective. You see what these people have done.”
Green and Brian Joyce have been tremendously active
in arranging for British fire authorities to donate
equipment to the impoverished Iraqi brigades. Joyce,
in conversation, frequently recalls visits elsewhere
in Iraq where firefighters were expected to work
with ancient machines and wearing just overalls. He
says they showed him the burns and wounds they had
suffered, which they accepted as part of the job.
I join Green and Joyce at a fire station in Dohuk to
see what has become of the equipment they had sent
over. We step into the tiny, impoverished office of
station commander Colonel Abdul Mohammed Rashid, who
calls in a tall fireman dressed in protective gear.
The fireman stamps his right foot as a kind of
salute, stands to attention and turns around to show
the logo on the back of his coat: “Sponsored by
Bristol - protecting the world’s firefighters”.
Exploring the station’s engine shed, Green and Joyce
find two brand new Mercedes fire trucks next to a
much older vehicle of indeterminate make. They also
discover that much of the new equipment they had
arranged to send here has not been used and the
firefighters have not been trained to use it. The
two officials keep asking why firefighters (in
common with the civil police, of which they are
part) are not allowed to join unions. They are
assured later by a group of parliamentarians that a
labour code passing through the Kurdish parliament
would permit membership. But what the Kurdish
firefighters really need is efficient and protective
equipment. Both the British firefighters say they
will continue working to supply it.
Shortly after we return home, the long-expected
British general election is called. Polls and focus
groups show that Blair is trusted less and less, and
the main reason given is the basis on which he took
the country to war in Iraq.
This has become the crucial issue in the
constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in east
London, where Labour party officials fear an upset.
George Galloway, the former Labour MP, supported by
fellow members of the Stop the War Coalition, is
standing as a Respect candidate in the seat, which
has a Muslim majority and whose sitting Labour MP,
Oona King, supported the war. Galloway appears to be
making good progress in a bitterly fought campaign.
”Trust”, which Blair is deemed to lack, is defined
almost wholly in terms of going to war in Iraq. If
the Kurds see it as a war of liberation, the
majority of Britons reportedly view it as a
disgrace. But in the aftermath of their trip, the
trade union delegation is determined to take a
pragmatic approach. A report, drafted by Nick Crook,
will recommend that the TUC and its affiliates help
Iraqi unions through the IFTU with training in
organisational skills, leadership and English, and
give money for offices and equipment. It will
recommend that unions should not work with the GFITU,
because of its Ba’athist links.
There is a strong precedent for this sort of action.
After the second world war, the British union
movement helped rebuild the German unions - giving
them (as many Labour politicians have ruefully
reflected since) a structure much more rational and
coherent than British unions have today. It was a
parallel that occurred to several members of the
delegation in Iraq, though all were born after the
war. Through the decades, some deep imperative of
solidarity seems to have asserted itself.
John Lloyd is the editor of FT Magazine.
http://news.ft.com
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