EIGHT YEARS OF IRAQ'S OCCUPATION, EIGHT YEARS OF MISERY
By David Bacon
3/28/11
When demonstrations broke out in other countries of the
Middle East and North Africa, people in Baghdad, Basra and Kirkuk had
been taking to the streets for years. "There has basically been no
change in the unemployment situation since the occupation started,"
charges Qasim Hadi, president of the Union of Unemployed of Iraq.
"There are more than 10 million unemployed people in Iraq -- about
60-70% of the workforce. There's no electricity most of the time,
and no drinking water - no services at all," Eight years after the
start of the U.S. military intervention, "there's hardly even any
repair of the war damage - there's still rubble in the streets.
People are going hungry."
According to the UUI, government unemployment statistics are
artificially low because they don't count many people.. "Women aren't
counted," Hadi says, citing just one example, "because the government
says their husbands or fathers are responsible for supporting them."
Hadi was one of Baghdad's first protestors, leading marches
of unemployed workers to the gates of the Green Zone, where U.S.
occupation chief Paul Bremer had his offices. On July 25, following
the May 2003 invasion, Hadi was arrested by U.S. troops for
protesting. For the next six years, he led one protest after
another, making the Union of the Unemployed a thorn in the side first
of the U.S. occupation administration, and then of the Iraqi regimes
that followed.
Some government representatives tried to stop the union's
growth with bribes. "They said they'd give us a position in the
Labor Ministry, and make us responsible for unemployed people," Hadi
says. Those attempts were unsuccessful because, he explains, "we
belong to the union because we want civil rights, not for ourselves,
but for all people."
When bribes didn't work, threats followed. "A representative
of the Dawa Party (the party of Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki) told
us to leave the union," Hadi recalls. "If we didn't, he said we'd be
enemies of the people of Iraq. We know what this language means.
They will kidnap you. They'll make holes in your body with a drill.
They will kill you slowly, with lots of pain."
Hadi isn't exaggerating. During the years of U.S.
occupation, many union organizers have been murdered, some, like Hadi
Saleh, brutally tortured first. "People who get threatened like this
change the place where they sleep many times," he says. "Sometimes
they go live in another city. I don't care what they do to me. I
have a dream I'm fighting for. But when they threatened to kidnap my
wife and children I couldn't stay." A year ago Hadi left Iraq.
He describes enormous economic pressure on families. "Prices
are very high, and millions of people have no income at all," he
elaborates. "Even for those who have a job, wages are so low you see
people on the street selling all their furniture. If they get a
sugar ration, they sell it instead. People stop drinking tea because
they have to spend all their money just on the food they need to stay
alive. It surprises me how people can survive."
The Iraqi government only counts 2 million unemployed, and
pays unemployment benefits to a quarter of them. Benefits are low,
about $110 a month, and if there's more than one unemployed person in
the family, they reduce the benefit. But the worst problem, the UUI
says, is that you have to register with the governing political party
at the same time you register for benefits. "If you oppose the
governing party, you can't register," Hadi says. "Benefits are given
out as political bribes."
Unemployment, hunger and corruption were the fuel that fed
the rising wave of protest that culminated in Iraq's Day of Rage at
the end of this February.
At the beginning of the month rallies in the Al-Kuray'at and
Al-Mutanabbi Street neighborhoods featured banners saying "The
Baghdad Municipality is wasting billions and the capital is sleeping
in trash." Other banners had warnings for the government: "O
inhabitants of the Green Zone -- think about the others," and
"Remember the fate of Arab dictatorship regimes and how their people
revolted."
As the month wore on, the government passed an $82 billion
budget, financed almost entirely from oil revenue. Endemic
corruption, however, practically guarantees that little of that will
reach the country's hungry and unemployed populace. The growing
anti-government tone of the demonstrations was displayed in one large
banner at a Tahrir Square rally that read, "The oil of the people is
for the people, not for the thieves."
Finally, unions, leftwing political parties and other
organizations of Iraqi civil society announced a national
mobilization for February 25, the Day of Rage. The Maliki government
attempted to keep turnout low by arresting leaders of organizations
calling for the protest. Offices of leftwing political parties were
closed, as union offices for oil and electricity workers has been
last year.
Nevertheless, Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization
of Women's Freedom in Iraq, reported that almost 70,000 people
participated in the day's protest rallies. One demonstration in
Samarra was the first tribal protest organized by women, in part
because widows now make up a majority of the city's female
population. "The army shot the demonstrators in the evening,"
Mohammed says, "attempting to disperse them. Seven were killed in
Samarra, and 15 were wounded." According to the Iraqi Society for
the Defense of Press Freedoms, 14 people were killed in Hawija,
Mosul, Tikrit and Basra.
If only several hundred people were brave enough to
demonstrate in Baghdad's Tahrir Square on March 4, a week later, the
reason was obvious. But it is not likely that shooting demonstrators
and a massive show of force will end the protests sweeping Iraq.
Instead, the state's violence has pushed protestors into moving
beyond calls for better conditions to demands that the government
itself resign.
"The government says we're Baathists or Al Qaeda," says Qasim
Hadi. "That's their main tactic - try to scare people, to say we're
going back to 2003. But it's a lie. They know the people don't want
them."
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
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