ALJAWHRY: Sure. The British invasion started in 1914, at the beginning of World War I. They installed a government in 1921, a monarchy. It was then that the Iraqis began agitating for labor rights, starting with the railway workers. When the British invaded Iraq, they wanted to transport their equipment from south to north for the war, and the first industry they built in Iraq was the railroad. So the railway workers were the pioneers in the Iraqi labor movement.

Since then, the strikes and the struggles of the labor movement have not stopped until this moment. Iraq has the longest history in the Middle East of the labor movement, except for Egypt. For 35 years Saddam’s regime tried to marginalize this movement, even after the war on and occupation of Iraq. The media try to portray the Iraqi people as religious fanatics who know nothing about reality or the world. But the reality is different—the Iraqi people have the longest [labor organizing] history in the Middle East.

PULSE: Would you say this has been a continuous struggle, or at times been suppressed and then revived under other people?

ALJAWHRY: In 1968, when the Ba’ath party came to power, they tried to marginalize the workers, and succeeded to the extent that workers were deprived of any right to associate, any right to organize or any right to demonstrate or strike. In October of that year, right after the Ba’ath party came to power, workers in the crude oil factory—the biggest industry in the capital city of Baghdad—went on strike, and the government, instead of trying to negotiate with the workers, raided the factory, killed some union leaders and arrested others. That was the beginning of marginalizing the workers.

After that, in 1970, came Law 151, banning any strike or demonstration. For 35 years, there were no big strikes, because everyone was afraid. But while the movement was scattered, the desire for it continued.

Two years ago, after the war and during the occupation, when there were no laws or anything, workers started to become the center of the society again, and rebuild their organizations. Our organization, the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Trade Unions, was one of those that tried to mobilize the workers towards making demands. Part of it was political and part was economical.

PULSE: The unemployment rate in Iraq is 70 percent, right?

ALJAWHRY: After the invasion, it went up to 90 percent, just because the entire infrastructure of the country was devastated and nothing was working. After a while the ministries got rolling again and put some people in places—the teachers and some civil employees went back to work again. But the unemployment rate is still high, and will get higher.

The other day I was reading an article by some Iraqi expert who was saying it was now down to 40 percent. But, he said, there were some major concerns, because last week the government spokesperson was saying the government is planning massive layoffs, because they see that “only” 40 to 60 percent of them are needed. The other 40 to 60 percent will be out of a job soon.

That will add on to the unemployment rate, which will grow much higher, leading to more devastation and more damage in the society. Not to mention that these people who will now be unemployed will redirect their loyalties to the insurgency, leading to more violence and more killing. It is a chain reaction of changes—one leads to another, to another.

PULSE: So until recently, the public sector has been the main source of employment, and since the invasion the public sector has been scaled back?

ALJAWHRY: Because Iraq was a country entirely run by the state, the government was the biggest employer. After the invasion, the U.S. authorities in Iraq decided to privatize the entire country, except for one industry—the oil sector. Other sectors will be privatized, and this will lead to massive layoffs, because it will lead to companies coming to Iraq and saying Iraqis are not capable of running enterprises. So countries that come in from abroad—United States, Japan, Australia and others—can lay off Iraqis and bring in their own people.

This is going to be a big problem, because the public sector employs a huge number of people in Iraq. Destruction of it will be dangerous. The government has not planned for any kind of unemployment insurance, any Social Security payments. Millions of people are laid off and receive no benefits of any kind, and they are the source of the insurgency.

PULSE: In the American media, the insurgency is depicted as motivated by ideological extremism. But you say most insurgents are mostly economically desperate people.

ALJAWHRY: I’ve been there. I went back to Iraq last June and spent four months there, until the end of September. I’ve seen the people there. For 35 years, the Iraqi people have never had one moment of peace. Never had one government that has treated them as human beings. Forty years of devastation, 40 years of instability, 40 years of insecurity, 40 years of killing. The Iraqi people don’t want anything right now except peace. They want to be able to go to the store and know they will come back alive.

I’ll tell you something—everybody that can afford one in Iraq is getting a cell phone. They are borrowing money to buy cell phones, not as luxuries, but because if they go outside they might not come back, and in an emergency they want to be able to talk to their families.

This is how the Iraqi people live. They didn’t want all this violence and killing, which is being driven by the U.S. occupation forces and religious and Ba’ath remnants that have allied to fight the U.S. troops. So the Iraqi people are caught in between these two forces.

Poverty plays a big role here. You can tell someone, “I will pay you $200 to kill an American, or someone in the occupation government,” and there is someone who will do it. So the poverty is a big role in driving the country into this kind of violence.

PULSE: You were an underground union organizer, both under Saddam and today. What were some of your experiences?

ALJAWHRY: It was very hard to organize workers [under Hussein], because of the security police everywhere and the banning of freedom to demonstrate and organize. So it was difficult to motivate people to take actions like this.
After the war, the only people who knew how to organize were ones who used to work 30 or 40 years earlier among the unions, when they were a little bit free. It was difficult just to bring these kind of traditions back to the workers. Workers knew there were such things as unions, but they didn’t know how to lead a strike, how to negotiate—all these things that had been suppressed for 35 years. If you’ve lived without unions for 35 years, there are many things you don’t learn.

For example, we had some unions who went on strike in the city of Kut—180 kilometers south of Baghdad—and instead of negotiating with the organization, they decided simply to strike until their demands were met. So the heads of that textile factory called the national guards, who raided the factory, opened fire on workers, injured four people, arrested 10 and left. So both the workers and the administrators didn’t know how to play the game of unions or negotiations.

I’m not blaming the union—the workers are new at this—but what the government has tried to do is escalate the situation instead of de-escalate it. They inflame it until there is no way for a solution, and this is what happens—people get injured and arrested.

These kinds of situations were taking place under Saddam, and now the traditions live on. The union didn’t know how to respond at that time. But later on, we organized them and told them we don’t want to go through that kind of violence again, and that the government is going to act viciously, and we don’t want to lose any more workers.

So this is the kind of thing we deal with every day.

PULSE: When you left Iraq, you became active in the international campaign to end the sanctions. What did the sanctions do to the situation inside Iraq? What effect did they have on organizing and dissent?

ALJAWHRY: The sanctions were the worst period in Iraq’s history. It lasted 13 years, and what the sanctions did was to dismantle the entire country, so that everything except the government stopped or vanished. They didn’t have the infrastructure to feed equipment and tools into factories. Wages were low, and many people who could left the country. Unemployment shot up to 80, 85 percent.

Iraqi society was really damaged by the years of sanctions, until 1996, when the U.N. oil-for-food program alleviated it a bit. But even that gave us some flour or oil or a bit of tea—these are the things given under the program. Even then, you could not sell anything to the outside, you could not buy anything from the outside.

The sanctions brought the country to its knees, and it might take decades to bring the country back to what it had been.

PULSE: In September 2003, in the months after the invasion, the U.S. government made several laws in Iraq. One was that foreign companies could own 100 percent of Iraqi businesses, and limited corporate and personal taxes to 15 percent. How did that affect the Iraqi people?

ALJAWHRY: This is another part of the privatization process. So many enterprises in Iraq are under a process of privatization—like in Basra, where foreign corporations brought in Indians and Sri Lankans and Pakistanis to do the jobs, rather than employing the qualified local people. And of course this creates some kind of hatred, unfortunately, because local people think, “This is my country, we should have these jobs.”

This has affected all the workers and added on to the unemployment rate. Companies brought more than 3,000 workers from Egypt to rebuild the airport, and Iraqis who wanted to get a job there were told, “We don’t want Iraqis.”

Because of the violence in Iraq the government has tried to take advantage of this situation, by robbing the entire country. The corruption is at the highest it has ever been—higher than it was even during Saddam Hussein.

People think about the violence and the killing, and are busy responding to these emergencies, and don’t think about the other things that are going on in their country. Four billion dollars of oil revenue went missing last year, and by the end of this year, who knows how much they are going to “lose.”

PULSE: I’m not sure how it’s possible to lose $4 billion.

ALJAWHRY: Well, that’s probably only part of it—the $4 billion that was reported missing was just the part that someone reported. Oil is flowing out of the country on a daily basis, and no one is talking about it. The government wants to lay off people and just do nothing about their poverty, but you don’t heal a crippled society by putting people out of work, you do so by creating jobs.

PULSE: One last question: You’ve been living in Canada for the last few years, and traveling the United States. What strikes you most about America, and Americans’ attitudes towards the world?

ALJAWHRY: It is not the American people. They are not the problem. The problem is the American media, who are deliberately trying to face off against the entire Middle East. They try to portray everyone in the Middle East as religious fanatics, who deserve the way they live now, who do not deserve democracy.

Take Egypt—it is run by a dictator who has been in power for 25 years, who has suppressed democracy for 25 years, and the U.S. government has supported him for 25 years. The government supports the Saudi monarchy, and says nothing about democracy.

This will be my third time in the United States, and each time I come here, we tell the people that the media are saying things far from reality. The reality is that the Iraqi people and many people in the Middle East have a long progressive history, a long history of dissent against the dictatorships imposed on us.

We have a long history of labor struggle, of a struggle for women’s rights, of a struggle against corporations. But there are many dictatorships here that have been heavily supported by the U.S. and others, and the image Americans are given of the Middle East is an image of people who just want to kill and die. But this is not the reality. Pakistan the other day had a big labor march, but they don’t show these things on FOX News or even the BBC.

Most Americans want to get out of Iraq, but even some progressives think that the United States is stuck there now. But there is an easy way for the U.S. to get out of Iraq and leave behind more than chaos. It is an organization called the Iraqi Freedom Congress, a coalition of groups that want a more progressive country, and which my organization is part of.

It is a movement for a secular state, that wants to work with the U.N., that wants an end to violence. But no one hears about such a movement, and the media won’t show it. ||

Amjad Ali Aljawhry and Falah Awan will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 16 at the Carpenters’ Union, 710 Olive St., St. Paul.