The Australian government has played a deplorable role in post-invasion Iraq. Christopher Doran reveals Australia's role in privatising Iraqi crops and seeds.
No weapons of mass destruction and no ties to Al Queda. With the arguments for the Iraq war so thoroughly discredited three years after the invasion, John Howard's justification for Australia's participation now rests on "liberating" the Iraqi people and helping them establish democracy.
Significantly less attention and debate has focussed on Australia's actual role in occupied Iraq, particularly in the re-structuring of Iraqi agriculture, the one area where Australia was an equal partner with the US. Far from promoting democracy, Australia was focused on ensuring continued wheat contracts while facilitating dominance of Iraqi agriculture by
Australian and US corporations.
Australia, along with the US and Britain, co-founded the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in May 2003. The CPA was the official governing body for the military occupation, and
Australia was complicit in all CPA actions until the so-called handover of sovereignty on June 28, 2004.
The CPA was headed by the US's Paul Bremer; Australia's representative was long-time diplomat Neil Mules. The CPA occupation was almost as controversial as the invasion itself, with global attention and often outrage focused on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, allegations of war crimes by US troops in the assault on Fallujah, US$8.8 billion of reconstruction funds the CPA couldn't account for, and the alleged use of human trafficking to carry out reconstruction contracts.
Bremer laws
Equally controversial were the CPA's neoliberal economic policies, known as the "Bremer laws", which were enforced and implemented with Australia's active participation. In September 2003 the CPA announced that nearly all sectors of Iraq's nationalised economy were for sale. Foreign investors could purchase and own 100% of Iraqi companies, which had been state owned under the Baathist regime, and export all the profits.
Tariffs and duties on imports were practically eliminated, and a flat tax of 15% was set on corporate and personal income.
At least 15 Australian government officials were working for the CPA and helping implement these and the other unjust aspects of the military occupation, courtesy of Australian taxpayers.
Jeff Madrick, a New York Times economic columnist, said of the Bremer laws: "By almost any mainstream economist's standard, the plan ... is extreme — in fact, stunning." Even more stunning is that the laws were devised by the Bush administration in January, 2003 — a full two months before the invasion.
The CPA ensured the Bremer laws would be firmly entrenched beyond the so-called handover of sovereignty in 2004. The laws require a two-thirds majority of the Legislative Assembly to be repealed, which is unlikely in a country under a continuing military, including Australian troops, occupation.
By far Australia's most prominent role in the CPA was restructuring Iraq's agriculture sector, where it shared equal authority with the US. It also constituted the biggest chunk
of AusAid's Iraq budget, over $45 million of roughly $200 million. AusAid clearly stated Iraq aid was a high Howard priority: "As the prime minister, John Howard, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, stated, Australia will make a strong and effective humanitarian contribution to the Iraqi people."
Unfortunately for the Iraqi people, Howard decided that an "effective humanitarian contribution" entailed hand picking former Australian Wheat Board chairperson Trevor Flugge to lead Australia's agricultural team. Flugge is now famous as the alleged architect of $300 million in kickbacks AWB paid to Saddam Hussein to guarantee wheat contracts under the UN Oil for Food program, as revealed in the ongoing Cole inquiry.
AWB kickbacks
Evidence presented at the inquiry overwhelmingly suggests that senior government officials, including Howard, knew about the kickbacks, which were in clear and criminal violation of
UN sanctions.
Incredibly, one of Flugge's duties was to review previous AWB contracts with Saddam Hussein under the UN Oil for Food program, and determine whether they were to be honoured by the new CPA administration. Unsurprisingly, the CPA honoured the contracts.
Responding to heated criticism after it was revealed that Flugge was paid nearly $1 million by AusAid for eight months work in Iraq, Howard said, "I will tell you why we sought his involvement. It was because our principal concern at that time was to stop American wheat growers from getting our markets. We thought Mr Flugge would fight hard for the Australian wheat industry."
Flugge was not the only AWB official picked by the Howard government to work in the CPA. Michael Long, another former AWB top executive, was a Howard appointee "advising" the Iraqi trade ministry — the ministry responsible for approving and signing contracts. Darryl Hockey, aptly placed as the former AWB manager of government relations, was in Iraq on the AusAid payroll in 2004. AusAid, thus far, has declined to comment on what Hockey was actually doing in Iraq.
Embedding former AWB officials in its own occupation government to guarantee continued wheat contracts was not the limit of Australia's role in Iraqi agriculture. Mules and Flugge were also directly involved in one of the most deplorable of the CPA laws, Bremer Order 81, which introduced a system of monopoly patent rights over seeds and vastly facilitated the dominance of Iraq's agriculture by multinational corporations. Flugge shared co-responsibility
with US official Dan Amstutz, formerly of the Cargill Corporation, one of the world's largest agriculture companies and a notorious promoter of genetically modified organisms.
Iraq is the ancient birthplace of agriculture and its wheat, legumes and other seed crop varieties have been developed and refined for local conditions over a period of 10,000 years. As farmers do throughout the world, Iraqis save their seeds from one harvest to plant for the next.
But much of Iraq's seed stock was depleted in the war. Flugge and Amstutz then presided over the distribution of new seed stocks — seed stocks developed and "patented"
by corporations like Cargill and Monsanto, and protected by the CPA patent law. It is now illegal for farmers to plant these "patented" seeds, even if taken from their own harvest, without paying the seed patent owners — corporate giants like Cargill and Monsanto.
With the stroke of a military occupier's pen, 10,000 years of traditional agriculture and knowledge were swept away in order to force Iraqi dependency on US and Australian corporations for seeds, chemicals, and equipment, while simultaneously guaranteeing continued AWB wheat contracts. Both came at the direct expense of Iraqi food security, and were undertaken with no say from the Iraqi people.
"We are not in the business of imposing a particular model of democracy on the Iraqi people ... for only the Iraqi people are in a position to determine what is in their national
interest", Howard said in parliament in May 2003. Like so much of what Howard says, it is not an outright lie.
Australia, far from imposing a particular model of democracy on the Iraqi people, actively ensured there would be no democracy at all.
[A longer version of this article was published in the April-May issue of Arena Magazine. Christopher Doran is a lecturer in the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle, and is analysing Australia's role in post-war Iraq via post-graduate research in the sociology department at Macquarie University.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 21 2006.
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