Viv Miley, Sydney
Farouk Ismaal, international relations officer for Iraq's General Union of Oil Employees (GUOE), has begun a speaking tour of Australia, sponsored by a broad range of trade unions and anti-war and social justice organisations.
"If you want to help us rebuild our country, help us end the occupation of our country by the United States and its allies", Ismaal told a press briefing in Quezon City, the Philippines, in March. He is speaking in Australia about what life is like for Iraqis under the occupation, how the GUOE is fighting the privatisation of the Iraqi oil industry, and how ordinary Iraqis are struggling to end the US-led occupation.
Ismaal addressed a meeting of 90 people at the Tom Mann Theatre in Sydney on September 22. Also addressing the meeting were Jack Mundey, former NSW Builders' Labourers Federation secretary, and Tim Anderson, civil rights activist and political economy lecturer at Sydney University.
Although the US and Australia trumpet the "democracy" they claim they are bringing to Iraq, the GUOE, despite representing 23,000 workers, continues to be illegal, just as it was under Saddam Hussein's regime. Ismaal reported that the US-backed Iraqi authorities had recently decided to seize the assets of all trade unions.
He went on to explain how, after the US-led invasion in 2003, he and a small core of unionists confronted the corporate plunderers from Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, when they attempted to carry out Washington's plan to begin pumping Iraqi oil for their own profits. The oil workers threatened KBR with a campaign of industrial sabotage to protect the sovereignty of the Iraqi people over their oil resources.
Despite being isolated from the towns and cities and without any kind of secure funding, the union managed over a prolonged period to get 30,000 Iraqis back at work in the oil fields, as well as winning pay increases and health benefits.
According to an information flyer distributed at the meeting, by May 2003 KBR had been kicked out of workplaces in the oil industry in southern Iraq and their subcontracted labour rejected by organised workers.
Ismaal will be speaking in Canberra, Brisbane and Melbourne as part of his Australian tour. For details see Activist Calendar on page 27.
From Green Left Weekly, September 28, 2005.
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