Iraq: Administration favours Ba'athists

Shocking lack of understanding displayed by US administration, denounces Iraqi Worker Communist Party to Pravda.Ru

The Iraqi Worker Communist Party complains that the US-backed administration in Iraq is favouring Ba'athist Trade Unions over others which were discriminated against during the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein.

During this regime, Ba'athist Unions (known as Yellow Unions) suppressed the workers, exploiting them in many ways, such as using the trade unions to send them to the front during the Iran-Iraq war and their leaders supported the security forces which made an example of those who refused to go.

The Ba'athist regime also changed the word "worker" to "officer", and claimed that there was no working class in Iraq, where strikes, rights of association and freedom of expression were suppressed.

Now, however, members of Ba'athist Trade Unions, such as Karim Hamza and Jammel Al-Jabouri, of the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq, are being feted by the US-backed administration in particular and the international community in general, as national heroes, speaking in international meetings in the name of all the workers of Iraq.

The attempts of other Unions backed by the Iraqi Worker Communist Party and workers' Revolutionary Party, to demand rights for workers, are being ignored, their attempts to distribute literature suppressed.

The workers of Iraq have been quick to set up the Union of Unemployed Persons, Workers Councils and other organizations which have produced a radical agenda for the defence of workers' rights, welfare and freedom.

The Union of Unemployed Persons has 130,000 members. Its leaders resisted the Ba'athist regime and its privations. "These are the real representatives of the workers of Iraq" said Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq to PRAVDA.Ru, adding that "The Worker Communist Party is trying to restore (authority) in the name of workers' solidarity.Promoting this kind of people who have the blood of Iraqi workers on their hands is a disgrace".

Probably, Washington has a pre-defined agenda which does not include the desires of the WCP, or of the Iraqi workers, or even of the Iraqi people, but yes, certain figures with their fingers on certain buttons, who or whatever they are.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY
PRAVDA.Ru