Whose Human Rights is the Occupation Defending?

Oakland. Ca and Bagdad

The disaster that is the occupation of Iraq is much more
than the war that plays nightly across U.S. television
screens. The violence of grinding poverty, exacerbated
by economic sanctions after the first Gulf War, has been
deepened by the US invasion. Every day the economic
policies of the occupying authorities create more hunger
among Iraq’s working people, transforming them into a
pool of low-wage, semi-employed labor, desperate for
jobs at almost any price.

While the effects of U.S. policy on daily life
go largely unseen in the U.S. media, anyone walking the
streets of Baghdad cannot miss them. Children sleep on
the sidewalks. Buildings that once housed many of the
city’s four million residents, or the infrastructure
that makes life in a modern city possible, remain
burned-out ruins a year after the occupation started.
Rubble fills the broad boulevards that were once the
pride of a wealthy country, while the air turns gritty
and brown as thousands of vehicles kick up the resulting
dust. Sewage still pours into the Tigris River, and
those who must depend on it for drinking or cooking
continue to get sick.

The violence of poverty is not held to be a
violation of human rights in the United States - just
one manifestation of the great division in the world
between the wealthy, industrialized north, and the
developing south. The US does not recognize that human
rights include economic and social rights, in part
because they are collective rights of groups, social
classes, or even nations.

Therefore, the accusations made by the US
against the regime of Saddam Hussein focus on his
violation of the human rights of individuals - the
assassination of the regime’s enemies, and the
prohibition on political activity by individuals who
dissented from its policies. Most popular organizations
in Iraq, whether on the left or the right, religious or
secular, make the same accusations. But they don’t
confine the discussion of human rights within those
limits. For them, the occupation and the social
conditions it imposes are human rights abuses as well.

For the Bush administration and the Coalition
Provisional Authority, limiting the discussion of human
rights to those of individuals persecuted by the former
regime provides a convenient distinction. It allows
them to enforce in Iraq an economic model of their own
choosing, with drastic effects on the lives of millions
of people, and yet refuse to discuss these consequences
as potential violations of their human rights. As a
result of the occupation, U.S. contractors get rich from
the billions of taxpayer dollars supposedly appropriated
for Iraq’s reconstruction. At the same time, the
country’s national wealth — factories, refineries,
mines, docks, and other industrial facilities — are
being readied for sale to foreign companies by the
occupation bureaucracy, who treat democracy and the
unrestrained free market as the same thing.

Iraqis have lost control of their own economy
and country. This is far more than a symbolic loss. Yet
symbols are an important element in the way in which any
people react to this basic economic reality, and nothing
could have been more symbolic than the way in which the
occupation authorities have treated the legacy of Iraq’s
nationalist, progressive and anti-colonial past.

Since 1958, July 14 has been Iraq’s national
day. Last year, under the occupation, it was declared a
"Saddam-era holiday," and its celebration banned.
Instead, occupation authorities declared, the people of
Iraq should celebrate the day of the fall of the Saddam
Hussein regime, which is also the day the occupation
began. While most Iraqis were glad to see Saddam go,
prohibiting the celebration of national day is not just
an insult, but a sign of the occupation’s true
intentions.

For progressive Iraqis, June 14 recalls their
anti-colonial history. 1958 was the year nationalists
and radicals threw out the monarchy imposed by the
British after World War One. Over the next five years
of relative freedom and democracy, Iraq began building a
nationalized, planned economy, based on its oil wealth.
Hundreds of factories were eventually built, making it
the most industrialized country in the Middle East. The
Iraqi government organized a national healthcare system,
and treated education as a right. Women were
represented in professions in percentages larger than
any other Middle Eastern country. Even after that
government was overthrown in 1963 (a coup in which the
Central Intelligence Agency played an important role),
those reforms were so popular that they were continued
under the Baathist regime that took over.

A new deepwater port was constructed on the
Persian Gulf, Umm Qasr, which became a lynchpin in that
plan. From its piers Iraq began to ship the goods from
those factories to buyers in other countries throughout
the region. The port became a symbol of progress and
independence.

Today Umm Qasr has become war booty. It was the
first Iraqi enterprise to be turned over, not just to a
private owner, but to a foreign one. Even before US
troops reached Baghdad, in Washington DC the Bush
administration gave the concession for operating the
port to Stevedoring Services of America, a politically-
connected firm handling cargo around the world.
Privatizing Umm Qasr began the transformation of the
Iraqi economy — from one based on nationalization and
production for an internal, domestic market, to one
based on ownership by transnational corporations,
sending their profits out of the country. To Iraqis,
instead of a symbol of national pride, Umm Qasr now
represents a new era of foreign domination.

Following the revolution of 1958, a thousand
longshore workers labored on Umm Qasr’s docks. Even in
the heady days of Arab nationalism, however, they still
had no guarantees for their rights and jobs. At first,
subcontracting companies were allowed to hire dockers in
a daily shapeup. Finally, workers rebelled. After
winning recognition for their union, they demanded and
won a hiring system under their control, and a daily
guaranteed wage, whether or not there was a boat at the
dock to load or unload.

Today, those achievements seem like a distant
dream. Umm Qasr is an object lesson in the privatization
of Iraq. Its fate will have a profound effect on the
degree to which any future Iraqi government will be able
to control the country’s economy. By the same token,
the jobs, the standard of living, and the labor rights
of the port’s dockworkers are a bellwether for the fate
of hundreds of thousands of other workers in formerly
state-owned enterprises throughout Iraq’s economy.

The free trade ideologues of the Bush
administration see the occupation of Iraq as a beachhead
into the Middle East and south Asia. Their first
objective is the transformation of the state-dominated
economy of what was once one of the region’s wealthiest
countries. A free-market Iraq will then set new ground
rules for the rest of the area, much as the North
American Free Trade Agreement first helped to transform
Mexico’s economy, and then became a prototype for the
Free Trade Area of the Americas.

On September 19, the CPA published Order No. 39,
which permits 100% foreign ownership of businesses,
except for the oil industry, and allows repatriation of
profits. Order No. 37, issued the same day, suspended
income and property taxes for the year, and imposes a
15% flat tax on individuals and corporations from 2004
onward. Rightwing ideologues haven’t been able to get
the US Congress to pass a flat tax proposal despite
years of trying, but Iraq has become their playground.

Iraqi workers look at the prospect of
privatization with dread. Dathar Al-Kashab, manager of
Baghdad’s Al Daura oil refinery, predicted that
privatization would have an enormous effect. "A worker
starting here today has a job for life, under the old
system," he explains, "and there’s no law which permits
me to lay him off. But if I put on the hat of
privatization, I’ll have to fire 1500 [of the refinery’s
3000] workers. In America when a company lays people
off, there’s unemployment insurance, and they won’t die
from hunger. If I dismiss employees now, I’m killing
them and their families."

Unemployment in Iraq hovers around 70%,
according to the country’s new unions. There is no
unemployment benefit or welfare system. There is a
Union of the Unemployed, which has held marches and
demonstrations demanding jobs and benefits. It’s
leader, Qasim Hadi, has been repeatedly arrested by the
occupation troops. Meanwhile, the CPA set a new salary
schedule for Iraqi workers in September - Order 30 on
Reform of Salaries and Employment Conditions of State
Employees. This lowered the bottom wage rate from $60 a
month to $40, and eliminated all previous house, food,
family, risk and location subsidies.

In 1987, Saddam Hussein issued a law declaring
that workers in state-owned enterprises (which includes
most Iraqi workers) had no right to organize unions or
bargain. On the Umm Qasr docks and in factories and
refineries throughout the country, unions were
effectively banned. Today the US occupation authority
is still enforcing that 1987 law. This is another gift
to prospective new private owners of Iraqi enterprises.
If workers there have no legal union, no right to
bargain, and no contracts, then privatization and the
huge job losses coming with it will face much less
organized resistance.

On June 5 CPA head Paul Bremer put another
weapon into the anti-union arsenal — Public Notice
Number One, prohibiting "pronouncements and material
that incite civil disorder, rioting or damage to
property." The phrase can easily be interpreted to mean
strikes or other organized labor protest. Anyone who
violates the decree "will be subject to immediate
detention by Coalition security forces and held as a
security internee under the Fourth Geneva Convention of
1949" (in other words, as a prisoner of war.)

On December 6, US occupation forces then
arrested eight members of the executive committee of the
Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, and took them into
detention. Although they were released the following
day, the organization was expelled from the building
where they had their offices.

Jassim Mashkoul, director for internal
communications for the IFTU, says that "at the
beginning, we thought our situation might be better
after we got rid of Saddam Hussein. But it hasn’t
been." Many factory workers are less diplomatic. One
worker at the state leather goods factory in Baghdad
explained that "we must change this law that says we
don’t have to right to a union. If the law doesn’t
change, we’ll change it anyway, like it or not. We are
the people."

"Life has gotten much worse," said another,
pointing emphatically into the air. "Everything is
controlled by the coalition. We don’t control anything."

Most of these specific CPA decrees are
unarguably violations of international human rights
standards. Conventions 87 and 98 of the International
Labor Organization, guaranteeing freedom of association,
makes the continued enforcement of the 1987 ban on
unions illegal. Convention 135, preventing retaliation
against workers for union activity, makes the arrests of
union leaders, and their expulsion from their offices,
illegal as well. The CPA refuses to comment on these
violations. Yet in an especially Orwellian moment,
George Bush declared in his January State of the Union
speech that US intervention in Iraq would promote the
formation of free trade unions in the Middle East.

Denying union rights are not the only way in
which the economic rights of Iraqi people have come into
question. Protecting free universal health care and
education, even if they were guaranteed only on paper
for the last 20 years, is a critical human rights
question to most workers. By pulling apart this system,
and insisting on a free-market system in its place, the
occupation is demonstrating clearly that these
collective rights, held by Iraqis as a people, are not
human rights as they define them.

But beyond the question of social benefits looms
the even larger one of the nature of the Iraqi economy
itself - who controls it, and who will benefit from it.
When the port of Um Qasr was turned over to Stevedoring
Services of America, it did not seem like a human rights
question in the US. Contracting out public services for
the enrichment of private businesses, while bitterly
opposed by US public workers and those dependent on
them, has only recently been defined in human rights
terms.

In Iraq, where Um Qasr was the nation’s pride
and a source of its wealth for decades, its conversion
into a business for the benefit of a Seattle firm and
its stockholders was a fundamental human rights
violation. By extension, so was the occupation itself,
which enforced privatization at gunpoint.