IN ITS STATEMENT on the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) treachery at the Labour Party Conference, where its British representative, Abdullah Muhsin, was used by Blair and Straw to persuade the trade union bureaucracy to vote for the indefinite occupation of Iraq, the StWC made the following point about its attitude to the occupation of Iraq.

‘The StWC reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of the Iraqi people to secure such ends.’

The StWC is correct to confirm the legitimacy of the struggle of the Iraqi people to secure the withdrawal of troops and the end of the occupation.

However the movement to stop the war has to go further than this.

It has to support the struggle of the occupied people of Iraq to defeat the imperialist forces and to drive them out of the country, by working to mobilise the working class at home, in the trade unions, to bring down the imperialist aggressor government, and to replace it with a workers’ government.

This is the way forward to defeat capitalism and imperialism.

As the StWC statement recognises, the role of Muhsin and IFTU at the Labour Party conference was that they ‘attempted to divide the anti-war movement from the trade unions’, thus acting as an open conscious agency of imperialism.

To do that Muhsin mobilised the cowardly trade union bureaucracy, which was willing to sell out the Iraqi people for the promise of a few minor concessions from the government.

The same trade union bureaucracy will betray the struggle of British workers at the first serious test.

A serious struggle to stop the imperialist war on Iraq means uniting the insurgent Iraqi people with the British trade unions to smash imperialism.

This means removing and replacing the trade union bureaucracy with leaders who will fight, and defeating the politics of the counter-revolutionary Stalinists.

The Workers Revolutionary Party and the News Line supports unconditionally the struggle of the oppressed nations against imperialism.

Regardless of who is leading that struggle we are for the defeat of the imperialist powers.

Our attitude to the national bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations is that when it fights imperialism we will give it support, but where it forms a bloc with imperialism we will oppose it.

Basing ourselves on this position, when Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1979 and was armed with wmds by the imperialist powers for this purpose, we supported Iran.

This meant that we were practically alone when the News Line condemned the use of gas against the Kurdish people at Halabja.

The Western bourgeois media was silent since it supported Saddam, while the US, UK and France had supplied Saddam with the weaponry that he required for use against both the Iranians and the Kurds.

The position changed with the first Gulf War of 1991, when the US organised a 30 state attack on Iraq, attempted to bomb it back into the 19th century, and imposed UN sanctions which cost the lives of 1.5 million Iraqis, including half a million children under five.

We were for the victory of Iraq in the 1991 war and opposed the sanctions.
Their purpose was to try and create a situation where the Iraqi people would rise up and overthrow the Iraqi government.

They never succeeded in doing this, but when the US Secretary of State of the day Madeleine Albright was questioned about the 1.5 million deaths due to sanctions, she replied that these deaths were ‘a price worth paying’ to get rid of Saddam.

Consequently, we sought to make links with the Iraqi trade union body, the GFTU to campaign for the lifting of sanctions.

In 2001 our members in the FBU were able to convince that union to send an official delegation to the GFTU’s May Day celebrations, to bring the solidarity of firefighters to the sanction stricken Iraqi people.

In 2002 a delegation from the GFTU was invited to the FBU conference.

The delegation was received with enthusiasm and as a result of their visit the conference at Bridlington, on Thursday May 16th, passed the following resolution, with just four votes against.

‘Conference condemns the continuing war and sanctions against Iraq and believes that America’s recent proposals to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons against various countries including Iraq is symptomatic of imperialist aggression which must be halted.

‘The Conference therefore calls on the TUC to send a delegation to visit the General Federation of Trade Unions (Iraq) in Baghdad with a view to building fraternal relations between Iraqi and British trade unionists.

‘This would be the first step towards ending all hostilities between our two countries.’
This resolution, which sought to bring the Iraqi people and the British trade unions together was unfortunately never acted on.

The following March 2003 Iraq was invaded by the US-UK imperialists, who brought back with them to Iraq gangs of counter-revolutionaries, many of them from the Iraqi Communist Party.

The official position of the TUC and the Morning Star was that the war in Iraq was illegal.

However that did not stop the Stalinists supporting the Iraqi Governing Council that the US occupation Chief, Bremer established.

Muhsin organised a trip to Iraq by a group of British trade unionists, who were cheered on by the Morning Star and the Communist party.

They called the GFTU a ‘yellow trade union’, and reported that the returning emigres – many of whom had spent 30 years in England – had occupied the offices of the GFTU and were demanding that the occupation authorities hand over the GFTU’s funds to them.

The delegation of British trade unionists went along to see the head of the stooge Governing Council, Iyad Allawi (the current puppet prime minister) and asked him to hand over the funds of the ‘Ba’athist trade unions’ to the new allegedly democratic unions that were to be formed as a result of the US-UK invasion.

In the meeting with Allawi, Alex Gordon of the RMT demanded: ‘When will the IIGC call for the unfreezing of the former Ba’athist trade union’s funds to rebuild democratic trade unions in Iraq?’

The US stooge Governing Council issued Occupation decree number 16 signed by Interim Governing Council President Adnan Pachachi on January 28, 2004 declaring that the IFTU was ‘the legitimate and legal representatives of the labour movement in Iraq,’ therefore illegalising the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq.

IFTU is a creature of the occupation, and the imperialist powers.

When the News Line invited leaders of the GFTU to visit Britain last November, the StWC refused to meet them on the grounds they were Ba’athists and supported the right of the masses to fight the occupation.

This was due, no doubt, to the pro-imperialist influence of the Communist Party and the Morning Star.

We are pleased that the StWC now recognises the right of the masses to fight the occupiers.

The TUC also refused to meet them, but explained that it was to attend an international trade union conference to discuss the Iraqi trade unions. As a result of pressure from the world trade union movement, the TUC decided that trade unions could not be exported to the Arab world along with US and UK armies, and that all trade unions in Iraq would have to be respected.

This made no difference to the CP and the Morning Star.

They have campaigned to get a number of trade unions to support IFTU and unknowingly, perhaps, through that, to give support to the stooge interim government of Iraq and the occupation of that country.

The pay off for this Stalinist toadying to the imperialists in Iraq was that Muhsin was put into position to be able to deliver the knife into the back of the anti-war movement, on behalf of Blair and Straw at the Labour Party conference.

Not only must trade unions end any support for IFTU and the occupation of Iraq, they must remove all those union leaders who agreed to sell out the Iraqi people at the Labour Party conference and used their members’ bloc vote to support the indefinite occupation of that country.

In fact, all trade unionists and opponents of the war in Iraq who want to see united action established between the workers of the west and the oppressed nations to smash capitalism and imperialism should join the WRP.

The WRP is the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution.

• Concluded