Fighting the plunder of Iraq's oil

Socialist Resistance no27 | page 14

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

of 29 June outside the Hilton Hotel in Paddington, where the Iraqi Petroleum Conference was being held to plan the carve-up of Irag's oil resources.

The protest was organised by Corporate Pirates, who dressed appropriately and built a pirate ship for the occasion ("Give us an R-Aarrh!*). It was backed by Iraq Occupation Focus, Voices in the Wilderness, Stop the War and by Respect. A statement against oil privatisation from the recent conference in Basra was read out.

Two protestors managed to get into the meeting and a constant noise of drumming and shouting was kept up outside, in spite of police attempts to move us on and to block any view of us from the hotel with police vans. So conference delegates certainly knew that someone was keeping tabs on them. Later the protestors marched round the side of the hotel to inform travellers in Paddington Station of what was going on a few yards away. All in all a very embarrassing day for the Hilton and for the oil thieves that it sheltered. In May the General Union of