Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation was originally established in 1990 against the first Gulf war. The aim is to support all Iraqis against occupation, war and sanctions. HANI LAZIM is a founding member and has been in Britain for 35 years. He spoke late in June to KAREN O TOOLE from Socialist Resistance. T by the Americans and the British, he Saddam regime was brought in
so we don't see how they can be liberators. We see the ill wind that came from imperialism.
Before the First World War, oil became an important commodity, and oil companies discovered oil in Iran and Iraq. There was huge competition for the market between Germany and Britain. When Germany's influence in the region started to exert itself, Britain worried about its trade routes to India and they tried to put a spanner in the works of the Germans.
Germany and the former Ottomans agreed to build a railway line from Berlin to Baghdad. Then the line was to be extended south to Basra and to the deep port of Kuwait. So Britain decided to occupy Basra, realised it was too flat there and decided to take Baghdad as well. They did this in 1917.
They proceeded to Kirkuk and Mosul in the north because of the oil, and the British and French tried to divide the spoils up between them.
In 1919, immediately after the ending of the war, there was a revolt in Najaf. 1920 saw an even bigger revolt, this time in the south. The British brought with them a whole army of civil servants to run the country. That's different to today because this time they are dismantling the state.
The British gave up in Iraq, so they brought Faisal in as king under a League of Nations mandate. But the constant revolts made a difference and Britain overstetched itself. From 1963 up to now there has always been a military regime. Saddam got into power with the help of the CIA.
In 1968 revolutionary movements started in the south but were put down by the Baathists. The rest is history. The Baathists actually spent very little on developing the country because they depended on their security forces and spent the money on arms, or paying off western journalists.
Any development that did happen was only to serve the army. The road from ber, I was in my third year of secondary Mosul to Basra was prohibited for use by the people, only the army could use it and that was because Saddam declared war on Iran. He also had one or two palaces which he spent a lot of money on.
Before the war with Iran, the country had $37 billion in the bank in 1979. When we came out of the war, we were in the red by $50 billion, plus Saddam got £18 billion from Saudi Arabia, €10 billion from Kuwait, $8 billion from the UAE, billions from the United States, France, Russia and Britain.
All that money was spent on war and on the machinery of war. And of course the west supplied chemical and biological weapons. The Americans supplied Saddam with Anthrax.
The Baathists lasted as long as they did because of the foreign support they had from Britain and America, even though he was in a coalition with the Communists in Iraq at that time.
The communist movement in Iraq is very old, it started in the 1920s, and formed into a party in 1934. It was underground at that time but was very influential, especially in the railways, ports and the oil industry. There were a lot of general strikes, workers were shot, there were big demos against the government.
In 1958, when the puppet regime was swept away, there was an explosion of membership in the Communist Party. On Mayday 1959 there were 1 million Iraqis on the streets celebrating. That was out of a population then of six and a half million!
In 1963 there was a massacre of the Communists. The Baathists buried them alive and threw them in ditches. I rememschool. The Communist Party made a lot of mistakes. The first leadership was hanged in 1949, and in 1963 most of the leadership were also killed.
By 1967 the party split in two. One coalition went in with the Baathists under the influence of the Soviet Union and were given two ministries without portfolios. The other group was suppressed ruthlessly: they were shot left, right and centre.
They have a very good history and are called the Iraqi Communist Party Central Command. They were very critical of Russia, and China, and had nothing to do with them. The Kurdish movement was suppressed at the same time as them, so their fates overlapped.
The Baathist Communist Party lasted until 1978, they were discredited, but many of them fled when Saddam became so powerful he didn't need them anymore.
They were very muddled and took money from the Kurdish movement and from the CIA. But historically Iraqis have looked to them. Today, they are beginning to be active again, and have newspapers. I am aware of at least eight groups in Iraq at
the moment. As a group here we are against globalisation. I think in a very short time there will be a financial collapse, with big wars. What they did in Iraq was child's play. It is costing them $3 billion a month to stand still in Iraq. In a year that will be $36 billion, but Iraqi oil brings in only $20 billion. ush wanted tax cuts, and they are heading for big problems with deflation and overproduction. America lives on borrowed money. The best way out for them is to attack Iran, and I think that is coming. Their economic condition makes wars more likely because they are more desperate. There is resistance against the occupation. In the south, when the people tried to elect their own leaders, the British refused. They tried to install a sheikh, so people shot him. In Karbala they imposed two leaders, and the people shot them both. They enforced somebody in Najaf and they shot him. So there is a lot of resistance in the south. There have been strikes by bakers and -DARITY FOFAG Robin Cook has held Indonesia up as a test of his ethical foreign policy many times since Labour came to office in 1997, but on June 24 these assertions, long challenged by activists, were finally shot to pieces. 36 British-made Scorpion tanks were deployed by the Indonesian state as part of its intensifying campaign against the people of Aceh. This event was immediately picked up by the world's press and came at the same time as 80 campaigning groups across the world called for a global arms embargo against the Jakarta regime on the basis of mounting reports of its civil rights abuses. For further information contact: Campaign against the Arms Trade at http://www.caat.org.uk/ or tel: 0207281 0297 or Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific (ASAP) at www.asia-pacific-action.org railway workers. There has also been a demonstration by the oil workers in Basra because Halliburton brought in Filipinos to put down the oil well fires.
In the port of Um Qasr, there was a demonstration by workers over bringing in subcontractors to do their jobs, so the British backed off. Iraqis are not afraid of fighting.
People are still busy looking for their loved ones, and the sanctions have been severe. There is disease, depleted uranium, the whole thing is a mess. There are arms everywhere in Iraq, and everyone is trained in how to use them because of the wars
The US is sacking everyone from their jobs. Over 50 percent of the population were employed by the state - at the moment we see sporadic resistance, not a fully organised force.
But Iraqis believe in mass movements not individual terror. This is the whole his. tory of Iraq, the revolution of 1920 was a mass revolution. In 1958, it was a mass movement which caused the collapse of the regime. I think history will repeat itself.
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Summer 2003 Andrew Wind