Why
Iraqis Oppose U.S.-Backed
'Oil Law'?
By David Bacon
22 August, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle
Across
the political spectrum in Washington, members of Congress are now demanding
that the Iraqi government meet certain benchmarks, which presumably
would show that it's really in charge. But there's a big problem with
the most important benchmark: the oil law. It is extremely unpopular
in Iraq.
Congress has been told the
law is a way to share oil wealth among Iraq's regions and religious
sects. Iraqis see it differently. They say the law will turn over the
oil fields to foreign companies, giving them control over setting royalties,
deciding production levels, and even determining whether Iraqis get
to work in their own industry.
Under Washington's guidance,
the Iraqi government wrote the oil law in secret deliberations. It needed
secrecy to obscure the fact that it gives foreign corporations control
over exploration and development in one of the world's largest oil reserves,
through agreements called "production-sharing" contracts.
Such deals are so disadvantageous that they have been rejected by most
oil-producing countries, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates and otherwise conservative regimes throughout the Middle
East.
The leaders of the Iraqi
opposition to the oil law are the industry's workers. In early June,
the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions shut pipelines from the Rumeila fields
near Basra, in the south, to Baghdad and the rest of the country. Their
main demand was that oil remain in public hands, although they also
sought to force the government to improve conditions for workers.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki responded by calling out units of the 10th Division of the
Iraqi army and surrounding the strikers at Sheiba, near Basra. U.S.
aircraft buzzed the strikers as well, while al-Maliki issued arrest
warrants for the union's leaders. Facing the possibility, however, that
the strike would escalate into shutdowns on the rigs themselves, cutting
off oil exports, al-Maliki blinked. He agreed to hold off implementation
of the oil law until October, giving the union a chance to propose alternatives.
This undoubtedly increased
al-Maliki's troubles in Washington, where failure to move on the oil
law benchmark has been held as evidence of weakness and incompetence.
In Iraq, however, al-Maliki faces a fact that U.S. policymakers refuse
to recognize: The oil industry is a symbol of Iraqi nationhood.
Because of its actions, the
oil workers union has become one of the strongest voices of Iraqi nationalism,
protecting an important symbol of Iraq's national identity, and, more
important, the only source of income capable of financing the country's
post-occupation reconstruction.
U.S. legislators trying to
impose the oil law might note that they are requiring the Iraqi government
to betray one of the few reasons Iraqis have for supporting it - its
ability to keep oil revenue in public hands.
Some of the oil workers'
other demands reflect the desperate situation of workers under the occupation.
They want their employer, the government oil ministry, to pay wage increases
and promised vacations, and give permanent status to thousands of temporary
employees. In a country where housing has been destroyed on a huge scale
and workers often live in dilapidated and primitive conditions, the
union wants the government to turn over land for building homes.
Every year, the Oil Institute,
a national technical training college for the industry's workers and
technicians, has miraculously continued holding classes. Yet the ministry
won't give work to graduates, despite the war-torn industry's desperate
need for skilled labor. The union demands jobs and a future for Iraq's
young people.
Fighting for these demands
makes the union even more popular and further enhances its nationalist
credentials. Many Iraqis see it defending the interests of the millions
of workers who have to make a living and keep their families eating
in the middle of a war zone. Conversely, the United States, which imposed
a series of low-wage laws at the beginning of the occupation, looks
bent on enforcing poverty.
Iraq has a long labor history.
Union activists, banned and jailed under the British and their puppet
monarchy, organized a labor movement that was the admiration of the
Arab world when Iraq became independent after the revolution of 1958.
When Saddam Hussein came to power, though, he drove its leaders underground,
killing or imprisoning the ones he could catch.
When Hussein fell, Iraqi
unionists came out of prison, up from underground and back from exile,
determined to rebuild the labor movement. Miraculously, in the midst
of war and bombings, they did. The oil workers union in the south is
now one of the largest organizations in Iraq, with thousands of members
on the rigs, pipelines and refineries. The electrical workers union
is the first national labor organization headed by a woman, Hashmeya
Muhsin Hussein.
Together with other unions
in railroads, hotels, ports, schools and factories, they've gone on
strike, held elections, won wage increases and made democracy a living
reality. Yet the Bush administration, and the Baghdad government it
controls, has outlawed collective bargaining, continuing to enforce
a decree originally issued by Hussein in 1987 banning unions in the
public sector.
The al-Maliki government
has seized all union funds and turned its back on a wave of assassinations
of union leaders. After the June strike, Iraq's oil minister ordered
oil industry officials to refuse to recognize or bargain with the oil
worker unions. Iraq's oil industry was nationalized in the 1960s, like
that of every other country in the Middle East. The Iraqi oil union
became, and remains, the industry's most zealous guardian.
When Halliburton Corp. went
into Iraq in the wake of the troops in 2003, the company tried to seize
control of wells and rigs, withholding reconstruction aid to force workers
to submit. The oil union struck for three days in August 2003, stopping
exports and cutting off government revenue. Halliburton then closed
its Basra offices and left the oil region.
The oil and port unions compelled
other foreign corporations to give up agreements under which the U.S.
occupation gave them control of Iraq's deepwater ports. Muhsin's electrical
union is still battling to stop subcontracting in the power stations,
a prelude to corporate takeover of a public resource.
Iraqi nationalists make sharp
accusations that the occupation has an economic agenda, including the
wholesale privatization of the Iraqi economy. Paul Bremer, formerly
head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, published lists in Baghdad
newspapers of Iraqi public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab
labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization
easy: First you destroy society, then you let the corporations rebuild
it."
Hassan Juma'a Awad, president
of the oil workers federation, wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress on
May 13. "Everyone knows the oil law doesn't serve the Iraqi people,"
he warned. The proposed new statute "serves Bush, his supporters
and foreign companies at the expense of the Iraqi people. ... The USA
claimed that it came here as a liberator, not to control our resources."
The unions have vowed to
strike if the law is implemented. At the occupation's end, the government
in Baghdad will need control of the oil wealth to rebuild a devastated
country. That gives Iraqis a big reason to fight to protect public ownership
and control of the oil industry.
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