War on Iraqi unions

Iraqi trade union leader Hadi Salih, International Secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, was tortured and killed in his home in Baghdad Tuesday night--but a Nexis search reveals not a word has yet appeared in the U.S. Press.

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Iraqi trade union sources believe that the atrocity was carried out by remnants of Saddam Hussein's secret police, the Mukharabat," said the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in a statement.

On a visit to Europe last year, Salih "outlined the problems facing Iraqi trade unionists including lack of funds, the continued implementation of anti-union laws brought in by the Ba'athist dictatorship and attacks from US forces on IFTU offices."(emphasis added)

U.S. Labor Against War issued a statement on Salih's murder which said in part: "In the past three months, IFTU members and rank-and-file workers have been murdered and kidnapped as they tried to carry out normal union activity, or simply do their jobs.[...] On the night of December 26, the building of the Transport and Communications Workers in central Baghdad was shelled. Together with the assassination of Hadi Salih, these horrifying crimes are making Iraq as dangerous a place for union activists as Colombia."

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" The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions calls for the end of the occupation and the US war. "

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The Allawi government is largely hostile to trade unionists of what ever stripe--and so is the U.S. occupying force. As David Bacon of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union reported to a December conference of the International Labor Communications Association on receiving an award for an article, originally published in his union's newspaper, about his fact-finding trip to Iraq: "We assumed that if workers in the US could look at Iraq and see workers and human beings, they could understand better the economic purpose of occupation. They could see it is intended to implement privatization and the administration's neoliberal agenda. That's something many workers in the US already know about and understand. Seeing the occupation in that light, they could understand better why it was in our mutual interest, as Iraqis and Americans, to oppose the war."

Direland post

(A Google search doesn't turn up much, either.)