Iraq’s Workers Strike to Keep Their Oil
President Bush says he wants democracy, yet he will not accept the one political demand that unites Iraqis above all others. They want the country’s oil (and its electrical power stations, ports and other key facilities) to remain in public hands. The fact that Iraqi unions are the strongest voice demanding this makes them anathema. Selling the oil off to large corporations is far more important to the Bush administration than a paper commitment to the democratic process.
Occupation czar Paul Bremer published lists in Baghdad newspapers of the 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.”
