6 June, 2011
Security forces in Iraq are still holding 27-year-old Jihad Jalil, a leader of the Mechanics’ and Printers’ Union of ICEM-affiliated General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW). Jalil and three other young activists have been held at the Al Muthana airport detention centre since they were picked up on their way to a protest at Tahrir Square in Baghdad on 27 March. (See ICEM news release of 30 May.)
Iraqi authorities had promised release the four within 24 hours at the weekend, but their expected freedom and trial on 5 June never materialized. In a statement released yesterday, the GFIW said their families and attorneys had not been allowed to meet with them at Al Muthana.
The four, including Jalil and students Ahmed Alaa al Baghdaddi, Moyaid Fasil al Taib, and Ali Abdul-Khaliq, were initially charged with inciting violence. But those charges were retracted and new charges placed on them accusing them of carrying false identities.
Tahrir Square Rally this weekend
Tahrir Square near the Green Zone in central Baghdad has become a staging ground for regular protests for legitimate workers’ rights, jobs, basic public services, and against government corruption. The ICEM believes that the government of Nouri Al-Maliki has escalated repression of trade unions, thus cutting hope that a stable, safe, and secure society can take hold through democratic institutions such as trade unions.
The ICEM also points to the forced relocation of trade union leaders from there regular jobs with the sole purpose of removing them from pockets of worker activism at enterprises. In late May, this happened to Jamal Abdul-Jabbar Akram, the President of the GFIW’s Oil and Gas Workers’ Union of Kirkuk. His crime is that he led a walkout in support of contract workers at the state-run Northern Oil Company (NOC).
He had been verbally warned by Iraq’s Oil Ministry to stop his trade union activities. On 29 May, he was given a ministerial order that he was to be immediately transferred from his job at a Kirkuk oil facility to a remote location.
In a 30 May letter to the Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki, ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda protested the suppression of democratic freedoms in both the arrests of the four near Tahrir Square and the transfer of Abdul-Jabbar Akram. He wrote, “By restricting trade unions and the right of workers to freely engage in democratic assemblies that will benefit their work lives, and Iraqi society as a whole, your government appears to be stepping back in time.” (View the full ICEM letter to Iraq’s government here.)