Paris, 13 February 2011:
My name is Samir Adil. I am the president of the Iraq Freedom Congress. My base is in Baghdad. This organisation was established on March 19, 2005. The main goal of this organisation is to end the occupation and establish secular, non-sectarian government defining the Iraqi people by the human identity.
After eight years of the occupation everything now is clearer than before. Today, after eight years there is no electricity. There is no security. There is no freedom. We have thousands and thousands in the prisons. There is every day many assassinations and executions, many kidnappings.
The [incidence of] cancer is phenomenal in our society. There is a lack of social services. There is a lack of clean water. We have just one to two hours of electricity a day. We have 28% unemployment. This is the statistic of the official government — I believe that there is more than this number. But even 28% is a huge number [of unemployed].
We have now in Iraq more than 25% illiteracy. In the 1980s there was no illiteracy in Iraq.
There are mountains of garbage. If you go to Baghdad or the south of Iraq or the north (except Kurdistan) … you never see a clean building … just mountains of garbage.
This is the general situation in Iraq.
About education: Many people cannot go to university. One problem is that there is no income for most people. The second problem is no security. The problem is that the occupation divided society into a sectarian society, into Shi’a and Sunni. Now some people cannot go to university because they are scared of the militia and kidnapping, because Sunni and Shi’a …
After eight years the US administration promised the Iraqi people the sky will rain democracy and prosperity. Well, after eight years we have nothing.
There is no democracy. The democracy’s just inside the militia, inside the pro-America [organisations].
This is the whole situation in Iraq, unfortunately there is a blackout of media, especially in the West. During the election in March 2010, they said this election was going to change everything … transform Iraqi society to get security, transform Iraqi society to get more stability.
But we said at that time, before the election, as long as there is US policy in Iraq and those parties that divided society — fighting and conflicting for power and their privilege — there can be no security.
Now, after the election, everything is clear and now the people are saying … the day before yesterday [February 11] we started demonstrations saying: we don’t want this government. We have the demand: after eight years we didn’t get anything: no stability, no security, the killing of more than 2 million people during these years, 4 million refugees inside and outside Iraq. Now the demonstrations started just two days ago.
And two weeks ago [January 30] in Diwaniyah, 200km south of Baghdad, we had a demonstration and the police opened fire and injured more than four people and killed one.
The day before yesterday, demonstrations started in Baghdad. Many organisations, especially leftist organisations, organised it. This demonstration is shaking the government and now the government is threatening the demonstration with its militia, saying if you go to this demonstration we’re going to kidnap you and attack the demonstration.
These threats did not come from government officials, it came from the militias that belong to the parties in the government.
[…]
Now we have many suffering from depleted uranium because there were two times that the US forces attacked the Iraqi people with depleted uranium: firstly in the Second Gulf War in 1991 and secondly in the Third Gulf War in 2003. If you go to the south of Iraq, especially Basra City, many, many people have got cancer. Now Iraq is the worst country in the area for this disease, it’s affecting the society.
As you know, we have a lack of medical care and medicine. Plus, they use depleted uranium. Plus there is no clean water. Plus there is pollution. All of this has increased the number of people who get this kind of disease.
[…]
We hadn’t this problem [religious sectarianism] before the occupation. I’m one of the people who worked against Saddam’s government. I was in the jail in 1992 where they tortured me. Now, my left hand cannot move very well because I had many problems from this torture.
But even so, Saddam’s government wasn’t a sectarian government. He would deal with people by torture, by no freedom, equally. There was no Sunni or Shi’a.
But after the occupation, the occupation created this issue, and created these parties to give legitimacy to the war and the occupation on Iraq, and imposed this kind of political process on Iraq. The first government established by Paul Bremmer, called the governing council, said: you are Shi’a, you are Sunni, you are Kurdish, you are Turcoman — this is the first state to divide the society this way.
But, because the history of Iraqi society is a secular history … they couldn’t transfer this kind of division to the social conditions in Iraq. Even in February 2006 after the explosion at the [Shi’a] holy places in Samarra and the militias attacked innocent people — the militias kill you because your name is Sunni, or your name is Shi’a — but it has never happened until now that neighbours kill each other.
The opposite has happened: neighbours protect each other. Those same militias attacked workplaces to spread this division but they failed because Iraqi society has this history of secularism.
But I can’t give a guarantee. If the situation continues there’s no guarantee that it will not become like Lebanon or Kosovo … But we are working hard. At that time in 2006 we raised the slogan: “No Sunni, no Shi’a, We are Human” and we mobilised people around this slogan and we established safety force. Because of that the occupation forces attack our offices many times and assassinated the leader of the safety force.
Also, the militia attacked our office in the south of Iraq and assassinated one of our cadres. But we are working hard. Now the society is different from 2006 and 2005, 2004, 2003. Even at the last election the majority of people — opposite to what was said in the propaganda of the Western media that the majority of people vote in the election — that’s not true … the majority boycotted the election because they said: we don’t see a party that represents our interests not talking about the sectarian or ethnic divisions.
The majority of the Iraqi people didn’t vote in this election.
But now this kind of poison has been put in our society. If this poison is not removed quickly, it’s going to infect the society. For that reason we are working hard day by day and because of that our organisation is threatened by the militias and the government.
[…]
Since 2003, many, many militias [were formed] in Iraq … different kinds of Shi’a militias, different kinds of Sunni militias … Some of the Shi’a militia went into the Ministry of the Interior, and others went into the Ministry of Defence. Now the society is under the control of militias. There is no government. There is no state.
After 2003, after the war destroyed everything there is no state or government. This is a fake government. For example if you go to the south of Iraq, there’s a different law to the middle of Iraq. In the middle of Iraq there’s a different law to the north of Iraq. In the west there’s a different law. Every party has control in some area and all of it is controlled by militias.
[…]
The US occupation destroyed everything [but] they have many economic projects. They bring the IMF to Iraq, even though Iraq is a rich country from oil. For example, two years ago we have US$50 billion budget surplus but the government is going to take a $3.6 billion loan from the IMF — I don’t know why … This is the US project: they want to create a “free market” in Iraq, they want privatisation.
Now in the public sector there is no freedom of trade unions. There is no freedom to demonstrate or strike. No freedom to sit-in.
There is no freedom to make your own organisation or trade union in the public sector. Four years ago, a front against the draft oil and gas law was established by the IFC and leaders of the oil workers’ union and other sectors and we successfully stopped this draft law.
The minister of oil took a decision to capture our leaders, including Hasan Jum’a, Faleh Abood [and others] but we launched a big international campaign, inside and outside Iraq and they stopped this decision.
This is the kind of economic project being imposed on Iraq.
[…]
Now there are many companies like BP in the south of Iraq, like Halliburton and others … everything they want to be under their control. Now we are struggling and mobilising people to face these economic projects in Iraq.
[…]
The issues affecting Tunisia and Egypt also affect our society. That is why we started these demonstrations the day before yesterday. But the situation in Iraq is different from Tunisia, because Tunisia and Egypt there is a government, there is a state, there is a [system of] law. Even if you reject this law, there is a government you can fight with.
But in Iraq, you don’t have a government, you have militias. Before yesterday I called our comrades and said, “Be careful, maybe they’ll send you a car bomb, and they’ll kill many people and say this is al-Qaeda. Or maybe they’ll shoot you and say this is al-Qaeda or some other people.”
Because unlike Tunisia, people are scared of the security situation.
[Question: Did al-Qaeda do the October 31 church bombing?]
This is the government propaganda, educated by the US administration. It is not al-Qaeda. I don’t want to defend al-Qaeda, which is a symbol of the criminal underworld. But in Iraq, al-Qaeda failed.
This is militias — especially those of parties in the government. They give the chance to groups like al-Qaeda to do those kinds of crimes. And there is a hegemonic project in Iraq to impose this kind of sectarian division. For that reason they attacked the church, attacked the Christian people. Before that they attacked the Shi’a. Before they attacked the Sunni.
Now they attack the Christian people. They want to send a message. This message is to scare people and impose their rule on society.
I would never believe that al-Qaeda could do this sort of crime without help from the militias.
[…]
There are still 94 US military bases. After they said they had pulled out more than 100,000 troops [there are more] soldiers … working for private companies like Blackwater.
[…]
Our strategy to bring stability and security to Iraq, to introduce secular government and end the occupation cannot be successful without support on the international front. I take this opportunity to tell our movement to ask support for our movement in Iraq because we believe that if we defeat the US projects in Iraq, this is a victory for our movement in Australia too.
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