by- Suzie-Q @ 2:46 PM MST
Don’t tell Faleh Abood Umara or Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein that you want the U.S. quit Iraq, but that you’re worried about a resulting civil war.
The two Iraqi labor leaders, currently in Philadelphia as part of a U.S. tour sponsored by a coalition of American labor unions called U.S. Labor Against the War, say the U.S. is the cause of all the violence in Iraq, and argue that the sooner U.S. forces leave their country, the sooner things will start to get better.
“Did the occupier find us fighting each other when they came to Iraq?” asks Hashmeya, who is president of the Electric Utility Workers Union of Iraq. “No. The fighting among Iraqis started two and a half years after the Americans came.”
Faleh, general secretary of the Southern Oil Company Union based in Basra, agrees, saying that while the U.S. claims to be trying to quell the violence, “actually, since the U.S. has come into Iraq, they have done everything they could to encourage sectarian strife.” He asks, if Iraqis are just a bunch of sectarian fanatics, “How did we manage to get along in the past?”
Faleh, whose own brother was killed in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, accuses the U.S. of adopting policies that encourage divisions in Iraq, and of working covertly to foster more domestic violence.
Hashmeya, who regularly faces death threats, and threats to kidnap her seven-year-old son, for her part accuses not just the U.S, but also Britain, Israel, “and Iraq’s neighbors” of all working covertly to encourage the violence in Iraq. “They all have an interest in destroying the country,” she says angrily. A frequent international traveler, she notes that Iraqi and U.S. border control authorities make people leaving the country go through five or six checks, but that entering the country requires just one perfunctory showing of a passport. “They make it very easy for people to come into the country,” she says.
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