Iraqi Workers' Solidarity Group

Key dates for solidarity

The new Iraqi Workers' Solidarity Group made a number of plans at our meeting on 25 May:
We will be organising a fund-raising benefit comedy night for Iraq's new trade unions. We'll be selling a t-shirt with the same aim.

• At the Glastonbury festival on the weekend of 26-27 June, we hope to secure agreement on further fund-raising.
• Around 30 June, the date of the supposed "handover" in Iraq, we will - with others, we hope - organise a protest tour of the central London offices of the big corporations involved in the forced privatisation of Iraq's economy and the reconstruction boondoggle.
• On 9 July we will be rallying outside Highbury Magistrates' Court, where activists Ewa Jasiewicz and Pennie Quinton will be putting Iraqi privatisation on trial. They will reply to the charges of "aggravated trespass", laid against them for a banner-drop at the "Iraq Procurement" business conference in April, by arguing that the entire basis of the conference was illegal.
• We are approaching the organisers of the Tolpuddle Festival, on 17-18 July, to get speaking time and fund-raising facilities for an Iraqi trade unionists.
• In early August, Gene Bruskin, coordinator of US Labor Against the War - which has already launched an Iraqi Labor Solidarity Fund - will be visiting Britain briefly. We plan to set up a reception for him, and maybe some meeting.
• We are planning two pamphlets. One will be Ewa Jasiewicz's report on the trade union movement in Basra; the other, a briefing on the record, especially as regards union rights, of the British corporations now getting involved in Iraq.
• For October we will try to get solidarity with Iraq's new workers' movement on the agenda of the European Social Forum, being held in London.
  The aim of the Iraqi Workers' Solidarity Group is not just to organise such activities, but to help engineer the setting-up of a full-scale Iraqi Workers' Solidarity Campaign, with broad trade-union sponsorship.

A key date here is the Iraqi workers' solidarity fringe meeting at Unison conference, Wednesday 23 June, 12.30pm, at the Hermitage Hotel, Brighton. Unison's is the biggest union conference, and we hope to be able to use this fringe meeting as the launch of a broader campaign.

We need more activists! Check out the Iraqi Workers' Solidarity Group website at www.dlandmj.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/iraq.html.