BAGHDAD, 1 June 2003 — Denouncing the United States, hundreds of former employees of Saddam Hussein’s Information Ministry protested yesterday against the loss of their jobs following a US decree dissolving the ministry.
“America is against human rights. American democracy in Iraq means poverty and unemployment,” they chanted outside Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, where some foreign media are based.
The US civil administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, sacked more than 5,000 staff who used to run Iraqi state television, radio, the Iraqi News Agency and several newspapers, when he abolished the ministry a week ago.
In other moves to rid Iraq of links to Saddam’s era, Bremer also dissolved the armed forces, several security bodies and the Defense Ministry, firing more than 400,000 people.
The demonstrators, some of whom had spent more than 30 years at the Information Ministry, urged Bremer to reconsider. “It is an unjust decision,” Abdul Mutaleb Mahmoud, former journalist at Al-Qadissiya newspaper, told Reuters. Amad Al-Ataibi, a former editor at INA, said Bremer should negotiate with the sacked employees, saying they had suffered under Saddam when there was no freedom of expression.
“Before they invaded, the Americans said they would make Iraqis live better. Is firing 5,000 employees who feed around 25,000 people the way to make us live better?” INA engineer Samir Mehdi Al-Ubaidi asked. Some said they were not Baathists and demanded their pension rights. “I spent 25 years running Al-Hurriya printing house in Baghdad and had nothing to do with Saddam’s media, so why I am sacked?” asked Nuha Najeeb, a mother of five.
US officials say each ministry employee is eligible for a termination payment of $50, but Mahmoud said this was derisory. “I’m not going to take that money. It is humiliating,” he said. “In Europe and America, they pay the unemployed at least $300 per week, why they are paying us only $50?”
Meanwhile, calls by Iraqi Shiite Muslim leaders for American forces to go home are growing louder. “We ask US forces in particular, and coalition forces in general, to leave Iraq immediately, because it is for the Iraqi people to determine their future,” Sheikh Kazem Al-Abadi told faithful in a mosque in Baghdad’s Shiite suburb of Sadr City. The prayer leader spoke Friday after hundreds of Shiites, many from the influential Hawza seminary, protested in Baghdad against the US occupation and a US-led crackdown on their school in the holy city of Najaf.
“The British and Americans are traitors. We will turn our bodies into bridges of freedom,” they chanted as they marched along a main street, waving banners of prominent Shiite leaders. Top Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Al-Hakim reiterated in an interview with AFP in Najaf that US forces who toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime on April 9 should leave Iraq, but suggested this could best be achieved by political means.
“We have to make every political effort possible to hasten the end of the occupation,” Baqer said, implicitly rejecting a wave of guerrilla attacks on coalition forces that have left about a dozen US soldiers dead. These efforts include “dialogue with the United States, molding Iraqi public opinion to apply pressure and also by setting up an Iraqi administration to fill the political vacuum” left by Saddam’s ouster. The 66-year-old cleric, who returned from 23 years of exile in Iran on May 10, said the Iraqi people — some 60 percent of whom are Shiite — must choose their own government.
Baqer heads the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite group that opposed Saddam’s regime and part of a council of former opposition parties helping prepare a national congress that will pick an Iraqi interim administration under US auspices some time in July.
The military wing of the SAIRI has disarmed. With two weeks left before US forces impose a ban on weapons, Baqer said the Badr brigade, which boasted as many as 15,000 militiamen, had given up its heavy weaponry. “The Badr forces are no longer armed; they were armed because they were fighting the regime” of Saddam Hussein, he said. “But now the regime has fallen, the Badr forces are not armed ... it has no tanks, no artillery guns or other heavy weapons,” Hakim said at SAIRI headquarters in his hometown of Najaf, 150 kilometers south of Baghdad.
