The U.S. occupiers are building a $592 billion embassy in Iraq. It is a symbol of U.S. colonial domination over the once sovereign country.
Transnational corporations have raked in billions to build it and help maintain the occupation. The U.S. government
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First Kuwaiti is based in Kuwait. Its 2007 activities have pushed its assets past the $1 billion mark. This corporate juggernaut completely deprives workers of their rights and freedom.
In March 2006, First Kuwaiti workers, mostly from the Philippines, boarded a plane they thought would take them to work in Dubai. However, once the flight took off, they discovered that their destination was Iraq. This news caused an uproar that was quelled after a security guard pulled out a submachine gun.
An American worker for First Kuwaiti, Rory Mayberry, was also on the flight. “I believe these men were kidnapped,” Mayberry said at a July congressional hearing in Washington. He said First Kuwaiti asked him to escort the Filipino workers to the Kuwait airport and make sure they boarded the plane to Baghdad.
Mayberry said he later found out that the workers “were being smuggled into the Green Zone” in Baghdad. “They had no IDs, no passports, nothing.”
The kidnapping of Filipino workers was a blatantly illegal move. The Philippine government has banned Filipinos from working in Iraq.
More than 10 percent of the Filipino population works abroad because there are few high-paying jobs in the Philippines.
When the workers arrived in Baghdad, they found a grim reality. They were thrown into jobs with terrible working and living conditions, poor sanitation, and no real health care. The current whereabouts of the Filipino workers is unknown.
John Owens, another American who worked for First Kuwaiti on the U.S. Embassy project in Iraq, quit after seven months. In his resignation letter, Owens said that managers beat construction workers and demonstrated little regard for worker safety.
First Kuwaiti and other private contractors in Iraq get away with these appalling human rights violations because their work is sanctioned by the U.S. occupation and the Iraqi puppet regime.
The only way to bring such abuses to an end is to end the occupation now.
