>Bring Halliburton Home
>
>lookout by Naomi Klein
>
>[from the November 24, 2003 issue of The Nation]
>
>This article can be found on the web at
>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031124&s=klein
>
>Cancel the contracts. Ditch the deals. Rip up the rules.
>
>Those are a few suggestions for slogans that could help unify the
>growing movement against the occupation of Iraq. So far, activist
>debates have focused on whether the demand should be for a complete
>withdrawal of troops, or for the United States to cede power to the
>United Nations.
>
>But the "Troops Out" debate overlooks an important fact. If every last
>soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came
>to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest
>of another country, by foreign corporations controlling its essential
>services, by 70 percent unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs.
>
>Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only
>for an end to Iraq's military occupation, but to its economic
>colonization as well. That means reversing the shock therapy reforms
>that US occupation chief Paul Bremer has fraudulently passed off as
>"reconstruction" and canceling all privatization contracts flowing from
>these reforms.
>
>How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing that
>Bremer's reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the
>international convention governing the behavior of occupying forces, the
>Hague Regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva Conventions,
>both ratified by the United States), as well as the US Army's own code
>of war.
>
>The Hague Regulations state that an occupying power must respect "unless
>absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country." The Coalition
>Provisional Authority has shredded that simple rule with gleeful
>defiance. Iraq's Constitution outlaws the privatization of key state
>assets, and it bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible
>argument can be made that the CPA was "absolutely prevented" from
>respecting those laws, and yet two months ago, the CPA overturned them
>unilaterally.
>
>On September 19, Bremer enacted the now-infamous Order 39. It announced
>that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatized; decreed that foreign
>firms can retain 100 percent ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and
>factories; and allowed these firms to move 100 percent of their profits
>out of Iraq. The Economist declared the new rules a "capitalist dream."
>
>Order 39 violated the Hague Regulations in other ways as well. The
>convention states that occupying powers "shall be regarded only as
>administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate,
>forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and
>situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these
>properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of
>usufruct."
>
>Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines "usufruct" (possibly the ugliest word
>in the English language) as an arrangement that grants one party the
>right to use and derive benefit from another's property "without
>altering the substance of the thing." Put more simply, if you are a
>housesitter, you can eat the food in the fridge, but you can't sell the
>house and turn it into condos. And yet that is just what Bremer is
>doing: What could more substantially alter "the substance" of a public
>asset than to turn it into a private one?
>
>In case the CPA was still unclear on this detail, the US Army's Law of
>Land Warfare states that "the occupant does not have the right of sale
>or unqualified use of [nonmilitary] property." This is pretty
>straightforward: Bombing something does not give you the right to sell
>it. There is every indication that the CPA is well aware of the
>lawlessness of its privatization scheme. In a leaked memo written on
>March 26, British Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith warned Prime
>Minister Tony Blair that "the imposition of major structural economic
>reforms would not be authorized by international law."
>
>So far, most of the controversy surrounding Iraq's reconstruction has
>focused on the waste and corruption in the awarding of contracts. This
>badly misses the scope of the violation: Even if the selloff of Iraq
>were conducted with full transparency and open bidding, it would still
>be illegal for the simple reason that Iraq is not America's to sell.
>
>The Security Council's recognition of the United States and Britain's
>occupation authority provides no legal cover. The UN resolution passed
>in May specifically required the occupying powers to "comply fully with
>their obligations under international law including in particular the
>Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907."
>
>According to a growing number of international legal experts, this means
>that if the next Iraqi government decides it doesn't want to be a wholly
>owned subsidiary of Bechtel or Halliburton, it will have powerful legal
>grounds to renationalize assets that were privatized under CPA edicts.
>Juliet Blanch, global head of energy and international arbitration for
>the huge international law firm Norton Rose, says that because Bremer's
>reforms directly contradict Iraq's Constitution, they are "in breach of
>international law and are likely not enforceable." Blanch argues that
>the CPA "has no authority or ability to sign those [privatization]
>contracts" and that a sovereign Iraqi government would have "quite a
>serious argument for renationalization without paying compensation."
>Firms facing this type of expropriation would, according to Blanch, have
>"no legal remedy."
>
>The only way out for the Administration is to make sure that Iraq's next
>government is anything but sovereign. It must be pliant enough to ratify
>the CPA's illegal laws, which will then be celebrated as the happy
>marriage of free markets and free people. Once that happens, it will be
>too late: The contracts will be locked in, the deals done and the
>occupation of Iraq permanent.
>
>Which is why antiwar forces must use this fast-closing window to demand
>that the next Iraqi government be free from the shackles of these
>reforms. It's too late to stop the war, but it's not too late to deny
>Iraq's invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect
>in the first place.
>
>It's not too late to cancel the contracts and ditch the deals.