Sami Adnan is a revolutionary leading activist from Iraq. He co-founded Workers Against Sectarianism in Baghdad. Now, he plays an active role in advancing the work of the October Uprising Committee to bring activists together and make their voices heard inside and outside of Iraq.

What are the demands of the October movement and now at what stage is it? 

People started protesting in October and the first and only demand is to change the political and economic system in Iraq.  People want to change the Iraqi system, which is based on sectarianism, racism and Islamism. People want this to end because it’s totally corrupt.  This system brought us poverty, privatization, militias, security problems. And this system destroyed all structures, infrastructure and destroyed everything and killed all the dreams of the youth.

After 2003, when the US invaded Iraq. They did not build one hospital, one school. They did not build one real bridge to solve the traffic problem. They only opened the market in a very liberal way. And they stopped all the factories and agriculture in Iraq. And we lost everything. Also, because of the corrupted and sectarian system, people do not feel that they are represented. They don’t feel like there is a state or system taking care of them. People don’t feel that they are presented by any authority.  Even the elections are just a game. Elections are rigged.

We have been living in a country without any insurance for our life and without any services such as health care, education system or universities. And people gathered all of these problems in one sentence that “throw out the system.” If one ask people, they answer: “We want a homeland.” What does that mean exactly?  We are in a country that we don’t have any possibility to live a normal life.  Even, we are not safe. There are thousands and thousands of militia and terrorism and army and police. People see guards with arms in their hands at the doors of the schools when they send their children to school.

I ask one of the protesters spontaneously that “what do you want?” What would you mean by “we want the homeland”. He said, imagine I call this my country but I don’t have a house to live and a school to go to or a hospital to get treatment or any kind of insurance or electricity or clean water to live.  The neoliberal state doesn’t care about us they don’t even allow us to be workers and to work in our factories in. There is no job. There is no production. This system only wants to sell oil. Iraq import everything from China, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. We import everything: even food, vegetables, clothes… everything. We don’t have any kind of industry. They destroyed it. Iraq once was one of the main industrial centers of the Middle East.

Read more about it from the source: Socialist Middle East