Sinkhole Cajuns' And Iraqi Villagers' Deep Connection

Cajuns struggling to survive a monster sinkhole eating their community and Iraqi villagers in Gullan have a lot in common today, both struggling to survive petrochemical companies’ control of government that is ruining chances for survival

                                                                             ”If the company builds up a well, 

the oil exploitation process

will eventually contaminate the water

that sustains two dozen villages.” 

“Our ancestors have lived here and worked on this land for centuries but now we are afraid that our water sources will soon be destroyed and we will have to leave this place,” say kak Latif and Pshtiwan in the Gullan village dating back into the pre-Islamic times in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Both of these young villagers have learned to become activists out of necessity, survival. 

“A U.S.-based multi-national corporation has started to drill for oil above the village, in the same way as they do around other villages in the area,” explains a non-profit organization Cristian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) Iraqi Kurdistan in its online blog.

“If the company builds up a well, the oil exploitation process will eventually contaminate the water that sustains two dozen villages.”

Cajuns — as well as other Americans learning that the U.S. fossil fuel industry’s fracking is making life impossible —  and these Iraqi villagers are united in a way to few recognize: Both struggle for basic survival due to the wrath of petrochemical companies destroying water, essential for human life. 

The fledgling Iraqi activist group’s name is Council for environmental protection and common rights.

From Iraqi villages to Cajun Country, corporate works under government permission

“A company representative arrived with a group of security guards and met with the villagers in a nearby mosque,” CPT’s story reads.

“He told the villagers what they already knew: that the company works under the government given permission.”

So it goes, around the globe, from innocent Iraqi villagers to Louisiana’s innocent Cajun villagers. 

In Louisiana’s Assumption Parish, a giant sinkhole has resulted from the state government giving the green light to the petrochemical industry to extract and destroy the treasured culture’s unique, moss-draped swampland.

Carcinogens now bubble in waters that had fed fish and other swamp critters to generations of Creoles and Native Americans. The aquifer in Assumption Parish is tainted. Daily, spewing explosive methane there, bubbling in the bayous and swamps, threatens explosions.

One of the Iraqi villagers told a CPTer, “Today was the first time we were able to gather and act like this together. We are writing history.”

At the afternoon action, over a hundred villagers of all ages, mostly men, gathered. CPT was the only international organization present. At first people stood at the side of the road but as they saw the oil company trucks returning from the work sites, they threw wooden logs in the middle of the road and blocked all the traffic. Holding banners, such as: “The beauty and abundance of our land is our oil” and “Do not destroy our environment for the leaders’ pockets”, the villagers spoke to the media, both independent and political parties’ affiliated. The villagers maintained the blockade for about an hour until the armed government forces arrived and cleared the way first for the private cars and later also for the oil company trucks.

According to CPT’s website, it “amplifies voices of communities and individuals in their struggle for a violence- and oppression-free society and political sphere.”

Perhaps oppressed Americans have much to learn from people in countries the United States has designated as part of the “axis of evil.”

Perhaps Cajuns have not reached the awareness that their Iraqi counterparts have, despite the same real enemy.

Source: CPT

Photo Credit: CPT

Human Rights news reporter Deborah Dupré is author of “Vampire of Macondo, Life, crimes and curses in south Louisiana that Powerful Forces Don’t want you to know,” packed with US mainstream media-censored stories about the BP-wrecked Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico that continues catastrophic human and environmental devastation. Dupre’s articles regularly appear in dozens of hard copy and online publications. Email [email protected]

See more articles by Deborah Dupré here.