Painful debate centered on Hussein's monuments
BAGHDAD -- He was ousted, captured, tried, and executed. But while the dictator is gone, his legacy visibly lives on.
There might be no starker reminder of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule than the potent symbols he left behind: scores of hubristic statues, murals, frescoes, and other monuments he built all over Iraq to commemorate himself.
While many were destroyed in the cathartic celebration and mob violence that followed the invasion, many others still remain, serving as a constant echo of Hussein's all-consuming authority and triggering the same range of emotions, from swollen Ba'ath pride to desperate fear, that he inspired while he was alive.
Now the nation is trying to figure out whether to save these objects as memorials to history or wipe them out.
The debate goes to the core of a wounded nation's effort to redefine itself and reconcile with its painful past. In recent weeks, the matter has crystallized around Iraq's most famous landmark, the Victory Arch, two sets of gargantuan crossed swords held by giant fists modeled after Hussein's. The government had begun to tear it down, but an influential lobby, including the US Embassy, has blocked the dismantling .
Since the monument was added to the Baghdad skyline 18 years ago at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, it has been many things to many people: magnificent, vulgar, heroic, insulting, graceful, arrogant, inspiring, kitschy, bold, and grotesque. It is now encompassed by the fortified Green Zone and visited mainly by US soldiers and foreign contractors, who stop for the obligatory photograph and climb into the hollow interior of the fists.
To many Iraqis, including the Shi'ite-led government, the monument -- popularly known as the Crossed Swords or the Hands of Victory -- is a ghastly reminder of a terrible era and should be destroyed.
"Hussein built it for himself," said a Shi'ite officer in the Iraqi military, who gave only his first name, Manaf, out of concern for his safety. He marched at the parade ground the giant swords frame when he was in Hussein's army, he said, a memory he detests.
"The monument means nothing to us now," he said bitterly.
But to some Iraqis -- particularly supporters of Hussein -- it remains a national symbol and a source of pride. "It would be shameful to remove this monument," said Abu Ali, 30, a high school teacher living in Tikrit, the overwhelmingly Sunni city north of Baghdad where Hussein had his greatest base of support. "It represents the Iraqi people, the pure Iraqi people."
The challenge is an emotional issue common to all countries that have undergone revolutionary change, including post-Nazi Germany, post-apartheid South Africa, Cambodia after the fall of Pol Pot, and the former Eastern bloc countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"When societies break down and identities clash, the symbols of those identities become especially important," said Louis Bickford, a political scientist at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York. "New regimes have essentially two choices: eliminate symbols or engage with them. This comes to the forefront when there is deep hatred and anger about the past."
At the center of the debate here is a government body called the Committee to Remove the Remains of the Ba'ath Party and to Consider Building New Monuments and Murals, which was formed in 2005 and has a list of more than 100 artifacts from Hussein's era. The committee -- now a 10-member panel of Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds appointed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- has already removed two items: a bronze mural in the Alawi neighborhood depicting the history of the Ba'ath Party and a monument in Mustansiriya Square honoring a group of Iraqi prisoners in the Iran-Iraq War.
"Because Iraqis still have bad memories of the former regime and what Saddam Hussein did, we want to remove all of his traces," explained Kamel Nasser al-Zaidy, the committee's spokesman and a Shi'ite, who was jailed by Hussein because of his participation in an illegal political party.
But some, among them Shi'ites and Kurds who suffered under Hussein's rule, view the committee's effort as a blind, and possibly sectarian, attack on the country's heritage. "What do they want to do? Do they want to change history?" said Saad al-Basri, a Shi'ite and a professor of sculpture in Baghdad's College of Fine Arts. "The monuments should be considered as part of arch eology that speak to a specific era in Iraqi history. To remove them is wrong."
Hussein built the Victory Arch to commemorate what he viewed as the definitive victory in the war against Iran in the 1980s. Construction began well before the end of the war, which had no victor. In a claim that is now impossible to verify, Hussein said the stainless steel swords, crossing 130 feet in the air and each weighing 24 tons, were forged from the weapons of Iraqi soldiers who died in the conflict. The bronze fists and forearms, which punch upward through the earth, were based on plaster casts of Hussein's arms. He also incorporated into the monument hundreds of Iranian helmets recovered from the battlefield, many of them perforated with bullet holes. 