Baghdad. Memories in the stones or the stones of memories?

By Baghdadhope*

In the process of de-Baathification of Iraq, namely the cancellation of any memory or connection to the former regime of Saddam Hussein, that has already gone through the failed attempt by the Shiite majority government to exclude from the next political election planned for March 7 500 candidates accused of having ties or sympathies with the old Baathist Party, nothing is spared: not even the stones.

In 2005 the Iraqi government created the Committee to Remove the Remains of the Baath Party and to Consider Building New Monuments and Murals, a committee that since then worked to remove all traces of the remains of the Ba'ath Party and to build new monuments.

So some monuments dedicated to the war between Iraq and Iran were destroyed, and so were others recalling the greatness of the leader who had strongly desired them in an impetus of self-celebration. In 2007 the Committee even decided to pull down what has certainly become the most photographed monument in Baghdad, if for no other reason than its being located inside the Green Zone, the US controlled area, and then in the zoom of each soldier or contractor passing by: the famous Saddam crossed swords that in two copies close the ends of the Parade Ground, a long avenue where the regime praised itself in grandiose parades.

That time the work was suspended, but now it seems that the destruction of that and other monuments is in the offing again. The government has already started in fact the pulling down of the white monument called the "Union" designed by Ala Albashir, Saddam Hussein’s doctor, but also a painter and a sculptor, and that welcomed in Baghdad the travellers from Jordan.
The decision gave rise to controversial reactions.
The destruction of monuments belonging to an historical period represents an attempt - vain – of cancellation of human memory.

The victims of the brutality of the Iraqi regime will not forget their sufferings just because the city will be adorned with new monuments, as more than in the stones their pain is carved in their hearts.

Those who look back nostalgically to the past will not cease to do it only because of the detruction of its symbols.

To erase the past is therefore useless.

And politically shortsighted too.

Human beings tend to forget others’ misfortunes, the stones fix them in people’s memory. Those who have experienced the tragedy of being ruled by a brutal regime like the Iraqi one should instead preserve those stones to "capitalize the pain" so that it is not forgotten, that serves as a warning to future generations.

What sense would have, for example, to pull down, to raze the Nazi extermination camps? Would their disappearance serve to those who there survived to soothe the pain of their memories? Or convince someone of the horror of war and of the attempt to cancel physically the enemy?

To keep those camps meant instead to allow young people to visit them in the hope that their approach to the pain that those places evoke will take them to oppose any violence in the future.
In a hypothetical Baghdad of the future, if and when anyone can go there, those terrible monuments will serve to those who will be visiting the city to know what happened there, to enumerate the populations repressed there together with the others already known in the world, preventing their suffering to be forgotten.

The desire to erase the past, however legitimate, is shortsighted. This is not about preserving works of art - objectively those monuments are not - or glorifying through their conservation the past regime, but to capitalize the pain in the hope of avoiding it in the future.

Photo by Corvus Art Center