Saddam's flag still flaps

2004-06-28 20:21

Baghdad - Saddam Hussein is gone - but his flag flies on.

The green, red, white and black banner - with the words "God is great," added by Saddam in the 1990s - fluttered on Monday over government buildings of the new Iraq despite efforts to replace it as a break with the past.

But the proposed new flag, approved by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, sank faster than a stone in the Tigris river after a firestorm of criticism that the new banner ignored the country's Arab character - and looked too much like the Israeli flag.

Although the new flag was never formally withdrawn, even Governing Council members disavowed it. The traditional, Saddam-era flag adorned the conference room where ministers of the new government took their oaths of office on Monday.

The proposed new national banner had two parallel blue stripes along the bottom with a yellow stripe in the middle. The blue stripes represented the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The yellow stripe symbolised Iraq's ethnic Kurdish minority, taking its colour from the yellow star on the flag of Kurdistan.

Above the stripes, in a white field, is a blue crescent of Islam.

Some critics thought that abandoning the old colour scheme represented Iraq turning its back on its Arab identity.

The Iraqi flag is essentially the same as one adopted in 1921 after the establishment of the modern Iraqi state. It used the colours red, green, black and white which were symbols of the pan-Arab movement which blossomed after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

Just before the US-led coalition drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, Saddam added the words "Allahu akbar" or "God is great" in hopes of boosting the religious credentials of his otherwise secular regime.

The green, white and black stripes denote Islam - recalling the battle banners of the medieval Islamic dynasties of the Fatimids, Ummayads and Abbasids. Green is said to have been the prophet Muhammad's favourite colour.

Islamic crescents in Arab heraldry are usually green or red.

Red is the colour of Arab nationalism, the favoured shade of Sharif Hussein, who led the Arab revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule in the early 1900s. He added green, white and black stripes to create a symbol of pan-Arabism.

- AP