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Iraq bans school
groups from Saddam’s grave
WSN Network
In another instance of the Western world practicing its particular
brand of cultural hegemony, Iraq’s ruling government, which is
largely seen as the de facto symbol of U.S. control over the
country, ordered authorities in Saddam Hussein’s home town to ban
schoolchildren from visiting the grave of the former dictator after
a video showed a group of school girls singing his praises. The
order from the cabinet was accompanied by others that called for
some signs and monuments dating back to before the 2003
U.S.- led invasion to be dismantled because they “glorified the past
regime.”
“The (cabinet) ordered the Ministry of Education, Salahuddin
province, and the provincial council (of Tikrit) to take the
necessary steps to ban organized visits to the former resident’s
grave and to avoid what happened in the visit to the grave by school
girls in Tikrit,” he government said. An official at the
government’s
National Media Center said the order applied to schools in
Salahuddin, where Tikrit is. He said no one from anywhere else in
the country was likely to contemplate organizing a school tour to
the grave.
Saddam’s grave is regularly viewed by small groups of admirers of
the former strongman, who was toppled in the
U.S. invasion and executed in December 2006 for the murder of 148
men and boys following a failed assassination attempt.
Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim-led government has little tolerance for
admiration of Saddam, whose Sunni Arab-led government persecuted,
and sometimes massacred, the Shi’ite majority. Efforts to reconcile
Iraq’s fractious groups after the years of sectarian bloodshed
unleashed by the U.S. invasion are not open to those members of his
Baath party who are viewed as having blood on their hands.
8
July 2009
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