Kirkuk rally celebrates capture of Saddam

Thousands of residents of Kirkuk on Monday celebrated the capture of Saddam Hussein. But those participating in the rally, held in front of the city’s governorate building, also put forward serious demands, some of which could lead to splits in this northern city. One of the rally organisers, Saywan Aziz Talib of the area’s main party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), told IRIN in Kirkuk they wanted Saddam to face justice in northern Iraq as it had been the scene of some of his worst acts of repression. They also called for Kirkuk, which until April had been under the control of the former Iraqi regime, to be incorporated in the Kurdish federal sector and thereby come under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government. And perhaps most divisively of all, the participants demanded that all the Arabs who had been shifted to the largely Kurdish city and resettled there under Saddam's Arabisation campaign to leave Kirkuk and return to their places of origin. Throughout his reign, Saddam encouraged and paid Arabs domiciled in central and southern Iraq to move north to areas such as oil-rich Kirkuk, with the aim of tipping the region's racial and cultural balance in his favour. During the campaign, thousands of Kurds were evicted from their homes by the new arrivals, but are now returning to repossess their property. "Arabs are our great and sweetest neighbours, but they should leave and go back to where they are from," Saywan said. "We believe these things are our rights and not wild demands." Arabs, too, joined the rally to demonstrate their approval of the capture of Saddam. One of their spokesmen, Shaykh Salah Karim al-Hamdan, told IRIN he was sympathetic to the views of both sides. Addressing the gathering, he called on the "new Arabs", as the Arabisation migrants are known, to return to their homelands and rebuild their lives there. He said one way of solving the problem was for houses to be built for the Arabs back in their southern homelands to give them something to return to. He stressed that other Arabs, such as himself, had lived in Kirkuk for generations as neighbours of the Kurds. "We were all under the hammer of Saddam. He was killing all Iraqi people, children, women, using chemical weapons, transferring people, his wars against Iran and Kuwait, mass graves - he is responsible for all of this. Only destruction came from Saddam." The rally, which saw marchers converge from all over the city, passed off peacefully, although US soldiers kept watch from the sidelines. Kurds, Arabs, Christians, mothers of martyrs and even communists joined in chanting, dancing and hurling tirades against Saddam. Pictures of Saddam were displayed with his eyes cut out, cigarettes stuck in his mouth or burned by the triumphant crowd. When the marchers dispersed, they left the streets littered with a confetti of ripped-up Saddam posters. Dilshad Ahmad Karim wore a poster of the former leader hanging upside from her neck. A civil engineer, she had escaped from Kirkuk to Sulaymaniyah in 2001 after constantly being forced to work for the Iraqi army. She returned to her home after this year’s war drove the Iraqi government out of Kirkuk, and is now helping unemployed people. Along with many others, she had a special personal reason to celebrate Saddam’s capture. In 1982, one of her brothers was jailed for belonging to a Kurdish secret opposition group. The only news her family received from him was when he smuggled a shirt out of prison by having it worn by a prisoner being released, with details of his torture scribbled inside the collar. In 1985 he was executed along with 22 colleagues. Saddam’s security forces delivered the news to the family along with a bill for 90 dinars (now US $7.50) - this being the cost of the ammunition used to kill him. They were told no funeral for him was to be held. "We could not even cry or we would be punished," Dilshad told IRIN. When the Kurds rose against Saddam’s regime in 1991, they took control of Kirkuk, but, receiving no support, failed to hold it against the government army for longer than three days. Another of Dilshad's brothers was killed in the fighting, soon after which their father died from the shock of losing another son. Hanging Saddam’s portrait upside down was the ultimate insult to the leader who had caused so much pain, not just to her family but also millions of other Kurds, Dilshad said. "I don’t want to kill him. I want him to be put in prison and be tortured every day just as he tortured so many of our people." With her name meaning "happy heart", Dilshad said it indeed made her happy to see Kurds free to demonstrate and call for Kirkuk to be returned to them. "But my heart still grieves for my brothers."