Dictator Art - evil buttock edition
January 20 2012
Readers may remember that last year a former SAS soldier, Nigel Ely, tried to sell at auction a piece of Saddam's statue from Baghdad, to raise funds for injured troops. The sale gained publicity with the claim that the fragment of bronze represented Saddam's buttock, and a wildly optimistic 'valuation' of £250,000. It didn't sell. Now, police in the UK have arrested and interviewed those alleged to be trying to sell the piece again, and who may be acting in contravention of the 2003 Iraq Sanctions Order (specifically the importation of Iraqi cultural property).
In The Guardian*, Mr Ely questioned why the piece was being described as cultural property:
The ex-soldier asked: "How can it be classed as cultural property when it was put up by the biggest tyrant since Attila the Hun?"
Ely believes that Iraqi officials decided to demand the return of the war relic after seeing media coverage of its value.
"American Marines gave it to me and at that time Baghdad was under American control," he added. "There wasn't even an Iraqi government and I have since turned it into a piece of war relic art. "This is like having a chunk of the Berlin Wall – it's part of history but it's not cultural property."
Mr Ely is of course entirely wrong. You can't decide if a statue is culturally valuable on the basis of whether the sitter was a nice chap or not. That statue was a symbol of Saddam's power in Baghdad, and its globally-broadcast removal came to be seen as the defining moment of his downfall. As such, it is an important part of Iraqi history, and the Iraqi's are entitled to want it back, even bits of it. The bigger question, of course, is what happened to Saddam's head?
