Opinion: Show your colors
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In case you hadn’t heard, Iraq has finally agreed on changes ot the national flag! Temporarily, of course, until they can figure out a permanent solution next year.
It’s not a huge accomplishment: All that’s happened is that the three stars (representing Saddam Hussein’s Baath party slogan of ‘unity, freedom, socialism’) have been removed. And the lettering is a nice deep hunter green rather than the tacky quasi-neon shade — clearly, an indication of evolving Iraqi tastes.
The de-Baathification of the flag is a little ironic, considering that the government has just recently eased restristrictions on former low-level party members. It was mostly a Kurdish demand, given that Hussein’s forces massacred thousands of Kurds in the 1980s. A previous attempt to change the color of the script from green (a color representing Islam) to yellow (indicating the sun, which holds religious and cultural significance in Kurdish tradition) failed pretty miserably in Parliament.
An interim flag really wouldn’t be that big a deal if it weren’t for the flag’s rocky recent history. In 2006 tensions spiked when Kurdistan’s regional president refused to fly the Iraqi national flag from government offices; in 2004 a leaked copy of a design sparked flag burnings in Iraq. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes said it was ‘an unfortunate shade of light blue — an unfortunate shade because, to many, the color reminded them of the blue-and-white theme of the Israeli flag. You can see why there were problems.’
Needless to say, consensus colors just mean all factions are free to disparage it. ‘It was an organized conspiracy to change the flag,’ Sunni parliament member Khalaf al-Alayan told the Washington Post.
That’s not the only conspiracy theory flying around. From today’s Los Angeles Times:
‘This is literally a comedy,’ said Haseeb Mohammed, 33, a Sunni Arab in Mosul. ‘Is this Iraq’s flag? What was wrong with it? What has changed? Nothing has changed. It’s just a poor comedy charade to satisfy some sides. It’s a conspiracy against Iraq and the Iraqi people.’
Given how little the Iraqi Parliament seems able to acomplish, he kind of has a point.