Symbols of unity

Nida Kadhim's eight statues of physicians from the Abbasid era — a golden age that spanned five centuries beginning in AD750 — once adorned Baghdad hospitals. Along with many of his other distinctive bronze works, they disappeared in the wave of looting that engulfed the city after the US-led invasion in 2003.

But Kadhim, who witnessed firsthand the pillaging of Baghdad's heritage, is optimistic not only that there is a place for art in Iraq today but also that it can play a role in restoring Iraqis' sense of nationhood and normalcy.

The 70-something sculptor is busy working on his next project: a series of statues of prominent 20th-century Iraqi intellectuals, artists, poets and writers who were largely nationalist. The centrepiece will be seven images of the late Mohammad Mahdi Al Jawahiri, one of the Arab world's finest poets who romanticised a unified Iraq and was a pivotal figure in Iraq's anti-colonial movement from the 1920s until the 1950s.

The idea is that the bard and the others could serve as symbols of unity for a fractured nation struggling to heal the wounds of a bloody past and present.

"Jawahiri spoke of the nation; Tigris, Euphrates, the land — south, north and centre. He was loyal to his country to the last minute and that's an ideal that all Iraqis should strive for," says Kadhim, whose modest studio is nestled in a leafy alleyway not far from Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts.

Kadhim, bespectacled with a shock of unruly white hair, pauses from his work, wipes his hands, and hauls out a 3-foot clay model of the Jawahiri statue from his dark studio into the morning light. Like other Baghdadis, Kadhim receives an hour of electricity a day.

Jawahiri is depicted in his hallmark three-piece suit and embroidered skullcap. The statues will eventually be nearly 10 feet tall and show the poet in different poses and settings.

Promise of support

He has already received tentative support for his project from the government, and the statues will be displayed in a park on Abu Nawas Street along the east bank of the Tigris, an area that was once the hub of Baghdad's nightlife with its cafes and fish restaurants.

The street was divided after 2003 with checkpoints and protective concrete slabs put up by Western security firms and media outlets occupying nearby property.

The US military, in partnership with Baghdad's municipality, has already spent millions of dollars to beautify the area, according to Tahseen Al Shaikhli, a civilian spokesman for the US-Iraqi security operation under way in the capital. Artists were even hired to paint scenes of ancient Mesopotamia on the blast walls.

The park remains off limits to families from outside the neighbourhood and the Western tenants are baulking at removing the obstacles, says Shaikhli, adding that reopening all of Abu Nawas Street would definitely provide "a tremendous psychological boost for Baghdadis".

Kadhim, a former communist and Shiite who was expelled from his job at the Ministry of Culture in 1976 and had a brother hanged for evading conscription during the Iran-Iraq war, says he is willing to forgive former regime elements who are sincere about starting a new chapter in society.

He is also trying to convince the Shiite-led government of Nouri Al Maliki to preserve some monuments from the era of Saddam Hussain, who had a penchant for grandiose and heroic symbolism.

Two of four massive busts of Saddam in a combination of Western and Arab military attire that once adorned one of his palaces in the coalition-secured Green Zone, renamed the International Zone, could, along with other relics of the dictator's era, be installed in another park that is built along the lines of the graveyard of Soviet statues in Moscow's Gorky Park, reckons Kadhim. "It could be something for the collective memory just to remind people of Saddam's brutality," he says.

But the Iraqi sculptor says that hardline Shiites occupying positions of power in the government, who are bent on eradicating all vestiges of the Saddam era and remain highly suspicious of plots to turn back the clock, are demanding that the US military hand over the busts sitting in the courtyard of the palace which now serves as a base called Prosperity.

Elusive unity

Outside the International Zone, whatever was not removed by a municipal body tasked with clearing remnants of the previous regime was blown up by mobs as happened two years ago with the March of the Baath Party memorial not far from the National Museum. Municipal workers were busy over a recent weekend painting the memorial's empty pedestal with scenes of galloping white horses and maidens.

As reconciliation evades Iraq's political class and many segments of the population, Kadhim's attitude may be a glimmer of hope that Iraqis will overcome fear and "start talking to each other again".