Posted on 04/30/2004 7:50:23 AM PDT by yonif
The governing council in Iraq unveiled the second draft of its new national flag today (Thursday) – following protests against the version displayed earlier this week for resembling Israel’s flag.
The new design is nearly identical to that released earlier this week – two blue stripes along the bottom with a yellow stripe between them, and a crescent above them. The main difference is that the blue on the latest version is much darker than the light blue originally printed in an Iraqi paper, making the colors less similar to Israel’s flag.
The Iraqi paper that printed the flag received angry letters accusing the ‘puppet government’ of forcing a modified Israeli flag on them. Hundreds of university students in Mosul launched demonstrations against the first version. The students waved the old Saddam-era flag, which is red, black and green with the words ‘Allahu Akhbar’, meaning God is great. They said it should not have been changed because the name of God was written on it.
Council spokesman Hameed al-Kafaei responded to the protests explaining that the flag’s original colors were not the same as Israel’s flag and that “the copies you saw in newspapers were not accurate”.
The parallel blue lines of the new Iraqi flag are said to represent the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers – as well as both Sunni and Shiite Arabs. The yellow line represents the Kurds, while the central symbol is the crescent of Islam. Rifat Al-Chadirch, the 77-year-old designer of the new flag, explained that the new flag must, “be a powerful simple design. Something like the Canadian flag. Simple, straightforward – a very strong statement.” Responding to criticism that his flag looked like Israel’s Al-Chaderchi said, "I didn't think about Israel. Political opinions don't concern me. I approached the design from a graphic point of view."
The colors of the flag are very different from the flag designs in most other Muslim countries, which traditionally contain the colors green (representing Islam), red (as a symbol of Arab nationalism) and white and black (the military colors of medieval Islamic armies).
Governing Council president Massoud Barzani that the current design was just temporary, though. “This will be Iraq’s flag the coming months until a permanent flag is chosen,” he said, explaining that using the Saddam-era flag was intolerable. “We cannot raise the flag of a party that committed many crimes against Iraqi people,” said Barzani.
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