Posted on 07/29/2003 7:30:08 AM PDT by dead
Images of the Hands of Victory Arch flashed across the world as US tanks rolled into Baghdad in April. But, writes Keith Austin, few realise the 40-tonne monument contains a top-level secret.
They seek him here, they seek him there, those Yankees seek him everywhere. But given that every second male in Iraq looks like him, what will the allies use to identify Saddam Hussein (or what's left of him) if they ever do find him?
Well, there's the DNA sample the Americans say they have, or perhaps they could simply use the plastic moulds of his thumbprint that have turned up in the safe of a small British foundry in the unlikely surrounds of leafy Hampshire.
Certainly Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, thinks so. In a letter thanking the foundry's chief executive for her "unusual offer of the thumbprint of Saddam Hussein", he reveals that Foreign Office officials have passed the information on to Christopher Segar, the head of the British Office in Baghdad.
Sharon Pink, CEO of the Morris Singer Foundry, says she's moved the thumbprint out of the factory for safe keeping and is waiting to hear if the FO is interested.
The company, which cast two of the lions in Trafalgar Square, the Scales of Justice statue atop the Old Bailey and the statue of Australia's World War I military leader, Sir John Monash, in Melbourne's King's Domain, was part of a German-led consortium which, in 1986, cast the bronze arms for Saddam's enormous Hands of Victory Arch in Baghdad.
The colossal arch, which featured prominently in photographs of the recent Gulf War, was built to commemorate the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
The arms, holding 24-tonne crossed swords said to be made from the guns of dead Iraqi soldiers, are replicas of Saddam's forearms.
The statue was the idea of the prominent Iraqi artist Khalid al Rahal, who died in 1987 before it was completed.
The work, says the Morris Singer Foundry, was taken over by another well-known Iraqi artist, Mohammed Ghani, who came up with the idea of personalising the sculpture by having Saddam's life-size thumbprint on one of the two-metre thumbs.
David Vallance, the foundry's manager in 1986, explained: "Mohammed Ghani went to the president and got his thumbprints impressed into a tin of Plasticine, one of which was used for the modelling of the impression on the thumb."
Those impressions were then put into the Singer safe and taken out only when the second Gulf War started, and someone at the factory remembered they were there.
Pink, who took over the running of the historic foundry a year ago after her father suffered a heart attack, says: "When all those pictures appeared of the American tanks rolling under the Victory Arch, someone got hold of the fact that a British company had been involved in the consortium that built it and we started getting phone calls asking about it.
"We said we'd be happy for them to blow it up as long as the contracts for rebuilding Iraq came to British companies, starting with our little corner of Hampshire.
"Then the foundry director remembered that we had Saddam's thumbprint in the safe. I knew they had Saddam's DNA but still wondered if we should alert the Government to ask if the security services wanted the thumbprint for identification."
The foundry, which employs 25 people, is one of the oldest established arts foundries in the world and was recently commissioned to cast the bronze reliefs of pilots scrambling for their planes for a Battle of Britain monument to be built on Victoria Embankment in London.
And it was through an ex-RAF man, Lord Norman Tebbit, the Battle of Britain fundraising committee chairman, that Pink got in touch with the Government.
The foundry director, Chris Boverhoff, says: "The project was awarded in 1986 at a time when Iraq was a valued ally of the West, and when British companies were being encouraged to support and develop work in the region.
"We are, of course, pleased to have been associated with such a fine piece of work and we are justly proud of the craftsmanship that went into it, but like right-thinking people the world over we deplore the regime that Saddam created and presided over. The fact that his own thumbprint would be in his statue is surely a further measure of the vanity of the man.
"If the coalition forces had decided to decimate the Victory Arch, that would have been fine with us."
Pink, who has been told to be on standby with the mould, laughs that her father is now "moving the thumbprint around London" for safekeeping. "It's just so exciting, just so exciting. And if it helps 'nail' Saddam, I don't mind." And she added: "Of course, if the authorities don't want it I'm happy to auction it on eBay for a million dollars."
Oh, and that arch has to come down. Melt the steel in it and use it to build something that will actually help people over there.
I want them to sell it to the NY Giants for the parking lot, so you can drive under it on game day.
Do the Iraqis get any say in that? I think it is a tremendous,awesome statue, and it should stay up forever.
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