April 29, 2007	Sunday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1428

AWJA, (Iraq): In another reminder of the gulf that divides their warring communities, Iraqis remembered Saddam Hussein’s era on Saturday at two starkly different ceremonies.

One honoured the memory of the former dictator, another laid more of his victims to rest.

In the small northern village of Awja, where Saddam was buried after his execution in December, a crowd of 200 Sunni Iraqis, mostly young children, laid a wreath on his tomb in honour of his birthday.

Meanwhile, in central Iraq’s city of Karbala, about 40 officials and clerics gathered to rebury the remains of 61 victims of Saddam’s brutal crackdown of the Shia rebellion that followed the 1991 Gulf War.Tens of thousands of Shias – rebels and innocent civilians alike – were slaughtered by Saddam’s forces and dumped in mass graves across Iraq.

Since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, officials have been gradually exhuming the victims and laying them to rest in massive cemeteries.

Despite the passions that memories of Iraq’s former era once aroused, both ceremonies were sparsely attended, indicating perhaps that the daily bloodshed in the country now overshadows the contested historical legacy.

In Awja, the children laid candles at the grave but left them unlit to signify what one organiser called “the darkness of the occupation”.

“The children of Salaheddin want to celebrate the birthday of the martyr Saddam Hussein near his tomb. They regard him as their father,” said Fatin Abdul Qadir, the head of a children’s organisation in the province.

Many of the children, however, could not have been more than three or four when Saddam was ousted in the invasion.

In Karbala, Shias gathered to commemorate their own “martyrs”.

“Today we are burying the remains of 61 martyrs that the former regime buried in a mass grave in the Razaza area in 1991 during the popular uprising,” said Emad Muhammed Hussein, one of the organisers of the event.—AFP