SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region - The destruction of a sculpture to love in Sulaimani’s Azadi Park earlier this month, and a couple openly kissing at the site in protest, has been the talk of the Iraqi Kurdish city ever since.
On October 12, the Statue of Love was set ablaze and destroyed in the city’s famous Azadi Park, which upset many artists, among them the sculptor himself.
“Whoever has done this is against love, against beauty,” said Zahir Sdiq, the artist who placed the statue in the park in 2009.
The news that the sculpture had been taken down, doused in petrol and set afire, made the national news. But it was soon overshadowed by the picture of a young couple who stood and kissed on the site of the missing statue.
“Our kiss was not the first kiss between two lovers in this city or anywhere in the world,” said Kamaran Najm, whose picture of him kissing his Dutch girlfriend went viral on the Internet. “Every day people kiss each other for love, for accepting each other.”
Najm’s act won the support of many intellectuals and artists inside and outside Kurdistan. But it also brought the condemnation of many, among them the public prosecutor in Sulaimani, who said “the couple should be jailed for acting against public customs.”
“Unfortunately, here many people cannot show that love because of fear or suppression,” said Najm. “We only meant to say that love isn’t only in a statue for some people to be able to destroy or burn it,” he added.
Muthana Amin, a member of the leadership council of the Islamic Union and professor of Shariah Law, told Rudaw that kissing in public should be condemned because it was against “the norms of Kurdish tradition and culture and is an insult to married people.”
“We should distinguish love from a sexual act,” said Amin. “A kiss on the lips is a sexual act and it shouldn’t be done in public.”
But Najm and his girlfriend stood by their act, which prompted many youth to announce a “kissing week,” to share pictures of kissing couples through social media sites.
“I think the people who burnt the statue didn’t really make a point,” said Najm’s girlfriend. “It was a message to the people who destroyed the statue, saying, “You cannot destroy.”
According to Sdiq, his statue had been tampered with several times in the past. “I always fixed it,” he said. “But the last time they completely destroyed it.”
Only a few hours before the Love Statue incident the grave of famous Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, who died at age 73 in August, was also destroyed by unknown people, causing even greater condemnation.
It was Bekas’s will to be buried in Azadi Park so that he could “always hear the whisper of young lovers.”
According to the park authorities, 12 of their statues and busts have been defaced or destroyed in the past.
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