MOSUL, 15 October 2003 — Iraqi banks laid in millions of fresh banknotes yesterday, the eve of a huge currency swap that will wipe Saddam Hussein’s face from legal tender.
Iraqi police blocked roads and tightened security around Baghdad’s main financial district housing the central bank ahead of the start of the bill exchange today.
One bank manager in the northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s third largest, seemed dismayed by the operation, which will eliminate the disparity in the value of dinars used in the Kurdish-ruled north and those used in the rest of the country.
“I’m not getting any sleep,” said Anees Mahmood, general manager of state-owned Rafidain Bank branches in the north.
“In my opinion, it’s a bit soon,” he said, his head in his hands. “The new machines for counting money have not yet arrived. We are having some problems at the moment.”
Iraqis have three months to turn in four trillion dinars worth of Saddam-era bills in central and southern Iraq and older notes popularly known as Swiss dinars across the north in exchange for six new denominations ranging from 50-dinar notes to 25,000-dinar bills. The Iraqi dinar is worth about 2,000 to the dollar, with most transactions conducted with 250-dinar notes that can require customers to use sackloads to pay for expensive items. One-hundred dinar notes are rare, and most Iraqis are loath to accept 10,000-dinar notes because of widespread rumors of counterfeiting. Officials at Iraq’s Governing Council said police arrested four members of a counterfeiting gang in Baghdad on Monday, seizing 50 million Iraqi dinars worth of forged old notes, printing machines as well as negatives which could be used for forging the new currency.
“It’s not even been seen by the public yet,” council spokesman Ahmed Haidar said. “It was a perfect negative. From information received, we think that negative came from Jordan.” The US-led administration in Iraq has ordered all images of Saddam to be removed from monuments, murals and school textbooks. But in the months after the war it was forced to print billions of dinars of banknotes bearing the deposed dictator’s face to ease a shortage of 250-dinar notes.