BAGHDAD, 12 October 2003 — Iraq’s central bank fired up its furnace yesterday and consigned thousands of banknotes bearing the smiling face of Saddam Hussein to the flames ahead of a massive currency swap to start next week.
Deputy Central Bank Governor Ahmed Salman Mohammed said the central bank had already absorbed a “good portion” of Saddam banknotes still in circulation and would carry on with the systematic destruction in coming weeks.
Iraqis have three months from Oct. 15 to swap the estimated four trillion dinars of Saddam bank notes in circulation for new bills bearing pictures of an ancient Babylonian ruler and a 10th century Iraqi mathematician. The Iraqi dinar is worth about 2,000 to the dollar.
“I am optimistic it will go well,” Mohammed told reporters in the lobby of the Iraqi central bank where tellers counted tall dinar stacks. “Most of it (the currency swap) could be over in one month.”
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 following the war it was forced to print billions of dinars of banknotes bearing the face of Saddam to ease a shortage of low-denomination banknotes.
Several floors below the central bank lobby in a furnace room opposite the vast doors of one of the vaults, workers threw bundles of Saddam bills into the fire and raked the flaming notes deeper into the inferno.
Adnan Chalabi, manager of the furnaces, said about half a billion to one billion dinars could be in the furnace. Currency is burned weekly by the central bank, mainly to destroy defaced and tattered notes, he said.
Boxes of the new currency stood in the street outside the central bank building where several machinegun mounted US military Humvees stood in the heavily guarded banking quarter.
As part of the changeover, a convoy delivered several tons of bills yesterday to Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown about 175 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad.
At the downtown Rafidain Bank, security guards carried 76 crates of freshly printed bills weighing a total of four tons into the bank’s vault.
A squad of US soldiers and two Bradley fighting vehicles watched over the bank during the delivery.
The changeover “will help stabilize the economy and help give Iraqis confidence that Saddam is gone”, said Lieutenant Colonel Scott Schmidt of the 230th Finance Battalion, who helped oversee the operation.
The new notes are printed by the same firm that made Iraq’s pre-Saddam banknotes - Britain’s De La Rue Plc.
The Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, credited with creating the first written code of laws in human history, graces the new pink 25,000-dinar note, worth about $12. The other side shows a smiling Kurdish farm worker holding a sheaf of wheat.
Astronomer and mathematician Abu Ali Al-Hasan ibn Al-Haytham, born in Basra in 965 and known as Alhazen to medieval scholars in the West, is on one side of the 10,000 note, the only other human figure on the new notes.
