Symbolic Destruction: Bringing Down the Statues

Pulling down statues of political leaders, such as that of Saddam Hussein in the Iraqi capital 15 years ago, is a symbolic act with many precedents around the world.

When the giant effigy of Saddam was wrenched off its plinth on April 9, 2003 with the help of US Marines, it was confirmation for the jubilant onlookers thar his nearly 24-year rule had also come crashing down.

Here are some emblematic examples of the toppling of statues of other strongmen and figures around the world.

- Napoleon felled -In 1871, the revolutionary Paris Commune movement brought down a huge bronze of Napoleon I statue that stood atop a column more than 40 metres (130 feet) high in the central Place Vendome.

The "Communards" were leading an uprising following Napoleon III's humiliating defeat against Prussia the previous year. 

Celebrated painter Gustave Courbet was jailed for six months for organising the venture and made to pay for a new statue, erected in 1873.

- Soviet icons toppled -The dismantling of the Soviet bloc, the USSR, saw many of its leaders knocked from their pedestals.

In November 1989, youths in Warsaw applauded when a statue of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was taken down. As a crane lifted the piece, the lower part fell and shattered, the chunks carried off as souvenirs of the fall of communism.

Another of Dzerzhinsky, whose service was the precursor of the feared KGB, was brought down in Moscow in August 1991 after a failed coup against president Mikhail Gorbachev and his democratisation policy. 

Thousands cheered and chanted "Down with the KGB" as heavy-duty cranes got to work.

It took workers nearly three days in March 1990 to fell a 12-tonne bronze of revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in a Bucharest square, as Romanians sought the removal of symbols of Soviet domination. 

Dozens of masked protesters tore down another representation of Lenin in the Ukraine capital in December 2013 at the start of a massive uprising that eventually toppled the Moscow-backed government of president Viktor Yanukovych.

They put a noose round the neck and some screamed "Hang the Commie!". 

Georgia however waited nearly 20 years after its secession from the Soviet Union to dismantle a statue of Joseph Stalin in the dictator's birth town of Gori. The 2010 removal was carried out in a clandestine night-time operation. But it was re-installed three years later.

- Syria's Arab Spring -Anti-regime protests gathered momentum in March 2011 in the Syrian city of Daraa, where a statue of President Bashar al-Assad's father was toppled, marking the launch of the uprising that turned into full-out conflict.

About 300 young people climbed over the effigy of former strongman Hafez al-Assad, chanting anti-regime slogans. 

In March 2018, also in Syria, Turkey-backed fighters who captured Afrin from the Kurds stamped their authority by toppling a statue of a lesser-known symbol, Kawa the blacksmith, a Kurdish hero and symbol of resistance.

- Symbols of slavery -In the United States, demonstrators took matters into their own hands in August 2017 and toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier -- symbol of the defence of slavery during the Civil War of 1861-1865 -- in Durham, North Carolina.

This was in response to the killing two days earlier of a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia, by a neo-Nazi during a protest over the planned removal of a statue of top Civil War general for the south, Robert E. Lee.