Monumental task: What to do with problematic statues

NEW ORLEANS — Now that New Orleans has removed three prominent Confederate statues and a monument heralding white supremacy, what should it do with them?

The city will receive proposals from groups that want to take three of the monuments — the last is tied up in legal issues — and display them. Plans are also being made to fill the spaces they leave behind. The city wants to finish the work during its tricentennial year in 2018.

Across the world, cities have wrestled with what statues should be allowed to remain. Here's a look at what other places have done:

Monuments to colonial rule have been removed in many countries, though some remain. There is debate over whether to erase symbols of an era of white domination or preserve them as cautionary reminders.

Statues of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, who died in 1902, were uprooted in Zimbabwean cities after independence from white minority rule in 1980.

In 2015, students defaced a statue of him at South Africa's University of Cape Town, which removed the monument.

In Lithuania, the war in Ukraine prompted calls for the removal of all symbols of Soviet occupation, including statues of Red Army soldiers on a bridge in the capital Vilnius; they were removed in 2015.

Meanwhile, statues of Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and other Soviet leaders ended up at Grutas Park, a quirky theme park popularly known as Stalin's World dotted with relics of the country's communist past.

After World War II, the Allies occupied Germany and introduced a program of “Denazification” to purge society of remnants of Nazi ideology and power. Flags were torn down, statues of Hitler destroyed and Nazi-era place names changed. U.S. military engineers blew up a massive swastika that towered over the Nazi parade grounds in Nuremberg.

The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad in 2003 was one of the most famous moments of the U.S.-led invasion, but thousands of other Saddam-era statues and monuments were removed or modified.

In 2007, a government committee was tasked with reviewing what was left to remove, starting with the crossed-sword archways that Saddam commissioned to commemorate his victory over Iran. But the work was quickly halted after denunciations from artists and Sunni politicians.

Hundreds of Soviet-era monuments were taken down in Moscow and St. Petersburg as the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991.

The removal of one, a statue to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret service, in front of jubilant crowds on Aug. 21, 1991, was perceived as a symbolic break with Russia's totalitarian past.

The Dzerzhinsky monument and other Soviet landmark statues were taken to Muzeon, a park in central Moscow, while authorities were largely undecided about what to do with the busts and statues of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and other Communist Party functionaries.