Saddam Hussein's papers now at Hoover

The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is a repository of historical items of great importance. The institution keeps one of the original copies of "The Communist Manifesto," written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, tucked away in a safe.
The institution also has the fifth draft of the abdication statement of Russian Czar Nicholas II from 1917.
Now, for a while at least, the Hoover Institution also has the papers of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was executed in 2006 after he was captured by American troops.
The Iraq Memory Foundation, a Washington, D.C. group that collected about 7 million documents from Hussein's Baath Party headquarters after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq in 2003, has entrusted the Hoover Institution with the safekeeping of those papers.
Part of the collection may be open for public viewing by the end of the summer, according to Richard Sousa, Hoover senior associate director.
"This is a deposit agreement that the highest levels of Iraqi government are aware of," Sousa said. "They totally endorse what we are doing."
But there is some dispute about where the papers belong. Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, has claimed the records are the property of Iraq and should be sent to the national archives there.
Eskander has the backing of the Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists.
There is also some question that if the papers were returned to Iraq, they could be used politically instead of treated as historical documents to be preserved.
"We have full faith in the (Iraqi) archives' independence," Mark Greene, president of the Society of American Archivists, told the Stanford News Service.
For now, though, the papers will reside at the Hoover Institution.
In the midst of the chaos of the Iraqi war, an Iraqi scholar, Kana Makiya, stored the papers in his parents' home in Baghdad.
Because of the continuing war in Iraq, Sousa said the papers would be safer at the Hoover Institution than if they were returned to Iraq.