Kanan Makiya in 2003 poring over some of the millions of recovered Baath Party documents.
In the early days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Kanan Makiya, a scholar and Iraqi exile based in the United States, stumbled upon a potent trove of documents in Baghdad: Baath Party records reflecting the degrees of loyalty of some two million ordinary Iraqis to Saddam Hussein’s regime during its final years in power.
Documents being removed from Baath Party offices in Baghdad in 2003.
Mr. Makiya, who had been writing about Mr. Hussein’s abuses for many years, immediately recognized the value of the archive to Iraqi cultural memory — and its potential for misuse during the country’s volatile transition. “This was not stuff for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to have access to,” he said in a recent interview. “This stuff was dynamite.”
Shortly afterward the Iraq Memory Foundation, a private organization in Washington and Baghdad founded by Mr. Makiya, assumed custody of the sensitive archive, and last January it made a five-year deal with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to provide a safe haven for it.
To some Iraqi officials and American archivists, however, all this has been less a courageous rescue operation than a blatant case of plunder. In recent weeks the dispute has become increasingly public, with Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad, and Akram al-Hakim, Iraq’s acting minister of culture who also holds the title state minister for national dialogue, asserting that the documents were unlawfully seized and calling for their immediate return. In an open letter to the Hoover Institution on June 21 Mr. Eskander wrote that its arrangement with the Iraq Memory Foundation was “incontrovertibly illegal.” Mr. Makiya says that the archive totals more than five million pages.
At first glance the controversy may seem puzzling. The Hoover Institution is known for its research collections on former totalitarian regimes, and Mr. Makiya, who was a prominent advocate of the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, has strong connections to both the Iraqi and United States governments. The Iraq Memory Foundation has also gained recognition for its work gathering testimony of victims of the Hussein regime, which it has made public in a popular Iraqi television program.
But Mr. Eskander suggests that the Iraq Memory Foundation has used its political influence to gain control over material that should not be in private hands. The Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists have supported that claim, issuing a joint statement condemning the foundation’s gathering of the documents as “an act of pillage, which is specifically forbidden by the 1907 Hague Convention.”
International laws of war allow for an occupying power to acquire documents or archives deemed necessary for the conduct of war or occupation; the American military has acquired and continues to hold some 100 million pages of other archival material from Iraq. But the Iraq Memory Foundation, as a private group, does not fall under this provision, said Mark A. Greene, the president of the Society of American Archivists. “Its pretty unusual” for a nongovernmental entity “to gather up records and then essentially assert control over them,” Mr. Greene said.
Officials at the Hoover Institution and the Iraq Memory Foundation counter that the purpose of sending the Baathist documents to California has been misunderstood. Neither organization has asserted ownership of the documents, and both are in agreement with Iraqi officials that they should be returned to Iraq “in the not-too-distant future,” said Richard Sousa, senior associate director of the Hoover Institution. “Our understanding is that there is not a good repository for those papers in Iraq right now,” he added.
Iraqi officials have endorsed the Memory Foundation’s activities on several occasions, according to correspondence provided by the foundation. In August 2004 the prime minister’s office of the first postwar government authorized the foundation to collect “documents pertaining to harm committed by the former regime,” with the intention that they be preserved in a “national institution” it would help establish in the “center of Baghdad.”
But by 2006 the security situation had deteriorated, and the foundation, which had been storing the archives together with other salvaged documents in a house belonging to Mr. Makiya’s family in the Baghdad Green Zone, abandoned immediate plans to build a Baghdad museum or archive. The records were transferred to Virginia, where they were scanned by the federal government. According to the correspondence the idea of housing the documents “for a period of time” at the Hoover Institution was endorsed by the chief of staff of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq in September 2007 and again this April.
Yet those endorsements appear to be contradicted by a more recent letter, dated June 23, from Mr. Hakim of the culture ministry, expressing the ministry’s “absolute rejection” of the Memory Foundation’s actions. On Saturday Mr. Makiya and an associate met with Mr. Hakim in Baghdad to present their case and explain the custodial nature of the Hoover Institution arrangement. The ministry has not yet formulated its response, Mr. Makiya said by telephone from London on Monday.
The foundation’s critics say the Iraq National Library and Archive, which is the state institution entrusted with historical records, is the rightful home for the documents. Considered one of Baghdad’s few functioning cultural institutions, the library has gained international support for its work, including that of the Library of Congress, and has already amassed other records from the former regime. “We are not naïve,” Mr. Eskander said in a telephone interview from Baghdad. “We know how to handle this material.”
Still, Mr. Makiya argues that the documents — because of their explicit mention of individual citizens’ relations to the Hussein government — are simply too dangerous to place in a general archive. He cites countries including Germany, Poland and Cambodia that have set up new institutions governed by special legislation to deal with such records. And he notes that the Iraqi parliament passed a law in January calling for the establishment of a special national archive for this type of material.
But other experts point out that the January legislation did not mention the Iraq Memory Foundation. “Most troubling is that this was done without the authority of a legislative body of the successor state,” said Trudy Huskamp Peterson, a former acting archivist of the United States, referring to the foundation’s assumption of control over the papers. “The state has a really legitimate claim to these documents.”
Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, said he agreed with the Iraq Memory Foundation that access to documents like Baathist archive is a delicate issue that needs to be addressed with extreme care. “How do you have accountability, but not revictimize the victimizers?” he said.
“Their mission is exemplary,” Mr. Blanton added. “As for how it plays out in today’s Iraq, politically and otherwise, I don’t know.”
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