[MSN] Librarians and archivists demand US return of stolen Iraqi documents

[MSN]

Librarians and archivists demand US return of stolen Iraqi documents
By Sandy English
1 March 2008

The removal of millions of pages of Interior Ministry documents from Iraq by
the American military has prompted calls from organizations and individuals
in the library and archives community for their return to the Iraqi people.

These documents, many of which detail the crimes of the regime of Saddam
Hussein and his predecessors, are now in the United States in the hands of
the military and intelligence agencies. Others are being held by a private
foundation in the US headed by pro-occupation Iraqis.

Some 43,000 to 55,000 boxes, amounting to over 100 million pages, were
seized from Baghdad by British and American forces in April 2003. These
included, according to the Associated Press, "memos, training guides,
reports, transcripts of conversations, audiotapes and videotapes." At the
urging of Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte posted a
few hundred on a military web site, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document
Portal," in March 2006.

The documents were removed from the Internet in November 2006 after the New
York Times informed the government that it was publishing an article that
alleged that the documents contained sensitive information on Iraq's
pre-1991 nuclear program, sparking a momentary crisis for the Bush
Administration.

At the time, little of the controversy around these documents centered on
the illegality of the United States holding, accessing, and publicizing
material that was the property of the Iraqi people.

Today, the whereabouts of the originals are unknown to the public, either
Iraqi or American. Digitized images of these documents now reside in the
computer networks of the US government, accessible to no one without
clearance from the American military-intelligence apparatus.

During a speaking tour in the United States between October and December,
Dr. Saad Eskander, the director general of the Iraqi National Library and
Archive (INLA), the country's main repository of historical materials,
called for the return of these documents to Iraq. (See: "Iraqi archivist
demands US return seized documents").

At its midwinter meeting last month in Philadelphia, the American Library
Association central council passed a resolution that called for millions of
stolen Iraqi documents now in the United States to be returned to INLA.

The resolution states that these documents "represent Iraqi social memory"
and that the ALA "condemns the confiscation of documents ... by the United
States and British forces and strongly advocates the immediate return of all
documents." This resolution has garnered support from professionals around
the world.

But, aside from the ALA's resolution and the demands of Eskander, little has
been said in the media about the legality of these documents' seizure or
their continued presence in the United States under the tight control of the
American government.

Another smaller selection of approximately 11 million pages of Iraqi
documents has, however, provoked intense debate in the last two months.
These are held by a private group called the Iraq Memory Foundation, based
Washington, DC, which has digitized them and recently arranged that the
original documents be delivered for safekeeping to the right-wing Hoover
Institution.

An Iraqi named Kanan Makiya, a former associate of CIA asset Ahmed Chalabi
and a vocal proponent of the American invasion of Iraq heads the Iraq Memory
foundation. Under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, Makiya published his 1989
book Republic of Fear depicting life in the Baathist state.

His book was seized upon by elements in American ruling circles, especially
the neo-conservatives, as ideological ammunition for promoting an invasion
and conquest of Iraq, both during the Gulf War of 1991 and in the lead-up to
the invasion of Iraq in 2003. According to George Packer's The Assassin's
Gate, Makiya sat next to Bush and wept as he watched the toppling of
Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Fardus Square, now known to be an event staged
by the US military.

Makiya returned to Iraq on the coattails of the occupation, gaining entry to
venues presumably secured by the Americans. According to a feature-piece by
Dexter Filkins in the New York Times Magazine, "Since 2003 Makiya and his
small staff have scoured Baath Party offices and dungeons, adding to a
collection that would reach more than 11 million pages of records."

Makiya has said that these documents were moved to his parents' home in
Baghdad's Green Zone with the approval of the Coalition Provisional
Authority. The article continues: "In February 2005, the Memory Foundation
reached an agreement with the US military to have the Baath Party documents
shipped to the United States. Government contractors here could complete the
digitizing process much more quickly, the foundation concluded, and Baghdad
was too volatile."

Once in the United States, the exact use of the documents is unclear. In an
article discussed below, Hassan Mneihmneh, the executive director of the
Iraq Memory Foundation, said that in order to have the documents transported
to the US and digitized, the foundation told the American military that the
documents "could be of intelligence value and that the Baath party structure
depicted in them might correspond to the insurgency."

Harvard University pulled back from a proposal to store the documents
fearing, apparently, that it might break international law by doing so.
Dutch cultural heritage specialist Rene Teijgeler has noted that in 2005 he
had advised a Harvard committee, on request, that "the legal owner [of the
archives held by Makiya] was the Iraqi state and that at least they should
contact the State Department. However, the State Department did not want to
get involved."

In a January 23 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, journalist
John Gravois revealed that the originals of the archives were now to be
stored at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. The
Iraq Memory Foundation claims that it had the support of an Iraqi deputy
prime minister for this transfer.

The article reported that Saad Eskander demanded the return of these
documents to INLA because "they are the inalienable public property and
belong in the national archive without delay." In an interview with Gravois,
Eskander emphasized that these documents belong to the Iraqi people and that
"Makiya just represents himself."

Makiya's supercilious response was that "Baghdad is just not ready" for the
return of the archives.

The article provoked an outcry among librarians, archivists, and academics.
Jeffery Spurr, Islamic and Middle East Specialist at Harvard University's
Fine Arts Library, in an e-mail to the IraqCrisis discussion group observed,
"That the newly-designated temporary custodian should be a private
institution, and that notable bastion of conservative views, the Hoover
Institution, should come as no surprise given that Mr. Makiya has perforce
become a fellow traveler of the Neo-cons since he made common cause with the
Bush Administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. That such an
institution in far-off California should consider itself the proper site for
these documents as opposed to the national archives of Iraq is the height of
arrogance."

He further noted, "Dr. Eskander was rebuffed at every turn by the
representatives of the IMF in Baghdad. In 2005, I myself encouraged Kanan
Makiya to communicate with Dr. Eskander, with whom I had been in
communication since 2004. Makiya was uninterested."

Spurr was also critical of Gravois article, claiming that it appears to
"privilege the self-serving arguments of Kanan Makiya and his colleagues,
and employs quotations from Dr. Trudy Huskamp Peterson, a prominent expert
on archives and international law relating to archives, in such a way as to
support the plausibility of the refusal to return the originals to their
proper custodian, the Iraq National Archive, and its Director General, Dr.
Eskander."

Perhaps in response to these and other criticisms, Gravois wrote a second
article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, published on February 8. He
provided some new information about the history of these archives, notably
that the US Navy had held them for 21 months, and took a more conciliatory
(and honest) tone, amending, for example, his representation of Trudy
Huskamp Petersen. The new article quotes her as saying that when it comes to
the issues of ownership of archives like those in the hands of the Iraq
Memory Foundation, ownership can only be passed on by an act of the Iraqi
parliament. "There's tons of literature on this. There's just no question."

Nevertheless, the second Gravois article, like the first, serves to obscure
the fundamental issues at hand in the removal of these documents from Iraq
and their possession by Makiya's Memory Foundation. Gravois portrays Makiya
as a "liberal idealist who brought moral ballast to the case for deposing
Saddam Hussein."

While it does quote Eskander's characterization of Makyia as "a spoiled
child of the State Department," the article frames the debate as though it
were a "tug of war" (part of the title of the article) between two
individuals, Kanan Makiya and Saad Eskander, equally concerned about the
documents and both determined to protect them with a "remarkably similar
vision."

This is an intellectual dodge. Makiya is not only a "spoiled child" of the
State Department; he is a collaborator with the United States in the
sociocide of Iraq.

As professionals in the field have made amply clear, these archives are
essential for the preservation of the social memory of the Iraqi people. The
"tug of war" between the two men represents something entirely different
than opposing opinions on the best way to preserve a set of archives.

Makiya is a defender of the rapacity of American imperialism and its
willingness to take whatever it wants from a people that it has militarily
overwhelmed. To commit a "sociocide"-the destruction of an entire culture-it
is not enough to kill a million people and drive millions of others form
their homes. Keeping the documents out of Iraq intellectually abases the
Iraq people. It goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of education at all
levels, the assassination of academics, and the fragmentation of common
culture by ethnic cleansing, and the looting of archeological sites.

The demand to return the documents held by the Iraq Memory Foundation, as
well as the larger group in the hands of the American military, represents
the desire of the Iraqi people to understand their own history and to be
able to determine their destiny though accurate and truthful knowledge of
the past.

It is significant that this demand has found increasing popularity among
educated people in the Europe and America. But the calls for the return of
the documents, including the ALA's, while principled, suffer from political
myopia. Nearly five years of the unrestrained plunder of Iraq, funded by
both Democrats and Republicans, have dismembered Iraqi culture, in itself a
vital aspect of the world historical legacy.

These actions call for more than appeals to return looted documents and
artifacts. The US government will not relent to these pleas, any more than
it did to the mass anti-war protests of 2003. Archaeological, library and
archival organizations must demand that the perpetrators of these
crimes-ranging from Kanan Makiya to figures at the highest levels of the
American government-be tried for war crimes. It is time to consider what
political strategy will achieve this goal.

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