The Iraq Memory Foundation, Baath Party Archive & Wartime Plundering of Cultural Property

University of Colorado professor, Bruce P. Montgomery shares with AW a revealing journal publication he has authored.  It is an excellent study on the question of territorial provenance, ownership, and custody.  In it Montgomery looks in depth at the unique dynamics between the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), the US military, and the long-held contentious cultural property of Iraq in the hands of private US institutions.  Cultural property in the form of the former Iraqi government’s archives, the Baath Party Archive, normally fall into a category of state records that should be opened to citizens “‘in service of transitional justice, national reconciliation, and democratization’” as seen with the former Stasi regime archive, the Tuol Sleng Archives, inter alia.

Montgomery purports that through the extenuating circumstances of wartime Iraq in 2003 (as the emergence of civilian defense contractors under the US military like the IMF) and through a lack of legal frameworks, the IMF was able to evade direct contraventions to existing international laws and conventions that define cultural property theft or pillaging when the group transferred records out of Iraq.  Montgomery reveals that the legal status of contractors can be considered ambiguous at best because they ostensibly operated outside legal mechanisms. He presents arguments that the IMF, in the backdrop of this largely chaotic and tumultuous period for Iraqi citizens and the Hussein government, was able to leverage the situation to their advantage, circumventing legal protocols to transfer the Iraqi documents.  Consequently, the archives are not accessible to the citizens who could benefit from its use.  Thus, the circumstances surrounding the current fate of the archives has also been a barrier to legitimizing straightforward accusations of wartime pillaging of records.

Montgomery also traces the actions of various cultural and national institutions, non-government groups, and key officials in securing the country’s archives and the laws ensuring its possession.  He also outlines relevant international laws and conventions alongside the case – the Hague, Geneva, and UN conventions…

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Kuwait’s Missing National Archives

In an article released today in the online journal, Jurist, Douglas Cox of the City University of New York School of Law and of the blog, Documentation Exploitation, laments the still missing historical records of Kuwait. Cox brings attention to the issue as the last of US troops have left Iraq.  The Kuwaiti archives disappeared during the time of the 1990 invasion by Iraq and efforts to locate and repatriate the archives began in 2003 with a UN Security Council resolution.

Records relating to the whereabouts and final fate of the Kuwaiti archives are believed to lay in certain caches of Iraqi files and documents in US custody.  Last November it was reported that the Iraqi government was prepared to hand over some of the archives that it had looted back to Kuwaiti officials.  However, it seems that this does not include those in US custody.  Cox has reason to believe that Iraqi documents seized by the US during Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom potentially hold clues.  In his article, Cox implores the US government and the UN Security Council to assist the Iraqi government in restoring Kuwait with its historical memory…

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Saddam’s Regime in Hoover Institution Archive

The Hoover Institution’s collection on the Baath Party, which arrived at Stanford in 2008, includes nearly 11 million digitized pages and 108 video files.  Hoover holdings on Iraq comprise 15 collections, of which the Baath Party collection is the largest.  Standford University News claims that ”it may be the largest publicly accessible archive of documents collected from an authoritarian regime.”

The documents at Standford have given researchers and historians an unprecedented view of the inside workings of an authoritarian regime – and how the Baath Party became a bloated bureaucracy, fed by an unending atmosphere of war.  Scholars and journalists alike have used the documents in divergent and ways to shed some insights on the former regime…

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Contrast this reading with a 2008 New York Times article that highlights the political importance of controlling former regime archives.  In the New York Times piece, some Iraqi officials and members of the Society of American Archivists along with the Association of Canadian Archivists, deplored the ostensible rescue of these millions of Iraqi papers.

Repatriation of Anfal Files – Article link now available

In October, AW featured the article “Returning Evidence to the Scene of the Crime: Why the Anfal Files Should be Repatriated to Iraqi Kurdistan” by Bruce Montgomery and published in Archivaria.  I had previously remarked that the article was not yet made available for free on the Archivaria site.  Last week, Mr. Montgomery kindly provided AW with the link to his article.  The link is now available below.

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Podcast: Consequences of the US Invasion for Iraqi Archives

In April, Jeff Spur from Harvard University delivered a lecture on the Iraqi Archives.  A podcast of that talk has been made available by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Listen to podcast