Message from Jeff Spurr: Friends and colleagues, I am writing to call your attention to the fact that the Hoover Institution has apparently just made the contents of approximately ten million pages of Baath Party documents covering a very broad range of topics, plus other materials, available online. Please check out the announcement: hoover.org/library-and-archives/collections/middle-east/featured-collections/iraq-memory-foundation You may recollect that the Hoover made a pact with the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF) to take control of these materials as of June 2008. They had originally been acquired by the IMF in the free-for-all that followed the American invasion of March-April 2003, principally from the Baath Party headquarters in Baghdad (which representatives of the US military had previously rampaged through without securing the facility). Unlike some of the other actors in this rush, the IMF did receive the blessings of the Coalition Provisional Authority due to the collaboration of its founder, Kanan Makiya, with the Bush administration in the planning process in advance of the invasion. However, the scanning effort undertaken by the IMF within the Green Zone in the first years proved onerous, prompting Makiya and his colleagues to prevail upon the American armed forces to fly the documents surreptitiously out of Iraq to the US in 2005, specifically to a military base in West Virginia, where the whole lot was scanned. The scanning accomplished, the military wished to hand the originals back to Makiya. He proceeded to offer them to Harvard in 2007. Though Harvard had once considered the possibility of acting as a black site for the products of the scanning undertaken in Iraq (with no ultimate resolution), this proposal was rejected as untenable. I was present at this meeting, as I was for the whole process involving the IMF from the beginning, having been the person at Harvard first approached by Makiya. Given that Makiya had been dealing with the neocons in the Bush administration who had been promoting the invasion, it came as no surprise that he should then approach the Hoover. A formal delegation from the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, including Dr. Saad Eskander, Director-General of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA), visited the Hoover in April 2010, on which occasion they stated their claim that the rightful place for all such Iraqi documents is the INLA, not a private, (and, one might add, rightwing) institution in California. They were treated politely there, and a memorandum of understanding was signed, but there has been no positive issue from that event, just as the US government has not acted positively on behalf of the Iraqis in this matter either. Such neo-colonialist actions and attitudes remain, in my view, arrogant and insupportable, particularly coming in the wake of an invasion undertaken under false pretenses with many other grave and awful consequences for the Iraqi people and Iraqi cultural and educational institutions. I have written before on this topic in my third report that was made available on the web: “Report on Iraqi Libraries and Archives, 2010,” MELA Notes, no. 83 (2010), pp. 14-38 available at: mela.us/MELANotes/MELANotesIntro.html It is unclear whether the Hoover Institution undertook its own scanning process of these materials, but I am assuming that they did. Clearly, a host of privacy issues can be imagined regarding many of these sometimes highly sensitive and sometimes very personal documents given the intrusive character of the Iraqi state/ruling party. The statement on the site indicates that not everything has been made accessible in this manner, but without indicating what criteria were employed in the decision-making process. I would like to suggest that, with everything now fully digitally documented by the Hoover, any claim, however presumptuous, that they have made in the past to act as the protector of these documents has been obviated. The originals should now be returned to their rightful home, Iraq, and their proper repository, the Iraq National Library and Archive. Sincerely, Jeff Spurr
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 01:07:37 +0000
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