OPPRESSIVE REGIMES ACROSS the globe throughout history have maintained their grip on populations they sought to control through documentation. In ancient Mesopotamia record-keeping for the purpose of raising taxation was perhaps the first example of comprehensive surveillance of people. After the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066, the new regime surveyed the land to understand how it was arranged, who owned property of all kinds and where they were to be found. This was written down in a series of documents, the most famous being the Domesday Book. Eventually regimes would use secret surveillance to maintain control. During the French Revolution, and in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia citizens were closely monitored and documented in detail, and these documents would enable a fierce grip to be applied.
At the end of the Second World War the Russians held on to East Germany and half of Berlin. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) became the front line of the Cold War for the next forty-five years. On 8 February 1950 the communist regime created a state security organisation, the Stasi. The Stasi functioned as the GDR’s secret police, intelligence agency and crime investigation service, with ultimately 270,000 people working for it including 180,000 informers or ‘unofficial collaborators’. It spied on almost every aspect of East Germans’ daily lives as well as carrying out international espionage. It kept files on about 5.6 million people and amassed an enormous archive, which holds 111 kilometres of files in total. As well as written documentation, the archive has audiovisual material such as photos, slides, film and sound recordings. The Stasi even had an archive of sweat and body odour samples which its officers collected during interrogations.
After the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party stepped down on 3 December 1989, the Stasi became the last bastion of the dictatorship. Across East Germany political organisations, led by the Neue Forum, became concerned that the Stasi might try to burn their records and files, in order to cover up their activities. On the morning of 4 December, detecting smoke from the chimneys of the Stasi district headquarters in Erfurt, local political groups concluded that the Stasi must be destroying files. With the help of other citizens a women’s group, ‘Women for Change’ (in German: Frauen für Vertrauen), occupied the building and the neighbouring Stasi remand prison, where the Stasi stored files for safekeeping.1 This instigated the takeover of Stasi buildings all over East Germany. Citizens gained access to the Stasi headquarters in Berlin on 15 January 1990. The unified German state soon took responsibility for those records, and when the Stasi Records Act was passed in December 1991 it set out the rights of people to view them. By January 2015 over 7 million people had applied to view their own Stasi files.
The East German Stasi were to prove an inspiration for the use of surveillance and documentation for other oppressive regimes in central and eastern Europe and in the Middle East. The subsequent use of their archives would also be an example of how these records can be used to heal a broken society.
The issue of archives as central to the social order, the control of history, and the expression of national and cultural identity continues to be a pressing concern in the twenty-first century. At the time of writing, a significant proportion of the national archives of modern Iraq are located in the United States, the country still seen by many in Iraq as their enemy. These documents are essential to form a thorough understanding of the tumultuous events that have shaped the country, the entire region, and to some extent the whole world since the assumption of power of the Ba’ath Party in 1968, but they could also serve a beneficial social purpose in helping Iraq come to terms with decades of civil conflict.
The most important of these collections is that of the Ba’ath Party. The Hizb al-Ba’ath al-’Arabī al-Ištirākī (the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party) was the sole and dominant force in Iraq’s political and governmental affairs for thirty-five years. From his taking over the presidency in 1979 until his overthrow in April 2003 Saddam Hussein used the organisation and resources of the Ba’ath Party to assert an extraordinary degree of control over the country, due mainly to the state security organisations which sponsored surveillance of citizens, a culture of informants, and the forced suppression of any perceived dissent.2
During Saddam Hussein’s period in command, training and guidance was provided at various times by the East German Stasi, although in a much more limited way than the Ba’athist Iraqis would have preferred.3 The Iraqis reached out to the Stasi after the Ba’ath Party seized power in 1968. The Stasi trained Iraqi officers in covert surveillance (especially bugging), the use of secret ink and in decoding communications, as well as in the protection of high-ranking political officials.4
The Ba’ath Party collections have been moved to the United States because of a sustained interest in Iraq by the international community. But their removal there was also due to the influence of a handful of individuals, whose passion and determination would be critical to their preservation, often in the face of profound criticism, and even at the risk of their lives.
The first collection relates to Kuwait. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was executed with lightning speed: the whole country was overrun and occupied within twenty-four hours. Following the invasion came the formal annexation when Kuwait was declared an Iraqi province. The invasion was roundly condemned by the international community. In November 1990 the United Nations passed a resolution giving Iraq until 15 January 1991 to withdraw, and authorising the use of force if it did not comply. The allied attack began on 16 January 1991 and liberation from Iraqi domination followed on 28 February.5 As the Iraqi forces pulled out of Kuwait in a hurry they left large caches of documents behind them. These were taken to the United States where they were digitised by the US Defense Agency; over time a portion of them have been declassified. Digital files of the Kuwait material eventually found their way to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University where they are known as the Kuwait Dataset.6
The Kurdish uprising of 1991, which followed in the wake of the disaster in Kuwait, was the result of decades of friction between the Ba’athist government of Iraq and Kurdish peoples in the north of the country. The ferocity of the Iraqi attacks from the mid-1970s, known as the ‘Anfal’, which the Kurdistan Democratic Party called ‘a racist war of extermination’,7 turned it into an international incident. Kurdish villages were routinely shelled and bombed, the weapons used including napalm and poison gas. In response, Kurdish forces took advantage of the international pressure on Iraq following the first Gulf War to push the Iraqis out of their territory, overrunning a number of administrative centres, including regional command centres of the Ba’ath Party in northern Iraq, at Sulaymanïyah, Dahuk and Erbil. In the process the Kurds seized millions of administrative records, by some estimates weighing in at an impressive 18 tons. The Kurds knew the value of these documents and removed them to caves in remote parts of Kurdistan and other areas for safekeeping. The condition of the documents was poor – they were crammed into sacks and ammunition crates – and had lost all sense of ‘archival order’; yet those documents were to have a profound impact on world affairs and the future of Iraq.
In November 1991 Kanan Makiya travelled to the Kurdish-held regions of northern Iraq. Makiya, an Iraqi expatriate, is a central figure in the story of the archives of Iraq, and through him the documentary record would move to the centre of international politics and determine Iraq’s history over many decades. One of the extraordinary aspects of Makiya’s actions is that he used archives as the heart of his campaign as evidence to expose injustice, the reign of terror and cruelty and to make the international community stand up and take action: he would develop what he calls an ‘obsession’ with archives.8
Makiya’s parents had fled Iraq in the 1970s, his father having fallen foul of the totalitarian regime; they relocated their architectural practice to London. Makiya was a student at MIT studying architecture while his parents were fleeing Baghdad. In London he associated with dissident groups and even co-founded an Arabic bookshop which helped to disseminate publications about the Middle East – not just classical Arabic culture, but especially current affairs, as he felt that the West was, at the time, ‘drowning in a sea of lies’, unable to see the truth of what was happening in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In 1989, under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, Kanan Makiya published a book called Republic of Fear, which drew on the sources he found circulating among the dissident community, but also those he found in the British Library, the Library of Congress and in the Widener Library at Harvard, in order to expose the tyranny of Saddam’s Iraq. Subsequent editions appeared under his own name and he instantly became a prominent opponent of the Iraqi regime. In 1991 it was reissued as a paperback, and was read again as the political situation in Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion in August 1990 made its contents intensely relevant and took the book on to the bestseller lists. From this point Makiya became a key intellectual figure in opposition to the Iraqi regime.9
Makiya was seen as an ally by the Kurds who showed him documents that he began to realise could be of invaluable use in raising awareness of the human rights violations perpetrated against the Kurds. As he put it, his earlier book had been ‘like a physician judging a person’s malady from external symptoms only. What the documents would do is allow the physician to look inside the patient’s body.’10
The main groups of records were under the control of the allied Kurdish political organisations – the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party – united in their hatred of Saddam’s Iraq. As the 1990s progressed they realised that handing them over to the United States could enhance the status of their organisations. They reached an agreement that allowed for the documents to be airlifted out of Kurdish-held northern Iraq via an airbase in Turkey and placed in the custody of the US National Archives.11 The archivists then got to work, rehousing them in 1,842 archival boxes, allowing them to be safely handled by staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Middle East Watch under the direction of Joost Hiltermann whose team had digitised 5.5 million documents by the end of 1994. By this point the documents were being treated as one archive. In 1997, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee transferred the documents (and a copy of the digital files) into the custody of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The transfer was made strictly under terms that Kanan Makiya insisted on: the rightful ownership of the files lay with the Iraqi people, held in trust in the United States until a state existed in Iraq that was willing to preserve them in an archive similar to the one established in Germany, where the archive of the Stasi was made available to the public.12
In 1992, Kanan Makiya had established a small research group called Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP), based at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies, and arranged for copies of the digitised files of the majority of the boxes (but not all of them) to be given to the IRDP. Over the course of the following year the digitised files were put into a database system and metadata was added to these files: names of individuals, originating departments, key event dates, and summaries of contents. The IRDP website in 1999 boasted that it was ‘the single largest collection of Iraqi records ever to become public’. Makiya’s intention was that it be studied and analysed for the good of Iraqi society. This broader social purpose, made all the more urgent due to the human rights violations happening every day in northern Iraq, was at the heart of what he was trying to do: provide evidence of injustice and to raise awareness of what was happening to the Kurdish people so that pressure could be brought to bear on the international community to intervene. The ethical dilemma soon became clear, however. Publishing original documents was putting the lives of Iraqis at risk, as putting these documents in searchable form online exposed the names and personal details of many individuals to those forces that might cause them harm. The decision was made to take any files that revealed personal details down from the public website.
Makiya’s advocacy for regime change in Iraq, which he developed through the information he had gleaned from the archives captured by the Kurds, became very influential in American foreign policy circles as the 1990s turned into the twenty-first century. His was one of the voices listened to by the White House as the mood began to shift towards a second Gulf War and the forcible removal of Saddam and the Ba’ath Party from power. The Iraqi archives in the United States began to be searched for hints about weapons of mass destruction. Makiya’s passionate view about the Iraqi regime began to make a difference to the hardening of attitudes in Washington.
A critical turning point for him was an appearance on a popular current affairs TV programme, Now, hosted by veteran American political commentator Bill Moyers, alongside the writer Walter Isaacson and historian Simon Schama, where he urged a second Gulf War, and made a profound moral case for a successful transition. The show, which was broadcast on 17 March 2003, went straight to the hot topic of the day: the anticipated invasion of Iraq. ‘The American army is not just going in there to destroy things. It’s going there to build things,’ Makiya said to Moyers. The presenter questioned him on the evidence for injustices in Iraq and he replied, referring to the archives, ‘We’ve got evidence coming out of our ears. I have lists of disappeared people. I just said, a million and a half people killed, Iraqis killed, since 1980, violently at the hands of the regime.’ Later in the programme Moyers put the million-dollar question to him: ‘And you are convinced war is the right option?’ Makiya replied: ‘There’s no alternative. There’s a war already going on. And it’s a war being waged on the Iraqi people.’13 Such advocacy was highly influential in governmental circles. On the eve of the war Kanan Makiya was close to the US leadership, with George Bush personally informing him that there would be an invasion. Less than a month later US forces invaded Iraq and Makiya watched the invasion with the president in the Oval Office.14 He was unprepared for the chaos that would ensue.
‘Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze’, proclaimed the Guardian on 15 April 2003, reporting that: ‘As flames engulfed Baghdad’s National Library yesterday, destroying manuscripts many centuries old, the Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the widespread looting of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American archaeologists.’15 As the invasion continued, the focus of attention would move from libraries to museums; looted antiquities would dominate the agenda of the world’s press in terms of cultural heritage: Mounir Bouchenaki, UNESCO’s Assistant Director General for Culture, would describe the looting of artefacts as a ‘catastrophe for the cultural heritage of Iraq’. Equally, if not more catastrophic for the country, was the destruction and sequestration of archives and libraries occurring across Iraq, which would continue almost invisibly to the international press for the following fifteen years.
As traditional forms of documentation came under attack new forms were emerging. The invasion of Iraq was the first conflict in modern history to be live-reported on social media. The ‘Baghdad Blogger’, Salam Abdulmunem, provided a vivid insight into life in Iraq’s capital city, evoking the fear and trepidation of what was to come. ‘Impossibly long lines in front of gas stations last night’, he blogged on 17 March 2003, adding that there were ‘rumors of defaced picturs [sic] of Saddam in Dorah and Thawra Districts’. Television was still accessible to Iraqis, and Salam wrote: ‘The images we saw on TV last night … were terrible. The whole city looked as if it were on fire. The only thing I could think of was “why does this have to happen to Baghdad”. As one of the buildings I really love went up in a huge explosion I was close to tears.’ The invasion of this Second Gulf War (as it has since come to be known) came at a terrible cost in human life: between 4,000 and 7,000 Iraqi civilians and 7,000 to 12,000 members of the security forces lost their lives. Fewer than two hundred British and American troops were killed.16
The archives of the Ba’ath Party were being abandoned to their fate in a series of underground chambers beneath Baghdad as the American bombs fell on the city. The archive is known by various terms of description but most commonly as the Ba’ath Regional Command Collection (BRCC); it had for the most part resided in a network of rooms underneath the Ba’ath Party headquarters in Baghdad. In addition to this largely paper archive, there was a collection of audio recordings made at the behest of the Iraq Security Services. As the party held such a prominent and central position in the Iraqi state, its papers take the form essentially of governmental records (unlike the position of most countries which can more easily separate political party records from national archives).
Kanan Makiya had no notion of it as a collection, and even less did he sense that this would become such a key part of his life, and of the future of his country in the years to come. He had been invited to a meeting in the south of Iraq in June 2003 with around sixty other Iraqis who were gathered to ‘think through the transition’. He was optimistic about the future of post-Saddam Iraq: ‘Iraq is rich enough, developed enough, and has the human resources to become as great a force for democracy and economic reconstruction in the Arab and Muslim worlds as it has been a force for autocracy and destruction,’ he wrote shortly after the invasion.17
Post-invasion Baghdad was a place of chaos, rumour and destruction. When a US Army captain asked Kanan Makiya for advice about a large quantity of documents in the basement of the central headquarters of the Ba’ath Party in Baghdad, Makiya was curious. He was taken down into a labyrinth of basements ‘like Aladdin’s cave’. The basements were knee-deep in water in parts, and there was no electricity, but the network of rooms contained shelf after shelf of documents, many of them on racks that had fallen over, splaying their contents over the floor. Makiya examined some of the documents and files and could see immediately that this was a major source of information. He knew instantly that it had to be saved.
Makiya’s parents had built a large house in Baghdad before they fled the country in 1971 and this was fortunately situated in the Green Zone, an area protected by the US military. He found US officers based there and managed to use his influence with Paul Bremer, the most senior civilian administrator at the Coalition Provisional Authority, to move the documents out and transferred to his control. He could hardly believe his luck: his parents’ old house was now the official headquarters of the organisation he established to deal with the Iraqi archives, the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF). The material began to be moved from the basement to the house and the process of digitising it began.18 Hewlett-Packard donated scanners, and the IMF staff, augmented by a team of Iraqi volunteers, were able to scan 80,000 pages a month (given that the archive today amounts to more than 6 million pages this was not nearly fast enough).19 It was very dangerous work: attempts were made to destroy the archive, possibly by former Ba’ath Party officials, and members of the team received death threats. At one point a rocket landed on the roof of the house but miraculously did not explode. Given the descent into violent civil war within Iraq, a decision was made to remove the archive, which felt like a sensible precaution.
The Department of Defense funded its removal under supervision by Makiya’s team, to a huge military hangar in Virginia. Here a large-scale processing facility was set up, with an assembly line who were able to scan 100,000 pages per day. Within nine months the job was done. Documents from that collection, and from the material captured by the Kurds, went on to form evidence heard by the tribunal accusing Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging on 30 December 2006.
The Ba’ath Party archives are now in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. The various accounts relating to the move of the archive all agree that it was originally set up as a short-term arrangement.20 The archive would be secured and administered by a highly professional team of staff, but history was already being controlled by the victor of the Second Gulf War. Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq National Library and Archive, wrote:
Within the space of three days, Iraq National Library and Archive lost a large portion of Iraq’s historical memory. Hundreds of thousands of archival documents, and rare books were lost forever … As a direct result of the two fires and lootings, the National Archive lost about 60 percent of its archival materials. In one word: it was a national disaster on a large scale. These losses cannot be compensated. They formed modern Iraq’s historical memory.21
The material found by the Kurds, and the Ba’ath Party archive, were not the only collections taken from Iraq. The Iraqi secret police files also found their way to the University of Colorado Boulder.22 Collections of documents in numerous government and defence buildings were discovered and removed. These collections were much larger than the Ba’ath Party archives and were taken to Qatar where they were digitised to help in the search for weapons of mass destruction, the motivation being very different from the rendition of documents by the Kurds, which was to expose the abuse of human rights. This set of files is the largest of them all – estimated to be over 100 million pages. Selections were made and released online by the Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense University, and the majority of these records were returned in May 2013, when 35,000 boxes on 634 pallets were loaded into transport planes and flown back to Iraq.23 The Ba’ath Party records, however, remain.
Given the collapse of civil society in Iraq, and the role that archives played in the case for invasion, was the removal of the archives the right thing to do? Kanan Makiya now regrets his urging for the invasion in 2003 but not the removal of the archives. The Iraqi state had ‘rotted during the 1990s … hollowed out by sanctions from the west’,24 and as a result the 2003 invasion was not a real war, as there was no opposition: ‘the whole pack of cards came tumbling down’. No one outside Iraq, including himself and the decision makers in the Bush administration, realised that the Iraqi state had become so corroded. Nor did he expect the social order to evaporate so quickly after the invasion: ‘the snowballing of the catastrophe that is post-2003 Iraq transfixed me’.25
Archives played an important part in shaping the political arguments that led to the Second Gulf War and its aftermath. The impact of the two Gulf wars on the world has been profound, stimulating global terrorism on an unprecedented scale, with the social and economic catastrophe that has swept up Iraq and other countries in the region, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands across the globe arguably the result. Has the continued absence of the Iraqi archives delayed the healing of that society?
It is possible to contrast the effects of access to archives in Iraq with that of East Germany after the collapse of communism. The contrast between what happened in the former eastern bloc countries and Iraq is one that puzzled me for many months as I grappled with the ethical problems of the removal of the Iraqi archives. Without them, how could they face up to their difficult past?26 In Germany an organisation called the Gauck Authority was set up after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to administer the process of opening up, in a very controlled manner, access to the Stasi archives. Could Iraq have achieved similar levels of social progress that the opening up of archives – albeit mediated by the Gauck Authority – had enabled in the former East Germany? Arguably the process in Germany was successful because the West German economy was strong enough to allow it to be well resourced. Joachim Gauck, the former East German priest who set up the Gauck Authority (and later became Germany’s president), developed a sophisticated organisation that could carefully control the release of information to citizens, so as not to compromise the safety of others. By 1994 Gauck employed 3,000 staff, with a huge budget, and they were able to process millions of requests for access to, and information from, the files.27 Without the funds to resource it properly the whole enterprise could have been disastrous. This could well have been the case in Iraq.
A further set of documents relating to Iraq’s most recent history has appeared in several different, and unrelated, online presentations. The most high-profile and controversial of these has been the work of Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times journalist embedded within the Iraqi army. She accessed buildings recently seized from ISIS control and came across 15,000 pages of documents and computer hard disks – information that has been central to her work on ‘The ISIS Files’, relating to the terrorist organisation calling itself Islamic State, which started as a splinter group of al-Qaeda and which attempted to take control of territory in Syria and Iraq. Callimachi was not granted – and did not seek – permission to remove the documents from Iraqi territory, she just took them. She has since been working with the George Washington University to digitise, translate and publish the documents online, alongside lengthy journalistic materials in the form of a podcast and pieces in the newspaper, only allowing others to access them after her own journalism has been published. This process raises the familiar issues surrounding the legal and moral authority to remove and publish documents from their country of origin.28
The documents have revealed a lot of important information about how the Caliphate, established in June 2014 by ISIS, operated. There is a good deal of detail on the workings of the administrative structures, and the way they affected the lives of ordinary people through, for example, setting prices (ranging from the cost of caesarean births to satsumas) or detailing the punishments for certain crimes (death for homosexuals, eighty lashes for those found drinking wine). These documents are very different to the earlier documents removed from Iraq, as ISIS was not an Iraqi organisation but a transnational body stretching across Iraq and Syria and not replacing the political structures of Iraq but asserting a new one. Key ethical questions remain concerning Callimachi’s behaviour: were the documents removed illegally? Was it responsible to publish them, especially when living individuals are mentioned in the documents, potentially putting their lives at risk?
The amount of documents now being published by Callimachi is small in comparison to the vast caches removed by the US government but it shows the continued centrality of archives in understanding political and social events across the globe. During the last decade the position of the Iraqi archives, especially those of the Ba’ath Party, have been the subject of great critical debate, involving prominent individuals and organisations. The key questions remain: were they illegally taken? Should they be returned?
The Iraqi documents have a complex history. The first tranche, found by the Kurds, played a decisive role in prompting the Second Gulf War, but they also exposed the horrors of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Kurds can hardly be blamed for using them to draw attention to the horrific acts perpetrated against them. The Ba’ath Party documents saved in Iraq by Kanan Makiya have shown the control exercised by the Ba’athist regime in shocking detail. The role of informers, the execution of dissenters, the war against the Kurds, all the details of these aspects of life in Iraq and more have since been made more widely known as a result. Had they remained in Baghdad, even the American military may have struggled to protect them. But the documents have not been in the hands of the Iraqi people, and it has not been possible for them to play a role in their country’s social development such as the opening of the Stasi archives achieved in East Germany.
Inspired by the Holocaust museums in Europe and America and by the experience of South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had used archives and oral testimonies as part of their social healing, Kanan Makiya saw the possibility of creating a museum in Baghdad to house the material he had found. The atrocities of the past had to be ‘remembered’.
Iraqis have had a decade of trying to forget the past forty years. A new generation deserves the opportunity to ‘remember’ or to understand what happened – but as Iraqis rather than as members of an imposed regime. Sadly, as I write in early 2020, the Iraqi archives held at the Hoover Institution have not been returned to the safekeeping of the Iraqi government. The geopolitical situation in the region has not made this possible. But without the ability to use those archives to face up to their past, the Iraqi people will struggle to move into the future.