Iraqis strive to preserve national memory

‘Historians of Iraqi history will be privileged to have access to officials Iraqi documents. In Britain, documents are declassified only after 30 years,’ said historian Roger Owen

WASHINGTON DC - Alternative Staff

March 2005

The Iraqi National Foundation and Baghdad’s Mayor announced the transformation of one square kilometer of Saddam Hussein’s deposed regime’s Festivities Square into a museum.

The announcement was made during a day-long conference at the Library of Congress in Washington DC during which the foundation also said that it successfully managed to salvage some six million documents of the former regime.

These documents, according to Kenaan Makiyya, president of the foundation and author of the world famous book on Saddam’s regime, Republic of Fear, will be also scanned and their contents will be available online in order to serve both relatives of victims of the deposed regime locate their loved ones and to serve as primary sources for future historians.

“I announce my intention to donate to the foundation a one square kilometer piece of land in the Festivities Square to be transformed into a museum,” said Ala Tamimi, Baghdad’s mayor. “We want to preserve our national memory so that what happened under Saddam shall never happen again,” he added.

“These documents can be classified into three sets,” said Makiyya. “The first set of 3.2 million documents was collected by the Peshmarga Kurdish fighters upon their capture of Iraqi offices in the 1980s.”

The second set, he added, was seized by the Kuwaiti government after the liberation of Kuwait of Saddam’s forces in 1991. The second set is composed of 800,000 document.

“The last set of 4.2 million documents we collected from different parties who acquired them from public offices after the liberation of Baghdad in April 2003,” he argued.

According to Makiyya, the area his foundation will be transforming into a museum is huge and needs at least $100 million. “I tell you, for the first time maybe, that we will be knocking on doors of international governments, like the US government that has created this library, seeking donations and funds.”

Makiyya said that, in collaboration with the mayor’s office, his foundation would seek funds from other governments. “Perhaps the Japanese government and especially the Mitsubishi Corporation would like to donate some money,” he said arguing that it was the Mitsubishi Corporation that constructed “the abhorrent (victory) swords.”

He added that his foundation’s resources were meager and not enough to scan the huge number of documents that have been preserved.

Meanwhile, prominent scholars commended the project, saying that it was essential for future generations that national memory be preserved. “Through my stay in Baghdad, I’ve discovered that under Saddam, each group invented a secret term to represent the tyrant, and every group has its own term to call Saddam,” said Iraqi sociologist Faleh Abdul-Jabbar.

“It is essential that we talk about the Saddam era and analyze it so that we can put it behind us and move forward, toward a better future,” he added.

Abdul-Jabbar, who is a noted sociologist for his work The Shiites of Iraq, said that his country was in dire need for such projects and thanked its sponsors for going forward with it.

For his part, the well-known British Middle East historian Roger Owen said that the best part “of the deal was that a great amount of Iraqi official documents” was being made available to scholars. “In England, you have to wait for 30 years to gain access to such sources. This means that the Iraqis will be privileged of this kind of declassification and would have the chance to write their history earlier than possible,” he argued.

Carol Basri, a Jewish Iraqi American, said that her curiosity about her roots made her discover how hard it was to trace her Iraqi ancestry.  Basri, the producer of two documentaries about Iraqi Jews, said that it was imperative that Iraqis record their “oral history.”

In order to do that, she argued, producers of such records needed to train their sources and provide them with enough comfort so that these witnesses who have survived Saddam’s brutality would be able to retain what has been engraved in their memories.

Basri said that oral history was essential for the understanding of any nation’s history, just like accounts of survivors of the Holocaust were the main source of the history of this tragic aspect of human history.

Meanwhile, historian Paul Slugett said that the documents offer one of the rare chances to historians to accurately record an important  period of the Middle East’s history.