< Records 'Too Dangerous' To Stay In Iraq

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Heard on All Things Considered

July 4, 2008 - This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.

And here's a question that has riled up many professional archivists, a question of more than academic interest: Where should the paper trail of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party be stored? And who should be in charge of it? More to the point, why are the Baath Party archives at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, instead of in Baghdad?

Well, the short answer is because that's where Kanan Makiya decided to put them. Makiya runs the Iraq Memory Foundation. For many years he was an anti-Baathist dissident in exile. His decision has angered the head of the Iraq National Library, as well as the Society of American Archivists.

Kanan Makiya joins us from London. Welcome back to the program once again.

Mr. KANAN MAKIYA (Director, Iraq Memory Foundation): Thank you, Robert. Nice to be back.

SIEGEL: First, why should these documents - I gather millions of pages of them - why should they reside in the U.S. instead of in Iraq?

Mr. MAKIYA: Robert, it's only temporary, and they don't belong to anybody other than the Iraqi government by the understanding of all the parties concerned in this agreement, which is the Iraq Memory Foundation, which I head; Hoover Institution, and the Iraqi government.

They are there temporarily because we were able to scan them at an extremely rapid rate, and because it was not safe to return them last year, when the security situation was still not very good.

SIEGEL: But the director of the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad, Saad Eskander, he says the arrangement between your foundation and the Hoover Institution is, his phrase, incontrovertibly illegal. And his point is that you and the foundation really don't have the right to decide where the paper should be held. That should be the government that's making that decision.

Mr. MAKIYA: But exactly - my point is that we didn't decide this alone. The Iraqi government has decided it. He knows that. Unfortunately, the minister under whom he serves did not know the whole background of the story. And when I sat with him last Saturday, I informed him the whole background. He has gone to review the whole situation and he has said to me personally that a retraction is required by his ministry under the circumstances that were revealed to him.

It's a situation of one part of the government not knowing exactly what transpired under another part.

SIEGEL: Apart from the question of documents that might be forgeries or that might be authenticated...

Mr. MAKIYA: Right.

SIEGEL: ...there probably are accurate statements within these archives that could end careers for people - people in politics, in the military, in the security forces in Iraq.

Mr. MAKIYA: True.

SIEGEL: Should there be some systematic, if edited, release of that information so it's all available to the Iraqi people? Or can the country not withstand that right now?

Mr. MAKIYA: I think they should not be just dumped on the public. That would be, in my opinion, irresponsible. I think the information has to gradually be made accessible. But it is very important that it not become a political football. One of the things that it does, apart from destroying people's careers, is it devalues the documents themselves.

The primary function and value of these documents is that this is the record of what was done to Iraqis by other Iraqis over a very long period of time, and what it means to be an Iraqi in a post-Saddam era.

SIEGEL: Would there be a risk, though, of vendettas, of people being killed for what's in those archives?

Mr. MAKIYA: There is a risk, yes. And there's a very large risk of perfectly innocent people being hurt. I'll give you a simple example. Twenty-five years ago, a young woman had to apply to the secret police for permission to take a certain job. She was allowed to take her job on a condition she reports on her fellow colleagues and workers. This is 25 years ago.

To release such information now is patently irresponsible and could lead to great personal pain to her and her family, and I think that's wrong.

SIEGEL: And yet - I don't know her case obviously - but if there were other people who worked with her who lost their jobs as result of what she wrote, if that is true, then they have a claim to want to understand what happened to them and why.

Mr. MAKIYA: They do. It's very easy to pull a piece of paper out which names a name and it can make all sorts of claims about it. It's very difficult to see that piece of paper in context against the whole background, to interview the relevant people involved and so on. An institution, a process, hundreds of civil servants dedicated to this task, governed by certain rules of privacy and secrecy - all this has to be institutionalized before you can begin releasing this kind of information in a responsible way. As to when such an institution might be ready, Robert, I really don't know.

SIEGEL: Well, Kanan Makiya of the Iraq Memory Foundation in London, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Mr. MAKIYA: Thank you, Robert.

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