A Remembrance Museum in central Baghdad is needed to house and preserve the millions of Iraqi papers and records documenting Saddam Hussein's regime, according to speakers at a March Library of Congress symposium on Iraqi archives.
The mayor of Baghdad, Alla al-Tamimi, was the keynote speaker. He said he is granting to the Iraqi Memory Foundation a 40-year lease of the Crossed Swords ceremonial parade grounds complex in Baghdad, a 1-square-kilometer parcel of land, for the future museum site.
"It is a very important moment in history. We need to make a place in Baghdad for remembrance. Every citizen in Baghdad should know the truth of what has happened in Iraq," said Al-Tamimi, the city's first elected mayor. Fifty-one members of the Baghdad City Council elected him to his post in May 2004.
The symposium was sponsored by the Near East Section of the Library's African and Middle Eastern Division and the Iraq Memory Foundation. In addition to the keynote address, the symposium featured two panels of speakers, who conveyed the importance and challenges of preserving these documents, opening them up to Iraqi citizens and the world, and helping the people of Iraq recover from the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein.
During the first panel presentation, "The Iraq Memory Foundation: A Repository of Memory and Hope," Kanan Makiya, founder and president of the foundation, announced for the first time his effort to raise $100 million for the remembrance project.
"We will go out and ask for this money, from the United States Congress, from the Japanese government. Other countries, including those in Europe, would be asked to contribute, too."
During the late 1980s, Makiya explained, the Mitsubishi Corp. in Japan had spent $250 million to build an imposing monument of two crossed swords on the ceremonial parade grounds for Saddam Hussein to commemorate the Iraq-Iran War.
"Maybe the government of Japan, today, would like to rethink that contribution to Iraqi culture," he said.
Makiya also discussed the role and importance of memory. "There is history, and there is memory—two separate ideas, but interwoven with each other." In historical accounts, Makiya explained, a certain distance from the emotions and passions of the day is needed.
"Memory is very different from history," he said. "It is a willed activity, an activity in which a person is driven to record and to reach for evidence that might not otherwise be available. The act of striving for that evidence can somehow change the way we human beings are. Memory, unlike history, is an activity inextricably linked with identity. It changes the nature of what it means to be an Iraqi."
Carole Basri, the Grant Irey Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, was the second speaker on the panel. She explained the foundations' oral history project, an effort to give a voice to the Iraqi people who suffered themselves or witnessed horrific events under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The foundation has recorded 20 oral histories and plans to add 30 more by June.
"The soul of Iraq needs to be remembered and revived, because it was tortured by Saddam," Basri said. "What Saddam did was take away our memory, take away our humanity. What we can do is build an Iraq based on truth. Each persons' story is a truth, and those truths are the building blocks of history," she said.
"We can't have a history without those oral memories," Basri continued. "Without oral history, history is really flat. History can be altered. It's the oral history that provides the inner truth of the moment." She also said it will provide closure and healing of the psychic wounds of the Iraqi people.
Basri said the Iraq Memory Foundation conducts much research before an oral history is recorded. "There are several days of preparation to make sure of the credibility of that person, to make sure that person is actually willing to be a witness," she said. The foundation will show these oral histories on Iraqi television and throughout the Arab world. One was shown to the symposium audience.
Basri also spoke of her Iraqi-Jewish heritage and her own efforts to record her family history and also to learn why so many Jews fled Iraq in the late 1940s. She has written and directed a documentary short, "The Life of Frank Iny: A Granddaughter's Journey."
The second panel at the symposium featured five speakers and focused on the Iraq Memory Foundation's documents collection, which reveals the inner workings of Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party. There are some 2.4 million pages from North Iraq during the 1980s that provide a view into the regimes actions during the Iran-Iraq War, the Kurdish insurgency and the Anfal campaign. There are approximately 800,000 pages on Iraq's actions in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91. Finally, there are 3 million pages from 1991 to 2003 of reports and correspondence from the Baath Party headquarters.
Director of the documentation project for the foundation, Hassan Mneimneh, said he would like to see three things accomplished: the organization of the documents by storing and indexing them digitally, the creation of a library for them, and the creation of a think tank for further study and analyses of the information contained in the documents. In addition to making the materials available to academia and society in general, the ultimate aim is to make the information useful to individuals who need to research the fate of their family members during the regime.
Falih Jabar, director of the Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies in London, discussed the advantages and problems of providing free and open access to the foundation's documents. Academically and politically, it is important to have access to the materials. "It is impossible to go beyond a totalitarian system without understanding and examining what it was about," he said. "Examining the past also has the potential to be a healing process, a catharsis."
The problem, according to Jabar, is the strict Iraqi code of honor among its citizens. Any rape victim will "suffer forever" if that information is made public. "We should be careful about that. I'm advocating full access to the archives, but I'm suggesting that there should be some code of honor in how to use the documents," he said.
Peter Sluglett, professor of Middle East history at the University of Utah, talked about the importance of the documents in the context of Iraqi history. "The arduous task of assembling, listing and collecting these papers will make it possible for historians to reconstruct the painful history of Iraq, to study in great detail the anatomy and functioning of the police state, which was able to hold its citizens in thrall for the best part of 40 years," he said.
Roger Owen, director of the Middle Eastern Center at Harvard University, also addressed the collections significance. "One more thing about the uniqueness of this collection is its instantness," he said. Instead of waiting a prescribed number of years before government documents can be made available, as is the case in many countries, these materials will have instant accessibility. The documents also will help historians connect Iraq with its previous history. "We know quite a lot about Iraq through the 1970s. It's only with the beginning of the Iraq-Iran War of 1981 that the veil of secrecy falls down on economic and political matters," he said.
Dianne Van der Reyden, acting director for preservation at the Library, discussed the technical aspects of preserving the records for future generations. Mary Jane Deeb, head of the Near East Section of the Middle East Division at the Library, moderated the symposium.
