Iraq records spark controversy.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT: News, Trends & Analysis

Millions of Saddam Hussein's records could soon be accessible at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, but the plan has been criticized by the director of the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA).

The Washington, D.C.-based Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF) gathered some seven million documents from Hussein's Ba'ath Party headquarters after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and loaned them to the Hoover Institution this year. In between, the IMF's director, exiled Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya, stored the records in his parents' home in Baghdad, according to The Stanford Report.

Makiya's group began digitizing the records and reached an agreement with the U.S. military in 2005 to store the documents in West Virginia while the digitizing process was finished. When digitization was completed, the foundation decided that Iraq was too volatile to return the documents and opted to send them to Hoover where they would presumably be safer. The documents arrived at Stanford on three semi-trailers in February and are currently being stored off campus, according to Richard Sousa, Hoover's senior associate director. Since then, he said, the collection has been cleaned, sorted, and catalogued.

The Stanford Report said Hoover will hold the documents for five years and then return them to Iraq. Sousa said the institution's agreement with the IMF was approved by Iraq's deputy prime minister, the Ministry of Culture, and the cabinet of the prime minister's office. He said he does not know who technically owns the documents.

However, in June, Saad Eskander, INLA director, wrote an open letter to the director of the Hoover Institution in which he criticized this plan and called the records "illegally seized documents of the former Iraqi state and the archive of the Ba'ath Party." He also stated that the more than five million pages of records are the property of Iraq and should be sent to Iraq's national archives immediately.

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"The Iraqis inside and outside the country have supported my position and disapproved of Makiya, al-Kadhemi [Mustafa al-Kadhemi, IMF director] and the IMF's activities, which are considered to be morally wrong and manifest violations of Iraq's...