With 6 million classified documents … America will return the Ba’ath Party archive to Iraq
With 6 million classified documents … America will return the Ba’ath Party archive to Iraq
01/09/2020 8:55
International: Where’s News} The American “Wall Street Journal” revealed that the United States had returned the archives of the ousted Iraqi Baath Party to Baghdad via an American military cargo plane.
This step by US officials comes as a goodwill initiative for the new prime minister, Mustafa Al-Kazemi, according to the newspaper.
The United States had reserved the Iraqi archive in order to protect it, with the escalation of violence in Baghdad 15 years ago, two years after the fall of the ousted President Saddam, who was one of the leaders of the Baath Party.
The shipment of this archive, which contains about 6 million documents, is now in a safe but unknown location in the capital, Baghdad.
In 2013, the United States returned a different set of documents it preserved after the 2003 war that toppled the Baath Party.
The Baath Party was established in the 1940s as a secular Arab nationalist movement, while Saddam joined the party in 1957, where he used it to impose his iron will on the country after he took power.
After the chaos that engulfed Baghdad in April 2003, Academician Kanan Makiya and the current Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kazemi (at the time running the Iraqi Memory Foundation) returned to Iraq from Britain, and discovered piles of documents and documents in a basement, where Makiya worked to transfer these documents to his home. His family, with American blessings, to save them, according to the newspaper.
As sectarian violence increased in the capital, the documents were transferred to the United States, in a brunt of possible destruction, where they were initially kept in West Virginia, before being sent to the Hoover Institution, a conservative think-tank at Stanford University in California.
The Hoover Foundation maintains a digital archive of all these documents.
In a 2008 statement, the American Archives Association and the Canadian Archives Association urged that these documents be returned to the Iraqi government, at a time when Kanan Makiya was saying that the Iraqi government had formally agreed to rearrange the archives by the Hoover Institution.
alliraqnews.com
