The Ba'ath Party archives are a trove of archival documents relating to the history and governance of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party under the rule of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and

Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein (28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 until Saddam Hussein statue destruction, his overthrow in 2003 during the 2003 invasion of Ira ...

from 1968 to 2003. U.S. officials seized the archives in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The U.S. government completed its handover of the archive back to Iraq in 2020.

U.S. seizure and custody

Soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. exploitation teams scoured Ba'ath Party offices for records that could shed light on Iraq's WMD programs and alleged support for global terrorism—though this effort was impeded by the widespread looting of the early post-invasion period. A U.S. defense contractor, the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), discovered and took possession of millions of pages of documents in the basement of the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Baghdad. The IMF encountered obstacles to their plans to create a national memorial to Saddam's victims of human rights abuses, so in 2005 they turned over the documents temporarily to the U.S. military. The documents were scanned for analysis by the U.S.

Defense Intelligence Agency The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is an intelligence agency and combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) specializing in military intelligence. A component of the Department of Defense and the United States In ...

. In 2008, the IMF donated the materials to the

Hoover Institution Library and Archives The Hoover Institution Library and Archives is a research center and archival repository located at Stanford University, near Palo Alto, California in the United States. Built around a collection amassed by Stanford graduate Herbert Hoover p ...

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in California.

Contents and research

The

National Defense University National Defence (or Defense) University (or College) may refer to: :''Alphabetical by country'' University * Marshal Fahim National Defense University, Afghanistan * National Defense University (Azerbaijan) * People's Liberation Army National Defe ...

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, which owned digitized records of the archives, established the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) to enable academic research of the records. In 2011, the CRRC publicly released a small batch records, including notes from a meeting called by Saddam Hussein in reaction to the revelation of the

Iran–Contra affair The Iran–Contra affair (; ), also referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the Iran Initiative, or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that centered on arms trafficking to Iran between 1981 and 1986, facilitat ...

in 1986 and strategy deliberations from the early days of the

Iran–Iraq War The Iran–Iraq War, also known as the First Gulf War, was an armed conflict between Iran and Iraq that lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. Active hostilities began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran and lasted for nearly eight years, unti ...

. The CRRC also owned thousands of hours of Saddam's secretly recorded meetings and conversations. The CRRC closed in 2015 when the Defense Department cut its funding. The Hoover Institution's archive included 11 million records and was used by researchers on the Ba'ath Party's governance, repression of dissent, use of religion in the state, and demographic policies. About 3.8 million records consisted of the party's membership files.

Controversy and return to Iraq

Iraqi cultural scholars argued the seizures of the Ba'ath archives constituted an imperialistic theft of Iraq's heritage. In 2008, the

Society of American Archivists The Society of American Archivists is the oldest and largest archivist Voluntary association, association in North America, serving the educational and informational needs of more than 5,000 individual archivist and institutional members. Establi ...

and Association of Canadian Archivists jointly issued a statement calling for the return of the Ba'ath archive and other Iraqi documents. Although the 1907 Hague Convention permits conquering countries to seize the records of enemy states, the archivist groups argued that the Hague Convention did not apply to the Iraq Memory Foundation as a private organization. The IMF argued in response that Iraqi national institutions would need to exercise extreme caution handling the documents, as many of them named victims of Saddam's abusive regime. In 2010, Saad Eskander, head of the Iraq National Library and Archive, formally requested that Stanford return their document archive; the university declined, citing the unstable security situation in Iraq at the time. Motivated in part by cost-saving concerns, the U.S. Defense Department returned a tranche of 120 million documents in May 2013. A final batch of 6 million pages was delivered in August 2020.

References

External links

Hiẓb al-Ba'th al-'Arabī al-Ishtirākī Records (Ba'th Party Records)
at the Hoover Institution
Conflict Records Research Center
at the National Defense University (inactive)

U.S. seizure and custody

Contents and research

Controversy and return to Iraq

References

External links

Further reading