The archive as an artefact of conflict: the North Iraq Dataset

ABSTRACT

An uprising in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq in 1991 against the rule of the central government led to the overthrow of the Baʿth regime’s institutions. During the revolt, members of the public and of Kurdish political groups seized large amounts of official records. The regime responded to the revolt brutally and retook the regions within three weeks. However, the records, the bulk of which were created by the government’s security offices, had been hidden away. In the following two years, Kurdish groups reached agreements with the United States government and an international non-governmental organization to ship the records to the US, where they were formed into an archive. Approaching the archive as a site of political struggle, this paper explores how the capture, movement and de-territorialization of the records have shaped the archive. The trajectory of the records illustrates the ways in which their value and potential uses shifted within new socio-political contexts that emerged as a result of the conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Iraq
• uprising
• archive
• displacement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. When US forces removed the records from the Kurdish regions, they signed agreements stating that the files were the property of the Kurdish groups that had seized them. Ownership over the original materials has been contested, with some commentators considering them to be the property of the Kurdish peoples whose lives they recorded, and others arguing that they are the property of the current Iraqi government as the successor to the government that created them (SAA/ACA 2008; Montgomery 2011). Given that the records are contested property, I have elected to not engage the copies that remain available to researchers at the Hoover Institution. The archival research for this paper was conducted in the Kanan Makiya Papers, which are also deposited at the Hoover Institution. Makiya, a long-term opponent of the Baʿth Party, travelled to northern Iraq in 1991 after hearing of the existence of the captured files. His papers include correspondence with various US-based actors concerning efforts towards transferring the files out of Iraq. I also held interviews with Makiya and several researchers and archivists that have interacted with the collection.