The Archives of Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party and the Politics of Remembering and Forgetting the Baʿthist Era in Iraq

Abstract

On August 31, 2020, a US military plane returned the archive of the Baʿth Party Regional Command, more commonly known as the Baʿth Party Archive, to Iraq from California, where it had been held by Stanford University's Hoover Institution Library and Archives since 2008. A leftover issue from the 2003 Iraq War, it had been static as a policy matter for years, but appeared on the agenda of the US–Iraq Strategic Dialogue in summer 2020. Mustafa al-Kadhimi's emergence as the compromise choice for prime minister by Iraq's competing factions that May facilitated this development. Kadhimi, a journalist and human rights activist by background, was one of the cofounders with Kanan Makiya of the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a nongovernmental organization that followed in the wake of the US-led invasion in 2003 as a US Department of Defense contractor. The origins of this relationship dated to the aftermath of the 1990–91 Gulf War. Shortly after arriving in Iraq in 2003, and responding to the rumor that looters were headed toward the mausoleum and museum of Baʿth Party founder Michel ʿAflaq, Kadhimi and Makiya by chance discovered the Baʿth Party Archive underneath the structure, which was adjacent to the Baʿth Party's headquarters in Baghdad.