The Hoover Institution acquired the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), which contains critical digitized documents from Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Ba'th party, and al-Qaeda, providing valuable resources for academic research. This acquisition raises questions about the preservation of Iraqi history, the study of regime crimes, and the opportunities for Iraqi researchers to engage with these archival materials.
Last year, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University announced its acquisition of the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), an archive containing important digitized documents from Saddam Hussein’s regime, along with al-Qaeda and affiliated groups.
The CRRC was a research institution affiliated with the US Department of Defense that closed in 2015 due to a lack of funding. The center’s records, while controversial, were inaccessible for nearly a decade.
Over the last several years, the American author Steve Coll drew attention to the archive’s inaccessibility as he studied the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Coll subsequently covered this relationship in his book The Achilles Trap, for which he used a collection of former CRRC records provided by the Pentagon. Coll later gave these records to the Wilson Center, which has been releasing and introducing them in articles by Michael Brill, a Global Fellow with the History and Public Policy Program. In turn, I have translated the Wilson Center articles into Arabic and published them through the Iraqi Center for Documenting the Crimes of Extremism.
Even though the CRRC records donated by Coll to the Wilson Center amount to several thousand pages, they constitute only a very small percentage of the entire digitized archive of Saddam’s regime originally in the Pentagon’s possession, which amounted to tens of millions of pages.
Late last year, important news regarding the CRRC was announced in an article by Haidar Hadi and Jean McElwee Cannon, the Middle Eastern and North American collections archivists at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. Hadi and Cannon wrote that the CRRC archive, containing more than 1,100 document files and more than 150 hours of audio and video recordings, would become available at the Hoover Institution, constituting a valuable resource for academic researchers studying Saddam’s regime.
These files were produced by institutions and agencies such as the General Command of the Armed Forces, Baʿth Party, Fedayeen Saddam militia, General Directorate of Military Intelligence, General Security Directorate, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, and the Presidential Diwan. All were seized by US military document exploitation teams in the wake of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. There is also a collection of records related to al-Qaeda, which according to Hadi and Cannon, includes files on intelligence, security, communications, propaganda, finance, recruitment, diplomacy, training, operations, attacks, and missions carried out by the organization during the war in Afghanistan. All the records are available in their original Arabic, as well as in accompanying English translation.
According to Lisa Blaydes, a professor of political science at Stanford University and one of the most prominent American researchers specializing in the era of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iraqi documents at Hoover consist of approximately ten million pages of official documents from the Baʿth regime, all of which are available as digital images, in addition to hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings.[CK1]
Before the addition of the CRRC, the Iraqi archives at the Hoover Institution can be divided into the following collections:
The North Iraq Dataset—The Kurdish Archive
The documents in this collection include reports from the Baʿth Party, Military Intelligence, and General Security Directorate branches associated with the governorates of Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, and Dohuk, along with records from the dissolved Revolutionary Command Council. The documents were obtained after the 1991 uprising and digitized by the US government. The Iraq Memory Foundation obtained a digital copy of the collection, which is ultimately how it came to the Hoover Institution.
These documents were collected by coalition forces after the withdrawal of the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in 1991. The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) declassified part of the collection at the request of the State Department and another part was declassified in response to the Freedom of Information Act.
The Documents of the Baʿth Party Regional Command
These are documents obtained by the Iraq Memory Foundation from the Regional Command headquarters in Baghdad during the period of September 23-25, 2003.
The Secondary Collection
The documents in this collection were obtained after the fall of the Baʿth regime from various sources between 2004 and 2005. The Iraq Memory Foundation worked to collect, organize, and digitize the collection.
The Iraqi Ministry of Information Archive
These documents were selected for their importance by people familiar with the work of the Ministry of Information. Between July and August 2003, the documents were presented to the Iraq Memory Foundation, which in turn worked to digitize them.
The Jewish Archive in Iraq
This is a collection of documents pertaining to Iraq’s Jewish population.
Videos of the Baʿth Regime
This collection consists of videos of individuals and government agencies under the Baʿth regime, digitized by the Iraq Memory Foundation, and later delivered to the Hoover Institution.
Open Questions
Considering the Hoover Institution’s recent acquisition of the CRRC archive and making it available to researchers in America at its Stanford University and Washington, D.C., offices, what do we now know about the era of the Baʿth Party more than 21 years since the fall of the regime? What can we learn from studying Iraqi archival documents? What can be reconstructed from an era known for its cruelty and the variety of crimes committed for more than three decades?
We all know that what has been preserved is a small piece compared to what has been lost. Therefore, collecting and archiving records is important for preserving the collective memory of Iraq during the rule of the Baʿth Party. Have official reports been issued documenting the crimes and violations during the Baʿth era through sufficient review of archival documents, either in Iraq or abroad? The matter does not stop at studying crimes and violations, as archival documents help researchers understand the nature of the regime and its ideology. This is especially important given that internal records document the regime actions in practice as opposed to theory alone. What has been the fate of the various collections of Iraqi archival records since their repatriation to Iraq? What is the status of the original records and digital copy of the Baʿth Party Archive returned to Iraq from the Hoover Institution in 2020? What is the status of the archives repatriated by the US Department of Defense in 2013, from which the digital records of the CRRC were derived?
Finally, my question as a researcher is: have the institutions that acquired digital copies of Iraqi archives, especially the Hoover Institution with its Iraq Memory Foundation collections and the CRRC, provided researchers based in Iraq fellowships or other opportunities to study the records in-person or remotely? This assistance would be especially important for developing the capabilities of specialists in archiving, classifying, and studying the documents in Iraq. Archiving is a process of storing information and knowledge that requires human and material capabilities. In other words, this is the process of controlling information during its transfer into knowledge by scholars. Hoover has nearly two decades of experience working with Iraqi archives in their original hard copy and digital forms. It would be of great value to Iraqi archivists, researchers, and academic institutions. This matter is of the utmost importance since many topics related to the era of the Baʿth regime are incomplete without access to archival documents. Furthermore, beyond returning the original records accompanied by a digital copy to the government of Mustafa al-Kadhimi in August 2020, Hoover offering additional direct assistance with the digital records would be extremely helpful to Iraqi research centers. Perhaps the simplest thing that can be provided is to create an electronic platform in collaboration with one of the Iraqi centers that enables researchers inside Iraq to access and study the digital archival collections available at the Hoover Institution.
This article originally appeared in Arabic in the same publication on December 3, 2024, and has been translated by Michael Brill and the publication is now available in English for the first time.
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