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(The Guardian) June 9, 2008 – Where did the seized material go? “There were several groups involved in removing or stealing items from the library,” says Eskander. “The Americans, who wanted to find a link between Saddam and al-Qaida or prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction or find evidence of genocide. Professional thieves. Iraqi civilians seeking information about the fate of relatives who suffered under Saddam. Saddam loyalists who want to burn documents that would implicate them.”
He also names and shames Kanan Makiya, a US-based Iraqi professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University and founder of an organisation called the Iraq Memory Foundation which has links to Bush’s neocons and rightwing think tanks. Eskander is angry that Makiya holds sensitive Iraqi documents in the US that he believes should be returned to Baghdad and housed in his library. It is estimated that between 43,000 to 55,000 boxes, amounting to more than 100m pages, were seized from Baghdad by foreign troops in April 2003. They included memos, training guides, reports, transcripts of conversations, audio- and videotapes. Most are still held by the CIA, the Pentagon and Makiya’s foundation at the Hoover Institution in Stanford University. Eskander says Iraq must get them back. “They are national Iraqi documents stolen from us. They should be here. They are essential for us to understand our recent history. Many of them are about the crimes of Saddam Hussein and they should be the property of the Iraqi people.” So far he hasn’t succeeded.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
