Returning Evidence to the Scene of the Crime: Why the Anfal Files Should be Repatriated to Iraqi Kurdistan.
By BRUCE P. MONTGOMERY.
ARCHIVARIA, 69 (Spring 2010): 143–171, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved.
On 22 April 2008, five years after the American invasion of Iraq, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) issued a joint statement calling for American authorities to repatriate millions of captured intelligence documents and intervene with the “government of Kurdistan” to return the Iraqi Anfal files to the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad. The Anfal files, which chronicle Iraq’s genocide against the Kurds during the mid- to late-1980s, were captured by Kurdish peshmerga in the March 1991 uprisings following the first Gulf War. They were transferred to the United States for safe storage and analysis for human rights crimes with the understanding that the documents were Kurdish property. The SAA and ACA based their statement on the archival principle of the inalienability of national records, a concept that claims that the alienation of national records can only occur through a legislative act of the state. [1]
=KTML_Link_External_Begin=https://www.kurdipedia.org/docviewer.aspx?id=452143&document=0001.PDF=KTML_Link_External_Between= click to read: Returning Evidence to the Scene of the Crime: Why the Anfal Files Should be Repatriated to Iraqi Kurdistan=KTML_Link_External_End=