Shipping containers’ worth of records created by Iraq’s Baath Party — which ruled Iraq from 1968 to 2003 — will now find a new home at the Hoover Institution.

The Iraq Memory Foundation (MF), a U.S.-based entity headquartered in Washington, D.C., went to Baghdad shortly after the Iraq invasion and began gathering and archiving as many documents as it could. Initially, the Foundation kept the materials in MF Director Kanan Makiya’s house, which is within the Green Zone in Baghdad. In February 2005, Makiya allowed the U.S. military to fly these materials to a military base in the U.S., scan them and then transport the materials to a storage facility of the Foundation’s choice. In January of this year, the Hoover Institution agreed to store this body of materials.

According to Richard Sousa, senior associate director at the Hoover Institution, the collection consists of records from the Baath Regional Command, from the headquarters of the Baath Arab Socialist Party and from the Special Security Agency. However, they do not comprise all of the records from these entities.

“They constitute a considerable, representative and very important sample,” Sousa said. “In addition, the collection includes photos from Iraqi newspapers and a few oral histories.”

However, there is some controversy regarding where the papers should be held. Saad Eskander, the director general of the Iraq National Library and Archive, has publicly argued that the records of the Baath Party are inalienable public property and should be returned to Iraq’s national archive without delay.

Makiya does not agree, however. While he feels that it is essential that the documents are back among the Iraqi people, he has publicly stated that Iraq and Baghdad, while mired in turmoil, are currently not ready for the papers.

According to Trudy Peterson, a former acting archivist of the United States under President Bill Clinton and an international archival consultant, the records of the government bodies and the Baath party should be returned to the government of Iraq to be maintained as part of the official records.

“The official records of the Iraqi government need to go home to Iraq, to the official custody of the government of Iraq in its Iraqi National Library and Archives,” she wrote on her Web site of the decision to move the documents to Hoover. “The U.S. government should be extremely careful as it makes the determinations about the destiny of the Iraqi materials in its custody.”

The MF came close to reaching a deal with Harvard University in 2005, where it hoped to house a digital copy of the collection, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Negotiations fell through, however, because of the complicated issues surrounding the documents.

Sidney Verba, director of the Harvard University Library at the time, said to the Chronicle that it was both a “relief” and a “great regret” when Harvard pulled out of the negotiations.

Sousa defended the Hoover Institution’s decision to store the papers.

“The acquisition of this collection is consistent with Hoover’s collecting philosophy since our inception nearly ninety years ago,” Sousa said. “[That philosophy is] to collect and preserve material on political, economic and social change in the modern era and to provide access — without conditions — to current researchers and future generations.”

He explained that the Hoover Institution’s goal for the papers, as with all their collections, is to preserve the materials and to undertake conservation efforts, which would ensure that the papers will be available to future scholars. He added that they will retain digital copies of these materials as well as other material from Iraq that will be made available to researchers.

According to Sousa, direct discussions with the MF in efforts to obtain the papers, which will not go on exhibit, began about ten months ago. However, he said that they had been aware of the collection’s existence for a number of years previously.

While some have publicly called for the documents to be returned to Iraq immediately, Sousa emphasized that housing the papers at the Hoover Institution is simply a deposit agreement. He said he agreed with those who felt that conditions in Iraq today could put the papers at risk. He explained that the Hoover Institution is holding these papers and will return them to Iraq when it is agreed that conditions in Iraq allow for their return to a safe repository there, which he hopes will be soon.

“The Hoover Institution does not own these materials, it is a repository for them,” he said. “We expect to return them to Iraq.”