Archivists chronicle Iraqis' pain

An activist group exhumes remains in 2003 from an unmarked grave near Nasiriya after a gravedigger told them the Iraqi army had ordered him to bury executed victims there during the Saddam Hussein era.


Archivists chronicle Iraqis' pain
By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 17, 2007

BAGHDAD — Staring directly at the camera, Zahra Badri begins: "I have not had one good day in my life."

Saddam Hussein's regime imprisoned and killed 23 of the Shiite woman's relatives, including her husband, her son and her pregnant daughter. To save two other sons, she kept them hidden inside her home for more than 20 years.

As Iraq is swept up in new bloodshed, a small team of archivists and videographers has begun the painstaking work of collecting, classifying and preserving evidence of such atrocities. Some of it is newly recorded, a cataloging of terrible memories, but much of it was documented in obsessive and chilling detail by Hussein's vast bureaucracy.

Each one of the more than 11 million yellowing pages and more than 600 hours of footage amassed by the Iraq Memory Foundation is witness to a family's pain, says its founder, Kanan Makiya, a longtime Iraqi exile in the United States and author of "Republic of Fear," the book that brought Hussein's savagery to international attention in 1989.

Many of those interviewed donate photographs and other personal mementos -- Badri gave the foundation her daughter's wedding dress.

Inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Makiya had hoped the material would be used to help Iraqis face their past, heal their wounds and make a fresh start after U.S.-led forces toppled Hussein in 2003. Instead, he watched as the country slid into a nightmarish cycle of revenge, and as the memories that were supposed to help reconcile a tortured people became the subject of bitter dispute.


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