Professor to present during Washington event on wartime archives

Bruce P. Montgomery, professor and faculty director of archives and special materials in the CU-Boulder library, on Friday will present at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., as part of a panel on “Archives in Wartime: From WWII to the Invasion of Iraq.” The event is a roundtable discussion about the seizure or capture of Iraqi records during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation. The question of repatriating more than 100 million seized documents from Saddam Hussein's regime is complicated by human rights concerns given Iraq’s continuing sectarian divisions and the possibility that the records could be misused by the ruling Shiite majority government against its adversaries in the Kurdish and Sunni communities.

Montgomery was invited to participate in this session because of extensive experience with the captured Iraqi secret polices files that were seized in the 1991 Kurdish uprising in Iraqi Kurdistan after the first Gulf War. The documents, which chronicle the Anfal genocide against the Kurds in the middle to late 1980s, were acquired by the University Archives in 1997, as well as the digital database to the 5.5 million-page collection. The original (physical documents) were returned to the State Department in 2005 to be used in the trials of Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership for the Anfal genocide. Montgomery has also written extensively on these subjects.  For more information: http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/archives/collections/international.htm.