Addressing the
Future of Iraq
In order to have
a future, and to lay the
foundations of justice for the
future, the people of Iraq must
come to terms with the
atrocities perpetrated in their
name during three decades of
Ba’thist rule. The ultimate
rationale behind the Iraq Memory
Foundation (MF) is that the
truth can help heal a society
that has been politically and
physically brutalized on a large
scale.
Citizens of a new and free Iraq
have whole new identities to
forge. And identity is memory.
People whose identities are
cobbled together from
half-truths, or from distorted
memories of who is to blame and
who is blameless, are prone to
commit new transgressions. The
Iraq Memory Foundation has no
“higher” purpose than to place
the Iraqi experience of
suffering and oppression,
between 1968 and 2003, in the
global context of the history of
pain and suffering. The MF seeks
to do this by filming and
archiving the individual stories
of many thousands of survivors
and witnesses of atrocity. The
MF also seeks to digitize, index
and classify the totality of the
documents recovered from the
outgoing regime that deal with
Iraqi pain and suffering.
These words of the victims and
records of their victimizers
will become available to the
public through a museum, a
public outreach project intended
to work with teachers of
elementary and secondary school
students, and a research
facility linked to the Iraqi
university system. Such
sensitive material will not be
used for purposes of
apportioning blame or playing
politics, but in accordance with
a protocol established by a
fully sovereign and
constitutional Iraqi government.
