Who gets to tell Iraq's history? The New York Times took 16,000 official documents from Mosul

[muriel_volestrangler]

He is now concerned that the history of the city under IS could be compromised. After the 2016 operation to drive out the caliphate, the New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi took nearly 16,000 documents produced during IS rule – everything from birth certificates to judicial rulings – stuffed them into bin bags, and flew them back to New York.

In Mohammed’s view, the history of Iraq, and of Mosul in particular, has too often been told and controlled by outsiders. He is still working to finish his PhD on the 19th-century history of the city but can’t access records key to his research, because they were removed from Iraq in 2007 by Dominican priests and are now housed in the US. The removal of the IS files, he says, fits into a larger pattern of pillaging that dates back centuries.

‘We as Iraqi citizens of Mosul need those papers,’ Mohammed told me recently. ‘We have to prepare ourselves for this future by using what IS left to tell the people what really happened.’ The New York Times has maintained that it saved the documents from being burned, that it had permission from the Iraqi armed forces to collect them, and that it will eventually make them available to the wider public. The Times has published small excerpts and used the documents to inform its series Caliphate, one of the 20 most downloaded podcasts in the US.
...
The New York Times has been sensitive to the wave of criticism. After the MESA letter, it issued an open call for questions on its handling of the IS files. Calamachi told Public Radio International that ‘the goal of the Times is to make these documents available to all.’ In late May, the paper announced it would eventually return the originals to the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, DC, and work with a university to digitise the documents for public consumption. But as the first anniversary of Mosul’s liberation approaches in July – and as the Caliphate podcast rounds out its first season – the documents are still available only to the New York Times and its staff.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/06/15/avi-asher-schapiro/who-gets-to-tell-iraqs-history/

[Igel]

1. He has a point.

So does the NYT.

Sadly, so would all the other people who'd point out that Iraq has a sucky track record of telling its own story in any way that tries to portray anything like anything but an openly, incredibly biased way.


Watched an endowed chair in Armenian studies get deep-6ed by a professor who studied Turkey. He was open about it: If you accept the money for that chair, he wouldn't get access to archives in Turkey, and neither would his students. Not only do you have to tell the right story, but you must never allow anybody else to tell the wrong story. I suspect he'd have been glad to have the Ottoman-era archives that he needed access to held by Dominican priests in the US. As it was, he was always hard put, he admitted, in what to write about. There were a lot of things on his "I'd like to do this, but if I did (a) I couldn't, (b) I'd be cut off, (c) my students and institution would suffer the same fate." He considered his biasing his research and sometimes falsehoods by omission to be falling on his sword for his field.

And given the current government in Iraq, given the instability there, and knowing nothing more about Mohammed than he's working in history and his last name is a common one in the area, I don't trust him not to be like that Turkish professor.

Doesn't help that "telling their own story" functionally often means "control over our story", exactly expressed in the way the Turkish prof described.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Omar Mohammed has been covered in many articles for writing 'Mosul Eye'

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="Omar+Mohammed"+"mosul+eye"

CBC, AP, Vanity Fair, Australian ABC ...

He's not saying he should have the documents. He's saying they should be in Mosul, as you'd expect for a city's official documents.

The documents include birth certificates. Those really should not be being held by a for-profit newspaper thousands of miles away while it produces a podcast.