The Cultural Genocide of the Iraqi Archives and Iraqi Jewish Archive and International Responsibility

Abstract

abstract:Archives represent one of the physical components of the country's heritage. They represent an important living memory containing both the past and the present upon which a country can foresee its future based on available data in order to design sound policies. The richer a country is in its heritage, the more valuable its archives will be to all of humanity, representing an accumulation of valuable experiences and information that help construct and explain both human psychology and the environment. Iraqi archives reflect the diversity of a civilization that goes back more than eight thousand years in the span of human history. The destruction and theft of Iraq's archives have impoverished humanity's shared heritage and, at the same time, resulted in an international-level cultural genocide as global and regional instruments concerned with this shared heritage compete to strengthen its protection.