There’s something about pain that seems to diminish with time but increase with remembrance. Pain is temporal—it can vanish as quickly as it appears. Often a certain amount of remembering, and thus, a temporary increase in pain, is necessary to bringing about pain’s eventual diminution. Yet, once in a state (or stasis) of remembrance, pain often transforms into something much harder to shake: suffering. To suffer is to be in an unrelenting state of pain. It is possible to suffer under extreme and enduring physical pain such as torture, or while living in unbearable and ongoing social conditions, such as poverty or racism. But sometimes those conditions change; the job comes, the torturer goes away. The condition of pain lessens, or at least transforms. One is left, perhaps, with physical disfigurements, the lost relationships of a life taken elsewhere, but more so, with abandoned hopes, the memory of what has happened and the fear of what is to come. It is then that the pain of the present can become the psychological suffering of remembrance, a circumscription of the future by the terms of the past.

This fall, Kanan Makiya, writer, architect, and teacher, will begin to build his long-dreamt-of Iraq Memory Foundation. Though publicly in the guise of a museum, the project is to be mostly a catalogue of the atrocities perpetrated under Ba’th party rule, presented as a mix of recollection and documentation, organized to provide insight into the dark and secretive activities that came from the Ba’thist ideology and will include accounts of the people who actualized Ba’thist aspirations. The project—which, though ongoing, can only now culminate in a physical structure in Iraq—is to be built below Baghdad’s ‘Victory Arch’, two sword-toting, towering arms of Saddam Hussein that meet together in a triumphant apex.

The arms are terrifyingly realistic, “down to every last little bump and squiggle.” [i] The Arch made its debut in August 1988, the first anniversary of the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and also, as Makiya points out in his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence, the month the infamous Anfal Operation began, the “final solution of the Kurdish question in Iraq.” For Makiya, the monument perfectly symbolizes Saddam and the world of Ba’thist Iraq. It is memory and cruelty all in one. It is a symbol of the ability to create false histories and an exultation of the power that manipulates history for its own agenda. As Makiya, in Cruelty and Silence, dreams of a future Iraq nation (a rare moment in a book meant mostly to chastise and expose), “founded on the kind of wisdom that was prepared to acknowledge what was done to the Kurdish people of Iraq,” he appeals—perhaps to the Fates of history or to someone more specific—that the Arch never be torn down, but that a new monument to the Anfal be built in its wake. He would have it that the two tributes feed into one another, one representing the cruelty of silence and the other the justice of information, creating a practice of remembrance that will one day unite the supposed disparate people of Iraq in a shared history of pain and culpability.

Makiya began collecting documents from this bureaucratization of terror when, in the wake of the first Gulf war, Kurdish rebels were able to secure large numbers of them from the regime, which were handed over to American authorities with a promise to Makiya that he would receive a copy. For over a decade, the Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP), led by Makiya and located at Harvard, worked to index these findings and to build a greater archive. English translations of some of the findings can be found on their website. They give a detailed and varied account of the Ba’thist program, and the startling extent to which the government documented their policies of genocide and torture clearly demonstrate its objective of total control over its citizens.

In one document, entitled Plan of Action for the Marshes, a 1988 agenda for dealing with insurgency in the region is outlined, including a plan for economic sanctions against “villages and areas in which subversives are operating,” to be “achieved in the following manner”:

- through the withdrawal of all food supply agencies;

- through a ban on the sale of fish;

- by taking the severest measures against persons who smuggle foodstuffs to deserters, outlaws and hostile

  groups;

- by prohibiting goods traffic from entering those villages and areas.

Each document is listed bluntly under an array of headings like “Citizen’s Refusal to Cooperate,” “Liquidation of Dissidents,” “Praise for Anfal Operations,” and the recurrent and perfunctory “Background Check.”

In another, under the caption “Punishment of Relatives,” is the arrest warrant for the relatives of an executed PUK member, including father, mother, wife, brother and 5 sisters, the youngest of whom appears to be 16. Still another, dated August 18, 1994, states that according to Section I, Article 42 of the Iraqi Constitution, “the Revolutionary Command Council is permitted to brand an “X” on the forehead of those individuals who repeat the crime for which their hand was cut off,” listing the X’s precise measurements (“one centimeter in length and one millimeter in width”) and location of branding (“the same hospital where the initial right hand was cut off”).

Among the provisions in the Iraqi constitution is a 1990 law sanctioning “honor killings” which maintains that:

No person shall be liable to penal prosecution if he kills or commits the premeditated murder of:

1-His mother, daughter, sister, female cousin or niece to defend the family’s honor.

2-The man who commits the indecent and immoral act with any of the aforementioned women in clause (1) of this article…provided that killing him occurs after killing the woman, and that the motivation for killing them both is the same.

And there are many lists of eliminated villages and displaced populations.

As an academic, Makiya was inclined to present the IRDP as a library, an educational tool providing access into the inner workings of Iraq’s 30-odd years under Saddam Hussein. Certainly it has been, and will continue to be, just this.

However, his work with the State Department makes his political agenda in regard to the documents undeniable: Makiya very much wanted to see the Ba’th party removed from power and wanted to use these accounts of genocide, among other atrocities, to build a case for invasion. Iraq now duly invaded, the Memory Foundation takes on a different role for Iraqi society, namely, the institutionalization of memory and the publicizing of private pain, presenting these as sustenance for Iraq’s future. As such, memory becomes a duty, a civic responsibility. “A thing belongs to the one who remembers it most obsessively,” Makiya writes in his book The Rock, and it’s true that there is power in memory. But the quote contains something ominous, too. For if the ‘thing’ is a national identity held together primarily through a shared experience of pain, then to the one who obsessively remembers belongs an identity of suffering. There is a phrase that has come to define much of the post-WWII Jewish ethos: ‘Never Again.’ It is an admonishment to those who have been persecuted and has been used liberally by those seeking collective empowerment over shared pain by means of remembrance. Notably, Makiya has compared his Foundation with the Holocaust Museum in DC, which he sees as a model for how a society can escape its past by coming to terms with it. The danger, however, with the ‘Never Again’ paradigm is that identity becomes contingent upon the fact that one never stop remembering.

The 20^th Century saw both the triumphs and failings of what the politicization of identity can do for a people persecuted due to the particulars of their race or religion or sex. In a country like Iraq, whose various ethnic and religious ‘factions’ are continually being described as artificially constructed, or false, or tenuously held together at best, Makiya places emphasis on personal accounts not because he wishes to stress the importance of personal experience, but because most Iraqis had been both victimized and implicated in victimization, both culpable and oppressed, such that personal experience itself was in danger of being lost. The recollections of a Kurdish boy who survived the Anfal or an imprisoned Sunni, or of a Shi’ite interrogator—powerful though they are as personal accounts—become testaments to the society they all live in.

Makiya is never sentimental about this process of remembrance (though he is certainly moved by their stories) and is generally more interested in presenting personal accounts alongside bureaucratic documents in order to better connect individual experience with the greater social condition of national grief. And the Foundation will also thereby reveal a nation allowed, by the world community, to languish as an international pawn. For over 30 years, it seemed always in someone’s best interest to allow the Ba’thists to get what they wanted, including an intellectual community often too focused on its own victimhood.

While the fighting was going on [during the Iran-Iraq War], naturally the Western “imperialists” were only too happy to sell guns to the combatants. As the mountain of Iranian and Iraqi bodies grew, Western arms companies and dealers made huge profits. No one is trying to deny that. But someone had to want to buy the guns and fight the bloody war in the first place for so many Arabs and Iranians to die. The Iran-Iraq War floated on the price of a barrel of oil not because anyone forced the Ba’thist regime in Iraq, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, to head down this particular road, but because the bloodlust of both Saddam and Khomeini went completely unchecked by, among others, Arab and Muslim intellectuals….

Makiya always intended that the documents he collected be made public. But the question is, public for whom? For Iraqis, to allay their fears and create a more coherent identity? Or for the rest of the world, as a lesson and reminder? Designed as a catalogue, the Foundation will most likely be more school than archive. And as a school, its focus toward academics and intellectuals is pointed indeed.

The work of the Memory Foundation makes it difficult for Iraqis to hide from what has been done to them, but also from what they have done to one another. It will not be a museum of Iraq’s accomplishments, but a documentation of its failures. For Makiya, it is primarily the continued denial of the failure of Iraqi society over the last 30 years, in which the international community was complicit, that perpetuates that failure.  

Of course, victimhood and blame have a complicated relationship, as do memory and identity. The danger of attempting to unify a people under the aegis of pain, to build a nation from a foundation of shared sorrow, is that it lead first to an identity of victimhood and, more dangerously, to a society founded on the paradigm of retribution. For Iraqis to escape at least the former, Makiya presents a formula based less on memory and more on storytelling. That remembrance may carry the danger of miring a people in their pain isn’t a problem for Makiya because he thinks of pain as an experience that can most bring together a people who have collectively suffered. And remembrance, as storytelling, is the most formidable opponent to Makiya’s greatest enemy, silence.

The interesting thing is that one gets a sense from Makiya, particularly in Cruelty and Silence, where the task of cataloguing horror was still fairly new to him, that he is uncertain what kind of impact the Iraq Memory Foundation will ultimately have. “The making of lists is important,” he says, referring to the thousands of names of those lost in the course of Anfal. “But I still don’t know what to do with the names I have got. The fact that they are being made means that the Anfal is about the present, not the past…Terrible memories…are going to shape Iraq’s future, whether we like it or not.” Taking control of memories and publicizing them has had a place in modern political practice for some time now, with varying degrees of success. And while Makiya seems to admit that the process of so-called ‘truth and reconciliation’ can’t build a nation, it can help build a civic space where experience can be related to the political. For Makiya, the question “Why?” is more often than not answered with an evocative “I don’t know,” or more boldly “No one knows.” But the ‘I don’t know’ is itself part of the answer, because the not-knowing is what leads to asking “Why?” Though there may be a politics of silence, silence itself is the absence of a politics, whether the silence is voluntary or not.

There could be doubt as to whether Makiya has the legitimacy to tell the story of Iraq’s last 30 years, mainly because he himself did not live through them as an Iraqi but as an American with a British passport. Or concern that the museum will present an Iraq suffering under the Ba’th, but not under UN sanctions. It is, of course, true that Makiya is not the authority on Iraqi pain. He doesn’t claim to be. Kanan Makiya is a storyteller, or perhaps more aptly, a librarian. As a librarian, he is faced with the decision as to what and how much to present. But, he is also well aware that those decisions carry implications. His agenda is to replace lies with truth and to found a new society on the breaking of a terrible silence. That he believes in remembering the past as a tool for the future is perhaps best reflected in his other project, helping to write the new Iraqi constitution.