US did not implement agreement to return Iraqi documents, official says

BASRA / IraqiNews.com: Iraq‘s Culture Ministry’s Undersecretary, Taher al-Hmoud, has said on Tuesday that the U.S. had not implemented its agreement with the Iraqi government to return part of the Iraqi documents, transferred from Iraq to the United States in 2010. “We had demanded the American authorities, through a diplomatic memorandum, to return the Jewish achieve and other Iraqi documents (taken from Iraq), but they did not implement their commitment and were delaying response for our demands,” Hmoud told IraqiNews.com news agency. He said “there had been an agreement between Iraq and the Americans to return half of the documents in 2010, apart from a message sent by to them by the Iraqi Culture Ministry, reiterating Iraq‘s right to restore those documents, adding: “but we did not get any result out of those commitments.” “We, as a state, have the right to resort to all legal means to restore our documents and other cultural properties, because we have millions of such documents, for which we keep video images for them,” Hmoud added. He said that “apart from the Jewish archive, there are documents of (Iraq‘s former ruling) Baath Party and documents that were confiscated from the Iraqi security, (Baath) Party, government and all state documents,” pointing out that “such documents are the symbol of sovereignty of any country and their confiscation equals to the confiscation of that country’s documents, which represent the ‘memory’ of the state.” “We need such documents at the current provisional phase to treat the issues of martyrs, political prisoners and serious security issues, as well as property conflicts..We need them, because they represent a symbol for our sovereignty,” Hmoud stressed. The Ministry of Culture “is the sole legal party, authorized to restore those documents, according to Iraq‘s Law No.70 of 1983,” he added. SKH (TS)/SR 594