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Posted December 8, 2006.

Iraq National Library and Archive Closes for Three Weeks Due to Violence

In the wake of increasing sectarian violence that resulted in the deaths of several staff members, Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, which houses the country’s largest depository of books and documents, closed for three weeks on November 21. In a December 6 e-mail to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Director-General Saad Bashir Eskander said the library is in an area where fighting between Shi’a and Sunni militias has intensified, resulting in gunfire and bomb explosions in neighboring buildings.

“On many occasions, the NLA was hit directly,” Eskander said in the December 7 Chronicle. “Windows were smashed. My staff are naturally frightened.”

Eskander decided to reopen the library the week of December 11, even though the security situation had not improved. He divided his staff into two groups that will each work three days, permitting access throughout the week, according to Jeffrey B. Spurr, an Islamic specialist at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library who has been in touch with Eskander.

In a portion of his diary posted online by the UK Society of Archivists, Eskander wrote that a one-hour gun battle had erupted across the street on November 20. The next day, two mortar shells landed 70 meters away from his secretary’s car. “Like other people, she talked about the incident for two minutes and then resumed her daily tasks,” he wrote.

But later that morning he received word that Ali Salih, a young man who Eskander had sent to Italy to be trained as the library’s webmaster, had been assassinated in front of his younger sister. That news, as well as the constant danger his staff faced in commuting to work, led him to shut down the library.

Eskander had hoped he could reopen it December 3 but, as he told the Chronicle, “As soon as I arrived [in] my office, a bomb exploded in the opposite building. We have not received any instruction from either the government or from our minister. It is really chaos.”

“If Iraq becomes a stable country,” Eskander wrote, the library “can play a constructive role in the transition process to democracy. For example, we can provide . . . historically invaluable documents, records, and books to our readers without censorship.”

Eskander, a Kurdish historian who was appointed director-general in December 2003, has struggled to rebuild the library following the U.S. invasion.

Aieda M. Salman, manager of internet resources for Baghdad University Central Library, told American Libraries that the university had also closed down the first week of December due to recent killings and kidnappings of university officials and faculty.

Posted December 8, 2006.