[Background (skip if you’re in a hurry)] I’m doing a second MA while doing an internship at a government institution. I spend my spare time gathering information for a thesis related to international organised crime. Most of what I find is from the news, supplemented by a handful of journal articles, and frankly the information is pretty thin. This is because the people in the know – police/security forces (including armies, Interpol, the US DEA, etc.), governments, and IGOs (like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC) release little or no information publicly, at most a few general reports and some press releases that form the basis of the news articles I use.
As my thesis is historical (OK, recent history, but still), and none of the information I’m looking for would really jeopardise or even embarrass people or governments today, I’ve been emailing embassies, IGO offices, NGOs, and security representatives asking for comments on past events, documentation, or an interview if possible. Responses so far have taken only two forms: 1. Deafening silence, or 2. Variations on the theme of “No, sod off”. I’ve contacted a few university professors, who have been far more helpful, and intend to start contacting journalists and activists in the field as well. It’s clear (as noted in an article in an academic journal a decade old) that academic study in this field is based on generally anecdotal and journalistic data, since – basically – the people in the know don’t feel like talking. Perversely, the most useful leads and data I’ve obtained so far has been from well-placed beer in the local expat community; and the information I’m looking for isn’t actually classified, as far as I know.
I’ve also been going through some archives for work, where I found some relevant files, though I couldn’t use them because of my security clearance – I had to get the same information from public channels. I was told that, in general, since none of these files are classified, I could submit a request to the government for access to the files (like a FOIA request) – but due to a technicality, the requests in almost all the cases would be denied. The paper archives are destroyed when they expire (i.e. files have to be stored for a certain amount of time; when that time expires, they are burned); the government is now digitalising their archives completely, where a program automatically deletes expired files every day. So essentially, a lot of non-confidential information, potentially of use to historians and other researchers, is destroyed with little oversight. [/background]
Two questions up for discussion.
- Is it in the public interest (nationally and globally) for governments, government institutions, and IGOs to gather valuable information and not share it? (Obviously excepting the case of information that’s confidential for safety or security reasons – e.g. most personal information, potentially embarrassing or offensive country reports from embassies, and information about current police investigations or activities in war)
- Are we harming our future by destroying/allowing our governments to destroy archives, even relatively mundane ones?
My concern is that society (local, national, global) is still solidified into two very distinct classes, the governing and the governed, and that the governing class is able to control the message by controlling the release of information – even when the information released is totally true and honest. This shouldn’t be the case in supposedly democratic countries where media penetration and especially the internet could and should allow the flow of complete, free, and mostly unfiltered information. For one example, Brazil is working on creating a “truth commission” to investigate human rights violations during the period of the military dictatorship (well, the period’s a little longer, but still ends over 2 decades ago). The president of Brazil fought the dictatorship personally (was tortured by the regime as a result), and the military has been largely sidelined and isolated from politics since the return of democracy, so there ought not be any major political opposition to an investigation. An amnesty law (which is not going to be repealed) means that nobody could possibly be prosecuted as a result of the investigation, so the investigation is purely for information and to “create a narrative for the period”. Even so, the archives remain sealed to the public, and the whole investigation will be carried out only by the commission itself – 14 people with up to two assistants each, to cover four decades of information - for a maximum of two years.
For another case, it seems somewhat “off” that it seems the best information about the Mexican drug war comes from the “Blog del Narco” instead of the state - even though it should be in the state interest to provide as much information as possible showing how evil and violent the cartels are, and even though it means that civilian reporters are jeopardizing their own lives essentially duplicating information already available to the state.
In the case of the destruction of archives, I fear we’re creating a period with no history outside the major isolated events. While looking through archives at work, I’ve found traces implying formerly archived information that would have made some great human interest stories and possibly some stuff that would add some more colour to WW2 and immediately post-WW2 histories, but that material is now all destroyed, likely with no copies of any sort anywhere. As a historian, I find that tragic in itself, but as a trend throughout the recent past, I think it’ll make it difficult to make any larger sense of the development of current events, certainly for historians but possibly even for analysts right now.
OK, that was long; sorry. Thoughts?