DePaul University Iraq

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
October 2007

In support of national reconciliation efforts in Iraq, DRL provides funding for The DePaul University’s Iraq History Project (IHP). The IHP gathers and analyzes personal narratives from victims, their families, witnesses, perpetrators and others regarding human rights violations committed during Saddam Hussein’s regime. These testimonies document the experience of torture, massacres, assassinations, rape, chemical weapons attacks, disappearances, and other acts of systematic repression. The IHP began in late 2005 and is now one of the largest independent human rights data collection and analysis projects in the world, and it is hoped that this will be the foundation from which the Iraqi national reconciliation efforts will come. DePaul’s IHP has gathered more than 7,018 testimonies from throughout Iraq, representing around 100,000 pages of text that have been entered into a secure, searchable database. The project is run by an all-Iraqi in-country staff that, at peak levels, included over 60 interviewers, supervisors, analysts, data entry staff and administrators. In mid-2007, the IHP began presenting its material publicly through radio programs, CDs, newspaper inserts, publications, and events.