General thoughts

Also, re: records in private hands--I don't know if you know much about the issues around the Iraqi Ba'ath Party records so this might all be old news to you, but it's super interesting and challenging and I definitely won't be able to capture the complexity of the issues and arguments around them in their entirety, but the article I'm mostly using for that section is one by Michelle Caswell that is worth checking out in a couple of weeks when you have free time again (and if you haven't already seen it):

Caswell, Michelle. “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records.” The American Archivist 74 (Spring/Summer 2011): 211-40.

I do like the bullet points, although you could always also make them bold or something for added emphasis. The 1923 thing is probably not that important - it just caught my eye as a pretty random date. I haven't seen the Caswell article before but one of the speakers at the 2014 ACA@UBC symposium did his talk about them (Bruce P Montgomery) so I was a bit familiar with the subject. I believe he's also written an article about it but I don't have a citation to hand. Very interesting indeed!

Yes, he has a couple of articles related to these records that I'm familiar with--one from 2001 and one from 2010. I didn't seem him speak at the symposium, but his insight into the issue as presented in the articles adds even more nuance to the discussion around repatriation because he argues that they really belong to the Kurdish people and not any incarnation of the government of Iraq. I'm not sure how much I will go into his arguments, but I was just going to outline the history of the debate before and now I think I will definitely add in stuff about current archival perspectives too. Thanks for bringing him up!