All but eight of the 433 files reported missing from the United Nations war crimes archives have been located and accounted for, according to a report submitted to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar and released here Friday.
The report was prepared by Richard Foran, U.N. assistant secretary general for general services. He headed an investigation ordered by the secretary general after it was alleged that 433 of the 8,100 files had “mysteriously vanished.”
The allegation appeared Tuesday in a New York Post article by Uri Dan, an Israeli, who was the first journalist given access to the files after they were opened to public inspection by Perez de Cuellar on Nov. 23.
According to the U.N. report, the missing files were in reality misplaced, and then found in one of two groups of files within the archives.
The report concluded that the “actual whereabouts of eight files remains undetermined. The existence of these files and a listing of names included in each file has been verified from the registers. In some cases, charges against the same individuals exist in other files.
“Since both the serial and the charge number of these eight files are known, an effort is under way to trace them.”
The report was sharply critical of the article by Dan. The report said that Alf Erlandsson, director of the archives, and his staff “believed that the author was there (at the archives) to conduct genuine research into the contents of the files, not to report on the status of the files and the United Nations’ husbandry of them.”
Furthermore, the report said, Erlandsson “was surprised as anyone to read the article in question. He had not been aware of the fact that he was being interviewed and that he would be quoted, in his opinion, out of context. He believed that he was talking with an experienced researcher who would understand ‘missing’ in an archivist’s context.”
The archives, stored in New York, were compiled by the Allied War Crimes Commission and placed in U.N. custody in 1947, after which the commission disbanded.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
