The British Library has refused to host a unique digital archive of Taliban documents because officials fear that holding the collection would violate British anti-terrorism laws.

The documents in the unmatched cache mostly come from the 1990s, when the extremist group ruled Afghanistan and hosted al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. It includes everything from their official newspapers, magazines and books of sharia law to maps and poetry.

More than 2m words have been translated from Pashto to English, making the collection more accessible. The academics who built up the collection, and have spent two years cataloguing it, told the Guardian they were now speaking to US universities, including Yale and Stanford, about hosting it.

Alex Strick van Linschoten, an academic who was prominent in putting the project together, called the decision shortsighted and said it would put other institutions off hosting similar archives.

“There is already a decent amount of fear about working on these kinds of projects, especially if you’re not a government-funded or affiliated organisation. Academics know to be careful about travelling with these kinds of documents,” he said.
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“It’s a pity, since the value that ours – and other, similar collections – have is really important for the historical record, as well as for researchers, analysts and policymakers, not to mention Afghans, to allow them to understand and come to terms with their own history.”

The British Library said that, “although the archive was recognised as being of research value, it was judged that it contained some material which could contravene the Terrorism Act [2006], and which would present restrictions on the library’s ability to provide access to the archive for researchers”.

It added: “The Terrorism Act places specific responsibilities on anyone in the UK who might provide access to terrorist publications, and the legal advice received jointly by the British Library and other similar institutions advises against making this type of material accessible.”   »»» The Guardian (U.K.)

Interestingly, the British Library still has on its shelves a large number of works (such as The Anarchist’s Cookbook and various neo-Nazi documents that are more dangerous than the Taliban collection. It would appear that for the British, some terrorism is more terroristic than other terrorism.

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