By STEPHANIE NOLEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

March 6, 2004

Halabja, Iraq — Freedom has a bitter taste that Rokhosh Araf never expected.

A little more than a year ago, she sat with her family and watched the astonishing television images of Saddam Hussein's defeat. The Araf family stayed up all night, giddy with joy: They are survivors of Mr. Hussein's 1988 chemical attack on the Kurds, and they felt a singular satisfaction as they watched his statues and murals torn down.

"When he was caught, everyone in Halabja who lived through the agony of the chemical attack felt that the people who died that day were alive again," she said.

Looking back, Ms. Araf said she imagined that life in the new Iraq would be happier — the colours richer, the sunshine warmer. It has not turned out that way.

These days, she sits in a cold house, lit by the weak winter sun, and worries. Months after the former Iraqi leader was defeated, Rokhosh Araf has felt his cruel touch one more time, and she is left fretting for her family in a country that feels largely unchanged since the dictator fell.

Ms. Araf's husband, Abdullah, died in November at the age of 40. He had suffered from respiratory problems ever since March 16, 1988, when Mr. Hussein's pilots dropped what is believed to have been a mix of mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin and VX on this Kurdish city of 70,000 and a dozen surrounding Kurdish villages. At least 5,000 people died that day. Mr. Araf and his wife carried their infant daughter Parwa on a terrifying trek 17 kilometres through the mountains into Iran, where they lived as refugees for the next three years — a harrowing story they recounted to The Globe and Mail a year ago.

In 1991, the Kurds rose up against Mr. Hussein, in the wake of the first Persian Gulf war. To check his murderous retaliation, the United Nations began to protect a no-fly zone in the Kurdish north that allowed a small, independent mini-state to develop here. The Araf family came home from Iran, bought a fabric shop, and had four more children — but with the Kurds isolated in the north, they were cut off from specialized medical services in Baghdad. So Mr. Araf simply did his best with ragged breathing.

After Mr. Hussein was overthrown, and the north rejoined the rest of Iraq, the family took Mr. Araf to see pulmonary specialists in Baghdad. They confirmed the obvious, that he had severe lung damage caused by the gas attack. However, Ms. Araf said, the doctors pronounced him in good health, all things considered, and said he need only come back for periodic examinations.

But on Nov. 6, moments after he completed his dawn prayers, he began to choke, and to cough up streams of blood. "It took him just 15 minutes to die," his wife said dully. "We couldn't do anything, we didn't have time even to get him to the hospital."

Rokhosh Araf knows who killed her husband. "Many who died before Abdullah and those who will die after him are still victims of the gas," she said. "He is as much a victim as my sister-in-law and my niece who died in the attack that day in 1988."

Ms. Araf is a gentle woman, who makes room in her lap for her toddler, Hushmand, 3, and a few other neighbourhood children. But her eyes narrow and her voice hardens when she speaks about Ali Hassan al-Majid, Mr. Hussein's cousin and lieutenant known as Chemical Ali, who ordered the gas attack. "Speaking from my heart, I want Chemical Ali to be brought to me and I want to dig out his eyes with my fingernails. It is my right. I want to kill Saddam first, and Chemical Ali second."

She believes that the U.S. forces who detained Mr. al-Majid must hand him over to Iraqis. "We all wait for the day when Chemical Ali is tried here," she said. "The people of Halabja want him strung up on a rope from the monument to the martyrs, and all the people of Halabja will throw stones at him until he dies."

In reality, though, debates about the fate of the former president and his henchmen seem terribly far away. For the Araf family, the death of Abdullah overshadows all else. Since November, Ms. Araf, 36, has struggled as a widow with five young children and a business to run; Baghdad, and the political skirmishing there, is another world.

Indeed, little has changed in Halabja since the war. The city now has cellphone reception, delivered by American contractors in slick charcoal suits. And salaries have increased dramatically — the U.S.-led military coalition turned over the equivalent of $480-million (Canadian) in former government of Iraq funds to the Kurdish government in this region, part of which has been used to triple the wages of all public servants. A teacher, for example, now earns as much as $350 per month. That means people have a bit more money to spend in the Araf shop.

But the streets remain muddy and unpaved. The schools are dingy and decrepit. And the women of Halabja continue to miscarry at rates 14 times above the national average; the people suffer from a five times greater incidence of cancer.

"Nothing has changed for the people who were victims of the chemical attack — the only thing that's different is they built a memorial statue for the victims," said Fouad Baban, head of the Halabja Medical Institute, which is dedicated to investigating the effects of the gas attack and treating its victims. "And there is no discussion in the new national Health Ministry about what these people will need or how to help them.

"I keep saying to them, 'You have to remember you have a significant population who are survivors of chemical weapons.'." But little that happens in Baghdad these days has much connection with the north. The two Kurdish parties rule their territory much as they did before the war. The coalition has almost no military presence here; Kurdish soldiers and police are in charge of security. And with the shocking exception of twin suicide bombings at political offices in February that claimed 100 lives, there has been little sign of the insurgency that rages farther south.

There is, of course, one large difference in Halabja today. "We are free," Ms. Araf said simply, gesturing out to the yellow roses that bloom in the winter garden her husband loved to tend.

"Before, we didn't own what we had," added her brother-in-law, Fa'eq Tawfiq, trying to put words to the feeling: "Now, we own it."

A year ago, Rokhosh Araf was taping sheets of plastic on the windows of her concrete house. On the day of the gas attack in 1988, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, she cowered in the root cellar with 26 relatives and neighbours as Iraqi war planes bombed Halabja all day. When her husband went into the street near noon, to see what was happening, someone shouted to him that gas had been dropped, and he should block the cellar door with a water-soaked blanket. That blanket saved their lives — and Ms. Araf readied her windows last year because she was sure there would be more gas before Saddam Hussein surrendered.

"We never imagined that we could be rid of Saddam without another chemical attack, without more loss of life to ourselves. Our thought then was that at his last moment in power, Saddam would attack us."

Now, the plastic sheeting is long gone; it has been replaced by new mint-green satin curtains in the front windows.

Her daughter, Parwa, the infant Ms. Araf carried out of Halabja with a hand over her mouth to block the gas, is today a shy 18-year-old in her first year of teachers college. "I feel the world is wider now — that I can do more things," she said. "It feels good, that we got rid of Saddam. But we have other problems."

Her college must share a building with a secondary school, so she has classes only in the late afternoon; there is no public transport, no computers, no language lab, none of the things she feels she needs to get a proper education. She has heard about e-mail, and thinks a young Iraqi ought to have it. "But I don't know where I would go to learn."

A few weeks ago, Ms. Araf signed a petition that has made its way across the north: It calls for a referendum on whether Kurds wish to be part of a new federal Iraq, or to live in an independent Kurdish state. "I signed," Ms. Araf said, with a rare smile. "We all did."

The petition has been delivered to the Iraqi governing council, to Paul Bremer at the Coalition Provisional Authority and to the United Nations. Should such a referendum take place, the Kurds would likely vote overwhelmingly in favour of independence — but as Ms. Araf points out, everyone knows the United States would never allow them to break away, at the risk of enraging Syria, Iran and Turkey, which have restive Kurdish minorities of their own.

But this issue, of rejoining Iraq, preoccupies Kurdish families. "Federalism is a good thing," Ms. Araf said. "If we go to the south and compare the situation to here, it's like the difference between the earth and the sky. We are happy to [be part of a united Iraq] but will the rights of the Kurds be preserved or will we lose our rights?

"We were so oppressed under Saddam that we couldn't move an inch. Now that we are rid of Saddam, we want to get rid of the Arabs. We want an independent Kurdistan. That's what we will be happy with. In the period we were free from Saddam [during the 13 years of Kurdish autonomy], we tasted freedom, and we want to live like that."

These days, Ms. Araf tries to supervise the employees who have replaced her husband at the store, to coach Hushmand (who does not speak because he was born with a misshapen lower jaw and tongue, a common birth defect in children of gas survivors) and to nurture her husband's garden. She wonders when she will start to see the promised changes in Halabja, and if they will bring the bright days she once imagined.

Her list of worries is long, and grave: She fears a revival of the partisan Kurdish warring that has recurred in the north for 100 years, or that her leaders will sell out Kurdish rights in Baghdad, or that Kurds will once more end up at war with the Arabs.

"What could happen in the future at the hands of our Kurdish leaders could be worse than the [gas]," she said. "Worse even than that."