Kurds struggle to transcend Saddam Hussein's legacy

In this respect, the project failed. Immediately after the Gulf War of 1991, the Kurds rose up against Iraqi rule. Hussein's regime struck back, but later backed off after Western nations imposed a "no-fly zone" in the north of the country.

The Western protection gave the Kurds a chance to practice the autonomy they had long sought. With the overthrow of Mr. Hussein's government, the Kurds will have a greater opportunity to track down its victims.

The Kurdish village of Kariz lies along the line that once demarcated the end of Hussein's control in northern Iraq and the beginning of the Kurdish-ruled zone. Iraqi forces maintained control of the area until a few days after the US attack began in April.

But "liberation" didn't mean much in Kariz. In 1988 the Iraqis emptied the village of its inhabitants and knocked down its houses. Since then, time and the weather have turned the rubble into waist-high mounds of earth, brick, and stone. A few trees rise over the desolation.

Amanj Khalifa, a PUK official in the nearby town of Kifri, points out where his aunt used to live, where the tea house was, and where the mosque stood. He nods his head toward the village well, which the Iraqis covered with cement.

He recites the Anfal numbers that all Kurds know: 5,000 villages destroyed, 180,000 people killed. "The families of these people are waiting - after the liberation of Iraq - to go and search for the bones of their relatives and the graves of their loved ones," he says.

Ali sits with two other torture survivors in an office in the Red Security complex. The three men tell stories of grim treatment at the hands of Iraqi officials and marvel that they now give interviews in a place that was once so feared.

They ponder questions about the meaning of the suffering they endured, about what it will all add up to now that the Baath regime has fallen. They struggled for Kurdish independence, but that goal seems as elusive as ever.

"Now what exists is to try to make a modern Iraq and a model of democracy that will lead to the collapse of [governments] in Iran and Syria and ... Turkey," says Bakhtiar Aule, referring to three neighboring countries that also have significant, often oppressed, Kurdish minorities. If the Kurds can't have their state, he seems to suggest, at least they can be free.

Ali Suleiman offers this: "The acts they performed we will not do," he says, referring to the members of the Baath regime. "We will bury these acts and perform good ones. The Kurdish struggle is for this sake."

In another part of the complex, a room is devoted to art and photography about the massacre at Halabja. One poster, by an artist named Mohammed Fatah, shows a bomb piercing a bed of flowers. The photographs, taken immediately after the Iraqi attack, depict dead children with milky eyes and blackened lips.

In this room the acts of the regime are far from buried, a reminder that Kurds are still skeptical that the world has acknowledged what they have experienced.

In the late 1980s, when they were so heinously treated, the West was largely silent.

A brochure at the Red Security reads: "Hoping that our coming generations and guests see who our enemy was."

Mr. Fatah, much of whose work focuses on the trials of the Kurds, says "we cannot forget Anfal, Halabja, or many tragedies very easily. But we are ambitious, like all people around the world, and we want to forgive [those responsible] and rehabilitate them so they, too, will be good people."

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