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In the damp heat of the tropics, the doctor and his companions must be wondering what has happened to their lives in the past six months. Now, in the polluted metropolis of Jakarta, they have seemingly endless amounts of time to ponder the dramatic turn of events that have led them to Indonesia, to gaze reluctantly into an uncertain future with no hint of imminent stability. However, in their homeland of Iraq, their outlook was infinitely bleaker. The doctor is a dignified man who walks with the grace that typifies the Arab people. He is tall and looks slightly thinner than he ought to at the age of 32. He also carries a respiratory condition, a remnant of his participation in the Gulf War. His story began in July 1994 when he was studying for his PhD in surgery at the Iraqi Commission for Higher Medical Specialities in Baghdad. It was in this month that Saddam Hussein decided to punish those men who refused to take part in military service. The \'offenders\' were to have the tops of their ears cut off, a life long testament to their \'cowardice\'. All surgeons and students were expected to take part in this brutal and humiliating operation. However, when the doctor found his name on the list of performing surgeons he refused to compromise his ethics. The day after his refusal, the doctor was called to the Medical Centre Security Office with three other students who had declined to participate in the operation, to face up to uniformed officials. The group of students was accused of rebelling against the ruling regime and was warned that their lives were "only worth the price of a bullet". The young students were ordered to operate the next day and when the time came, again, the doctor refused. For his pride and his ethics the doctor was taken to a dingy cell and beaten unconscious. He was later revived with icy water and left to ponder what his guards described as his "first lesson". His second lesson came later on that violent evening when the doctor was again severely beaten. After a rough night on the hard wooden bed in the cell, the doctor was lead into another official\'s office where he could detect a distinct change of attitude towards his presence. The official declared that no more black marks could be found against the doctor\'s character and he was released. He later discovered that only intervention from his influential supervisor had saved him from further beatings. However, a week after his release the doctor was moved to a new bedroom in the halls of residence, sharing with a member of the security forces. For the next two years he was frequently to find his shelves ransacked and his belongings rearranged. In October 1996 the doctor graduated with his PhD, granted by an associated Arabic higher education authority. With his new qualification the doctor wholeheartedly expected to work. In Iraq it was compulsory for all graduates to move into official government positions. The doctor was refused employment, as was his wife, a trained paediatrician. To further add insult to injury, the doctor\'s sister was fired from her job as an English translator, within nuclear research, at the time of his graduation. For the next three years the doctor remained officially unemployed, only working occasionally with his old friend and supervisor performing surgery in secret, under fear of arrest. For this undercover work, he received occasional scraps of income, but was sorely hurt by missing out on the food and medical supplies given to official workers to supplement their low wages. In such a poor economic situation, work became a necessity for the doctor and in 1999, after another campaign by his supervisor, he was given permission to work. His wife was also given permission to work on the condition that husband and wife took up posts at opposite ends of Iraq. The couple were suffering infertility of an unknown cause and had been advised to live together. The doctor\'s wife gave up her first opportunity to work in order that she could be with her husband and together they moved to the north of the country. The doctor\'s new base was in a sensitive region bordering Iran which is also an area mostly inhabited by Kurds, arguably the world\'s largest stateless ethnicity. Coinciding with the doctor\'s move was the ruling Al Baa\'th party\'s implementation of a new wave of ethic cleansing directed towards the Kurds, whose land and geographical position the Iraqi government required. The Kurds were forced off their own land, slowly, but by the truckload. They were taken to barren western Iraq, where only few facilities were provided and the community was forced to sleep in deserted mosques and schools. During this forced migration, the doctor was frequently given lists of Kurds on whom he was not to operate should the need arise. As the doctor was the only surgeon available for the population of four mostly Kurdish towns, the need for his skills did arise. He and four of his medical colleagues made a pact to help the injured Kurds in secret. The authorities began to slowly uncover the doctor\'s humanitarian plan and he was threatened. They wanted to know why he desired to aid the Kurds. The doctor covered up his minor work and declared that he only performed when treatment was a matter of life and death. The Al Baa\'th officials remained suspicious and began to demand some of his already limited UN donated medical supplies. This was an obvious bribe, as the officials would sell the medical goods on the black market and line their pockets whilst turning a blind eye to the humanitarian work being carried out by the doctor. It took three months for this blackmailing to come to a head after two incidents. Firstly, the officials brought a man to the doctor\'s clinic with two gunshot wounds, one to the elbow and one to the abdomen. The man, a Kurd, had resisted an expulsion order and had been shot. Without treatment he would have died. The officials left the dying Kurd with the doctor, explaining that they did not want the doctor to save the man but merely extract information from him before he bled to death. The officials left and the doctor paid no heed to their words. Helped by two young and spirited graduates, he administered the appropriate treatment to the Kurd. When the Al Baa\'th officials found about the doctor\'s life saving operation, they rushed to his surgery and screamed at him, accusing him of being anti-establishment, deliberately working against Saddam Hussein\'s regime. The doctor was now walking on very thin ice. Two days later, the second decisive incident occurred. Officials brought an old Kurdish woman to the surgery, who had also refused to be expelled from her home. She had suffered severe head injuries and multiple bruising to her body. The doctor saw that this woman needed intensive care treatment that his surgery could not provide, so he took her to a bigger hospital out of town. When he returned to his surgery, he found the place eerily quiet. He walked into his office and found an official sitting comfortably in his chair. The doctor felt the usual spark of fear ignite in his spine. However, on closer inspection the doctor recognised this man. He was the father of a boy the doctor had treated some time ago. This man told the doctor that an arrest warrant was being drafted as they spoke. The doctor was informed that he had two
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