UNDER SADDAM Hussein, dissenters who didn't flee wound up dead. The grisly torture chambers that have come to light since his regime folded, and now the thousands of corpses found in unmarked graves, provide abundant testimony to that.
But emigration carries with it a price. It is an abandonment of home. Those who leave have chosen not to share the burden that is their inheritance.
For most Americans, that hardly seems onerous. It's the immigrant story. Get away from the old country and all its troubles. But thousands who have fled regimes equally as unsavory as Iraq's understand that there's another dimension, and it all comes clear when the regime falls. Some stayed, but you did not.
Thus Vaclav Havel, who refused to leave Czechoslovakia under his persecutors, could rise to become president after their demise, while other Eastern Europeans who defected to the West in the bad old days never quite found proper places again in their post-Communist homelands. This is what Ahmad Chalabi and other leaders of the Iraqi National Congress are learning now. While you were in London (New York, Paris, Amman, Copenhagen) we were here. While you savored English notions of law and democracy, we endured Saddam.
There is a businessman in Moscow named Zurab Chavchavadze, from a storied Georgian family of princes and soldiers. His is a cautionary tale, a lesson in exile and belonging.
Mr. Chavchavadze was born in Paris, where his father Mikhail, a young officer, had fled in the early 1920s after the Bolshevik takeover of the little mountain republic in the Caucasus. The Bolsheviks were seizing estates and lynching czarist officers; the rest of the nobility they packed off to distant Arctic prison camps. Who would not flee if he could? From Tbilisi, his father scrambled overland to the Black Sea port of Batumi, and when Batumi was about to fall he boarded a boat for Istanbul, carrying with him only 50 pairs of boots, with which to establish himself in a new life. Eventually he reached France, and the colony of M-imigrM-is that had formed there.
In the 1930s, another Georgian, Josef Stalin, held the Soviet Union in his grip. Millions starved in the famine he fostered; millions more landed in the gulag. Stalin's ruthlessness was unbounded. In 1947, knowing all this, Mikhail Chavchavadze looked into his Parisian mirror and decided to take his family back home.
He was in fact arrested in short order, and sent to a prison camp in the tundra, charged with espionage. Zurab, his mother and four of his siblings were forcibly exiled to a remote village in Kazakhstan, labeled as the family of an enemy of the Soviet people.
Only several years after Stalin had died, in the late 1950s, were they reunited and rehabilitated. In 1963, they were finally allowed to move to an apartment in Tbilisi.
Mikhail Chavchavadze regretted the pain he had caused his children, but he didn't want them to grow up in the West.
"That I suffered all this torture in prison is like a redemption - the price I had to pay to walk on my native land," he told his son. "In the worst years of the Soviet era, I was in France. And my people were being shot. So I knew I must share in their suffering."
He earned his way home again. Few M-imigrM-is have the courage or opportunity to do the same. There was nothing extraordinary about Mikhail Chavchavadze, but he understood that to be a Georgian again he must join in the solidarity of pain.
Certainly no one can fault the many Iraqis who chose exile over torture and death. But for those now returning, the choice they made is a burden, one they carry with them on the long road home.
