Dr. Maha Hussain began with a disclaimer — she was not going to lecture about prostate cancer.

Rather, the geritourinary professor from Ann Arbor came to speak about her personal experience as an Iraqi expatriate. Her talk, which painted a portrait of a country ripe with culture and autocratic rule, was delivered Tuesday as part of the Days of Education on Iraq series.

Though many of her slides illustrated the majesty of the nation known to be the cradle of civilization—including one which displayed the luminous blue crescent of Baghdad curling around the Tigris—her hopeful images were paired with stories of mass terror.

“Any freedom that you can think of does not exist in Iraq,” she said. “The only freedom that Iraqis have is the freedom to be refugees.”

In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, parents were not even safe criticizing their leader in front of their children, she said. Children grilled by their teachers became the unwitting executioners of their own parents.

“There are people whose kids [repeated], ‘I spit on the TV when Saddam Hussein is on,’ and the dad disappeared,” she said.

Those accused of crimes, Hussain added, were forced to confess.

“If you will not speak up, then they will bring your mother, grandmother, and rape them in front of you,” she said. “There’s no due process.”

Human Rights Watch estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds were killed in Hussein’s 1987-88 campaign. Chemical weapons were coupled with tried-and-true military strategies which burned 2,000 villages to the ground.

Though she did not speak of it, Hussain’s own family has paid dearly for attempting to help the Kurds. Two of her cousins were executed in the late 1980s for arranging to hide a Kurdish friend that was evading the regime’s security forces. The male cousin who arranged for the hiding was shot and killed. The sister whose house he was hiding in was beaten to death, mutilated, and then paraded naked through a public area.

Hussain also leveled scathing criticism at the U.N. and the global anti-war movement. She said the Security Council delivered a “dismal performance” and only “added a nail to the coffin.”

Expatriates “have no trust in the U.N.,” she said.

She also contends the anti-war movement tacitly endorsed Saddam.

“What I did not see from the U.S. anti-war movement and the European anti-war movement is no to Saddam,” she said. “No war does not mean peace. This is speaking for the people of Iraq without having talked to the people of Iraq.”

To those who chided the United States’ intervention, including Arabs who claimed the U.S. was out to revenge Muslims for Sept. 11, she emphasized the barbarous cruelty of Hussein’s regime.

“The single person who killed more Muslims than anyone else in the Middle East was Saddam Hussein,” she said.

And whatever the motives of the United States, she lauded coalition forces as liberators.

“It’s about 24 million people who are contained as hostages,” she said. “There are kids there who have no idea what bananas look like. They don’t know chocolate or apples.”

“It was 20 years overdue,” she added.

Now, she said, Iraq must move forward to embrace democracy, most likely in a federalized structure which acknowledges Iraq’s diversity. Iraq, she hopes, will act as a beacon of freedom to all Arab peoples.

Already, she noted, Syria and Saudi Arabia have made steps towards reform.

“The Arab leaders are seeing these Iraqis demonstrating on the streets,” she remarked. “They know that their time will come.”