"REPUBLIC OF FEAR"

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) ''Republic of Fear,'' the chilling portrayal of Saddam Hussein's brutality, was a landmark in its exiled author's long intellectual journey of discovery. Now, Kanan Makiya has returned to an Iraq his words helped expose and says he finds it a vexing and complex landscape.

Makiya returned to Baghdad on April 21 for the first time in 34 years. He said the return has been an exhilarating ride meeting long-unseen relatives, old friends, reclaiming the family's Baghdad home on the Tigris River and negotiating access to government documents in now in U.S. hands...

''There won't be any clarity in this country for many, many years to come,'' Makiya, the son of a wealthy architect, said in an interview. ''Nothing simple is happening here, nothing simple is going on here.''

His countrymen, he said, aren't ready for the massive changes Iraq must undergo. Many fellow Iraqis, he said, can't shake the fear that is a legacy of Saddam's brutality.

Makiya, who was a leading member of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress, pointed to the deep disbelief among some Iraqis over news that Saddam's sons Odai and Qusai were killed.

''They are afraid to even allow themselves the liberty of thinking that (the sons) might be dead. This is the fear and terror that was deeply instilled in the very inner fiber of their being,'' he said...

To make it work, Makiya insisted, Iraqis must understand the full magnitude of Saddam's crimes.

Toward that goal, Makiya set up the ''Memory Foundation,'' a non-governmental body that will catalogue and index 2.4 million regime documents captured by the Kurds during their 1991 uprising against Saddam and 800,000 others seized by the U.S.-led force that retook Kuwait from the Iraqi army in the 1991 Gulf War.

With those, in addition to new documents seized by the U.S. military in the war that ousted Saddam, Makiya predicted the foundation would have the tools to help Iraqis learn what happened to missing loved ones.

He said he would raise money for ''the Iraqi version of a Holocaust museum'' in Baghdad where Saddam built a monument of two crossed swords to commemorate Iraq's 1980-88 war with neighboring Iran...

Makiya said he saw the U.S. decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam as a reflection of a post-Sept. 11 policy of breaking with authoritarian Arab regimes that, while friendly to U.S. interests, had become breeding grounds for Muslim militants.

Of 19 hijackers who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, 15 came from Saudi Arabia and one from Egypt two of Washington's closest Arab allies.

Makiya, like many in today's Iraq, accused Arab governments and the Cairo-based Arab League of maintaining silence about Saddam's crimes in return for the dictator's largesse.

''We in Iraq have the ability to turn this around, but if the Arab world is not willing to come along, we will do it alone. We'll try to do it alone,'' he said, conceding that ''the chances of failure are high.''