Iraq: Three months ago Haider Samad took his first walk of freedom down the newly-liberated streets of Basra. After 12 years of house arrest for his family's role in Iraq's small pro-democracy movement, there was only one thing Haider wanted with his freedom: to visit his fiancée, Noora.
They had last met six years ago. But the Iraqi secret police, learning of their lovers' trysts in Basra's parks and cafés, threatened to send them both to prison if Haider left his house again.
Haider's father, a leading lawyer in Basra, had already been taken off to Baghdad's infamous Abu Gharib prison for contacting the Iraqi opposition in exile at the end of the first Gulf War. He has not been heard from since.
Haider returned to the shadowy world of those who had fallen from favour with Saddam's regime.
Barred from school and work, he consoled himself in hiding by learning English from the BBC World Service and writing rapturous hymns to Noora and the United States. Noora wrote back with equal ardour.
Three months later I found Haider at the opening of Basra's House of Justice, the first centralised law court in southern Iraq since the war. He had been working as a translator for the military since turning up at the gates of an army base with his immaculate English accent and a copy of the British national anthem he was learning to welcome the soldiers.
"I can't believe it. A few months ago I was sitting in my room with the curtains drawn, terrified that I would be arrested again by the secret police, and now I'm about to translate for a major general," he said.
Haider, a frail man looking much older than his 28 years, stood before the assembled military hierarchy and judges and, in a suddenly sonorous voice, went to work.
"With the opening of this House of Justice, we are handing over to the people of Basra the sort of impartial criminal justice system they have never had before," he translated.
"God knows what we'd do without Haider," said Col Nicholas Mercer, Haider's boss and the military lawyer heading the team given the painstaking task of reconfiguring southern Iraq's criminal justice system.
Back at his home, in the room where he spent his 12 years of incarceration, Haider was disconsolate. "You know, I still haven't seen Noora yet," he said.
"I desperately want to meet her. I almost did three months ago but stopped outside her house, realising that she would never accept her marriage proposal from me with no job and poor health and nothing to offer except myself."
Haider and Noora have subsequently spoken on the telephone, but that has only confirmed Haider's fears. Noora, it seems, has grown tired with him after six years of waiting.
"She's receiving marriage proposals from doctors and lawyers and I'm earning £3 a day translating.
She's under a lot of pressure from her family. I've tried explaining to her that I am doing my duty helping the British and that I will go to medical school this autumn. But that means it will be another six years before I am qualified."