Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein is unlikely to stand trial for at least another two years, The Guardian has learned.
The Iraqi special tribunal for crimes against humanity is months away from hearing its first case, and when the trials begin in October or November the first defendants to appear will be high-ranking Ba’ath party officials.
Muhammad Zimam Abd al-Razzaq al-Sadun, the former Ba’ath party chairman and commander of the militia in Baghdad, was reported to have been captured on Sunday, bringing the number caught since US authorities issued their ”most wanted” deck of 52 cards to 44.
”I think it will take two years to get to Saddam being tried,” said Salem Chalabi, one of the architects of the court and a nephew of the influential Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.
The need to select and screen judges, prepare courts and establish well-guarded jails to hold the suspects have led to delays. ”There are frustrations,” said Chalabi.
The court has to balance the demand of most Iraqis for a rapid show trial of Saddam and his deputies with the need to establish an impartial model for the new judiciary.
”It is a balance that we have to work here between trying to protect defendants’ rights and meet international standards of due process of law and the wish of the Iraqis for quick vengeance,” said Chalabi.
He said he was under pressure from American officials to limit the tribunal’s cases ”for political reasons” — apparently because they want to avoid further alienating Iraq’s Sunni community, from which Saddam and most of his close aides are drawn.
”The US wants us not to make it more than 30 or 50 [cases],” he said. ”I envisage 300.”
In Saddam’s trial, prosecutors are likely to focus on around a dozen of the most heinous accusations, including the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, the crushing of the 1991 uprising, ethnic cleansing and persecution of the Shias.
Iraqi officials want to prevent him politicising his trial in the way the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has done by calling in former western government leaders to account for the support they showed Saddam before the first Gulf war in 1991.
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who visited Saddam in 1983 and 1984, is among those who could face unwelcome questioning.
Not all Ba’athists who committed crimes can possibly be brought before the court. Iraqi officials hope to run some kind of reconciliation effort similar to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
”If we try and chase all the criminals who caused harm to the Iraqi people there will be an infinite chain of cases,” said Nawar Mohammad Nasser, the chief judge at a criminal court in Baghdad.
Unlike the international courts set up in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Iraqi tribunal will be run by the Iraqis.
Chalabi, who is leading the establishment of the court, has lived outside Iraq for many years and worked as a lawyer specialising in capital markets at Clifford Chance in London.
He was a founding member of Indict, an organisation that documented evidence against Saddam’s regime, and was also involved in discussions on the tribunal with the US state department before the war.
The tribunal has the power to investigate and try only cases of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and three crimes particular to Iraq: manipulating the judiciary, squandering public assets and starting a war against another Arab country.
Each trial will have five judges. There will be a team of 20 ”investigative judges” to draw up evidence against suspects and a nine-member appeal court. Plea-bargaining will be permitted.
Crimes involving murder and rape will be punishable by death — by hanging for civilians and by firing squad for army officers.
But already there have been serious criticisms of the court. Human Rights Watch described it as ”fundamentally flawed” last month because it will use judges who have no experience of crimes against humanity, because the death penalty is not prohibited and because there is no explicit insistence that guilt must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. – Guardian Unlimited Â