/ 20 September 2004

Gardening Saddam ‘dying every day’

Saddam Hussein spends his days tending plants and playing board games as he waits to be put on trial for his life, according to Iraq’s United States-backed leadership in interviews on Monday offering a glimpse into the spartan routine of the once-all-powerful dictator.

Their sometimes contrasting portraits included at least three descriptions of Saddam.

The New York Times quoted Iraq’s interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, as saying that Saddam has been ”dying every day” since he was toppled by invading US and British armies last year.

”He is in prison, he is alone, he has lost everything, he has no power, nothing,” Allawi said. ”And to him that is worse than death.”

The same paper quoted Iraqi and US officials as saying that Saddam insists that he is still head of state and that ”he has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, or to show remorse for the hundreds of thousands of people killed during his 24-year dictatorship”.

In his 3,5m-by-3,9m cell — furnished with a fold-up bed, a small desk, a plastic chair and a prayer mat — Saddam reads poetry and ”tales from 1 000 years ago when Baghdad was a centre of learning and the capital of the Islamic world”, the officials said.

Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, for his part, compared the spartan simplicity of Saddam’s life in custody with the enormity of the crimes he is alleged to have committed.

Amin told the New York Times it was bizarre that Saddam placed white-painted stones around the plants he tends in the courtyard where he is allowed to exercise for three hours a day.

”This is a man who committed some of the biggest acts of ecocide in history when he drained the marshes in southern Iraq, used chemical weapons against 250 Kurdish villages and shipped whole palm-tree plantations to the charlatan leaders of the Arab world,” he said.

Amin said no lawyers, whether from Iraq or other Arab countries, are willing to defend Saddam or other ”high-value criminals” against charges such as the massacre of 5 000 people in the Kurdish village of Halabja in March 1988.

But ”without justice, I don’t see any possibility of healing the wounds in this society”, the human rights minister said.

Separately, Allawi told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat that Saddam is ”distraught and depressed” and has begged for mercy after he was charged in July with seven crimes that could take him to the gallows if convicted.

As he was being taken to court, Saddam was ”visibly trembling. He thought things would go as they had done in his time and that he was being taken for execution,” Allawi said.

Asked how he had answered Saddam’s plea for clemency, Allawi replied: ”It is for the courts to decide.”

He added: ”I don’t think it will take a long time, because the evidence against him is … overwhelming” and he noted that ”the death penalty has been restored in Iraq” since the interim government took office in late June.

Amin said that most former officials in custody have been kept well away from Saddam ”because of a fear that he would try to rig evidence or intimidate” them.

But 11 close associaties are allowed to exercise with him and they play chess, dominoes, poker and backgammon together, he said.

The New York Times said Saddam had been flown by helicopter to a US military hospital in Baghdad and treated by US and Iraqi doctors, including some formerly on his presidential medical team, for an enlarged prostate gland, hernia problems and eye trouble.

He has refused a surgical biopsy to determine whether his prostate condition is cancerous, but a US official ”there is no health issue that would prevent him standing trial”. — Sapa-AFP