Saddam Hussein has been questioned in court for the first time about the crushing of the Shia rebellion in southern Iraq in 1991, the senior investigating judge on Iraq’s special tribunal revealed on Friday.
Judge Raid al Juhi said the former Iraqi dictator had been summoned to a hearing on Thursday to face 45 minutes of questioning.
Pictures released by the special tribunal, set up after the war to try the former regime leaders, showed Saddam looking older with a trimmed beard and at times wearing thick, framed glasses.
The judge said he is confident of wrapping up the criminal investigations into Saddam’s alleged role in the repression of Iraq’s Shia population in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, as well as a probe into his involvement in the campaign of forced deportations of Kurds from large areas of their homeland in the north during the 1980s.
Judge Juhi said a trial date for the former dictator will be announced in the coming days.
The ousted president, who has been in United States custody since he was captured in December 2003, is expected to stand trial in September for his alleged role in the massacre of Shia villagers in Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982.
This will be the first of a dozen cases being prepared by tribunal officials against Saddam and other former Ba’athist leaders.
The new Iraqi authorities hope the trial (and subsequent execution) of Saddam will help to demoralise the Sunni-Arab led insurgency, which is in part led by supporters of the former regime.
The Shia uprising in southern Iraq began a few days after the ceasefire in the first Gulf War, at the beginning of March 1991.
It was matched by an uprising in the Kurdish north. In the south, Saddam’s Republican Guard responded with exceptional brutality, crushing the rebels and conducting indiscriminate mass killings of the population.
There was widespread destruction of Shia holy places in Najaf and Kerbala by Iraqi tanks painted with the slogan ”No Shia [will survive] after today”.
As many as 300 000 people may have been killed during the operation.
Mowfaq Al Rubaei, the National Security Adviser, said on Friday that the trial of Saddam and his former henchmen ”would enable Iraq to move on and begin a process of national reconciliation”.
Judge Ruhi’s announcement of the Saddam hearing appeared designed to reassure Iraqis that the work of the special tribunal was still on track.
The tribunal, which is supposedly independent, has been mired in controversy following attempts by the country’s de-Ba’athification committee, urged on by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, to remove a number of officials on the tribunal — including Judge Ruhi — for their alleged Ba’athist past.
Two days ago, however, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani gave his personal backing to the chief investigator and called for support for his work.
Sources close to the tribunal said the president’s intervention had ”restored morale” and that ”the judges remained determined to complete their task”.
Amid the continued violence on Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up among a crowd of Iraqi army recruits as they trained in the town of Rabiyah on the Syrian border, 368km north-west of Baghdad.
Police said at least 25 people had been killed and 35 wounded, but US military sources put the toll at 20 dead and 25 injured.
The attack followed an increasingly familiar pattern: an attacker with explosives strapped to his body joined a group of young men who had enlisted in Iraq’s fledgling security forces.
The Rabiyah border area is a special security zone, and officials speculated on Friday that insurgent sympathisers among the recruits may have helped the bomber gain access.
In other violence, two marines were reported killed by insurgents with guns and rocket-propelled grenades in Haditha, in western Iraq.
US jets responded by bombing suspected insurgent positions.
In Baghdad, at least three civilians were wounded when a car bomb exploded near a US-Iraqi patrol in the Dora neighbourhood, while the US military reported the death of a soldier in a traffic accident. He was the 11th American soldier killed this week. — Guardian Unlimited Â