Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and all the high-profile accused on Wednesday refused to attend the latest session of their trial, as the embattled tribunal finally completed the first phase of testimony.
Neither Saddam nor his defence team and none of the three other well-known defendants attended the hearing after all quitting the stormy first session of the trial under new Judge Rauf Rasheed Abdel Rahman’s control on Sunday.
Wednesday’s session saw the trial complete the complainant phase, featuring the testimony of people with direct complaints against the defendants, and move on to the witness phase, involving those who could shed light on the case.
In the course of the day’s testimony, however, it was hard to distinguish between the kinds of witnesses as all related the chilling torture tactics of the old regime. Two complainants and five witnesses testified.
The defendants are on trial for their lives over the massacre of 148 Shi’ites of the village of Dujail in the mid-1980s.
One of the more minor defendants, a former local Ba’ath party official, also refused to attend, leaving just three of the original eight defendants in an accused box marked by five empty black seats.
The judge, whose hard-line approach has courted fresh controversy for the court, said the trial would continue in any case, with the remaining defendants to be tried in absentia.
Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan and former top judge Awad al-Bandar joined the former Iraqi president in boycotting the session.
Torture
The absent Barzan featured prominently in Wednesday’s testimony, with one female witness describing how he presided over her torture and humiliation.
”Barzan personally supervised my stripping and then kicked me three times on my naked chest. I still feel the pain and for many years I was unable to breathe,” said the woman from behind a curtain.
Another witness also said her torture was frequently watched by Barzan, adding that he nearly killed her at one point.
”Barzan once put me on a doorstep and was about to shoot me, but something made him stop and I was saved,” she told the court.
Testimony, however, started only after a three-hour delay and a closed session to sort out a procedural wrangle.
Once the open session began, chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Mussawi called for an adjournment of the hearing until such point as the absent defendants could be compelled to attend.
The judge said only that his request would be considered and continued the session, saying that in the absence of the defence team, court-appointed attorneys would defend the remaining three accused.
Conditions
In a statement published hours before the trial resumed, the boycotting defence team laid out 11 conditions for their return.
Among those demands were the sacking of the judge and the switching of the trial ”to a country which can offer security”.
The defence team declared that Rahman ”be removed and cease to have anything to do with the accused because he shows them great hostility”.
Rahman, however, allowed Wednesday’s session to continue and the first complainant witness was a woman who had lost eight members of her family in persecutions following the events in Dujail.
”I want to know where Saddam took my family,” she wailed in the court from behind the beige curtain that has concealed most witnesses to date.
The trial has already come under attack from human rights activists who have cast doubts over its fairness after the previous presiding Judge, Rizkar Mohammed Amin, quit last month.
Several MPs and government officials had publicly criticised Amin for what they viewed as lenient treatment of Saddam and his seven co-defendants.
”The demand for presiding Judge Rizkar Amin’s dismissal, which contributed to his resignation, was nothing less than an attack on judicial independence,” said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, in a statement last week.
Also, the appointment of Rahman, a magistrate from outside the chamber, is believed to have irked other judges.
Rahman (64) is the vice-president of the criminal court in the northern town of Arbil and helped found the human rights organisation of the Kurdish autonomous region in 1991.
He was twice arrested by the Iraqi government and at one point was tortured so badly he was partly paralysed.
Rahman was born in Halabja, the Kurdish town bombed by Saddam’s forces with chemical weapons in 1988 — another of the events for which Saddam could be tried later. — AFP
