A Kurdish mother who lost a child to a poison-gas attack on her village nearly two decades ago cursed ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on Wednesday, the third day of his trial for genocide.
”May God blind them all,” cried 45-year-old Adiba Owla Bayez in court, pointing at Saddam and six co-defendants accused with him of masterminding the savage 1987 to 1988 Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurdish minority.
The accused appeared before a panel of judges at the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad, where prosecutors began to call more witnesses to testify to the savagery of the Iraqi military sweep through their villages.
The former president is accused of ordering his forces to conduct a campaign to exterminate up to 182 000 Kurdish civilians and raze about 3 000 villages in Iraq’s northern hills and deserts to the ground.
Bayez, wearing a black headscarf and dress, told the court that one of her daughters had died within three months of the chemical attack on her village, and she has since had two miscarriages.
Her testimony about the attack itself, describing how she and her family were temporarily blinded by gas during an air raid by Iraqi jets in April 1987, closely mirrored two accounts given on Tuesday.
”I was screaming because I did not want to lose my children. I could not see them and they were also blind. So I was screaming. It was a judgement day,” she told the court.
She recounted how the villagers, many of them blinded, stumbled towards higher ground to seek shelter, while pursued by military helicopters. They were tracked down by Iraqi troops and taken to a detention centre, she said.
”I went for four days without eyesight. My children could not see. I was just screaming. On the fifth day I slightly opened my eyes. And it was a terrible scene. My children and my skin had turned black,” she said.
After several days, the men from the village were separated from the women and taken away, Bayez said, alleging that they had been ”Anfalised”, the term in Kurdistan for those who disappeared into mass graves.
The accused insist Anfal was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation aimed at Iranian infiltrators and separatist guerrillas, but Tuesday’s witnesses told the court that Iraqi aircraft had fired chemical weapons on civilian villages.
Anfal — named after an Arabic term in the Qur’an meaning ”spoils” — was an operation directed against Kurds living in northern Iraq in the closing stages of Saddam’s long war against neighbouring Iran.
Two of Saddam’s co-accused argued on Tuesday the campaign was justified in the context of the 1980 to 88 Iran-Iraq war.
”Iranians and Kurds were fighting hand in hand against the Iraqi military,” said Saber al-Duri, Saddam’s former director of military intelligence.
Court officials expect the Anfal trial to last for about four months. Along with Saddam, six former officials including his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid — the notorious ”Chemical Ali” — are facing charges.
Saddam and Chemical Ali have been accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. They refused to enter pleas, and the court ordered that pleas of innocent be recorded for them.
The remaining five defendants have pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. — Sapa-AFP