The prosecutor in the genocide trial of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on Wednesday demanded that the chief judge resign, saying he was too lenient with defendants who had threatened lawyers and witnesses.
”Defendants have gone too far, with unacceptable expressions and words. Defendants have uttered clear threats. The chief prosecutor’s office requests the judge step down from this case,” prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon said at the opening of the latest hearing.
Presiding Judge Abdullah al-Ameri dismissed the demand.
”The judge should coordinate and make peace so nobody takes advantage of his fairness … I have been working in the judicial system for the past 25 years,” al-Ameri said.
Saddam and six other former aides, including his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed ”Chemical Ali”, face genocide and other charges over the brutal Anfal campaign of 1987 to 1988 in which prosecutors say 182 000 Kurds were slaughtered.
If found guilty they face execution by hanging.
Saddam and his former regime maintains they were engaged in a necessary counter-insurgency operation.
Since the trial opened last month, Saddam has often threatened the prosecutor and questioned witnesses who have given graphic testimony against his forces over the Anfal campaign.
On Tuesday, Saddam threatened one of the witnesses’ lawyers as he defended the fight of the Kurdish guerrillas or peshmerga — which means ”those who face death” in Kurdish — against the old regime.
Saddam accused him of being an agent of ”Iranians and Zionists” and threatened to ”crush his head”.
On the opening day of the trial on August 21, Saddam had also threatened prosecutor al-Faroon after he charged that Saddam’s forces had raped Iraqi women during the Anfal campaign.
”If he says an Iraqi woman was raped in my era and he does not prove it, I will hunt him down for the rest of my life,” Saddam said at the time.
On Wednesday, four new Kurdish witnesses continued their tirade against Saddam and the other accused, before the trial was adjourned to Thursday.
The first witness of the day, Majeed Ahmad, described how his village was bombed with chemical weapons ”just before Anfal”.
He said the bombing went on for 20 days in Sargalow, a village north of Sulaimaniyah, and that all residents fled to Iran.
”When the villagers returned to Iraq they surrendered to the Iraqi army and were sent to prison. We have not heard from them since then.”
Omar Othman Mohammed, a peshmerga fighter from Sulaimaniyah, accused al-Majid of leading the attacks and using chemical bombs.
”He [al-Majid] killed a large number of our peshmergas, civilians and members of the opposition Dawa and communist parties,” he said, referring to a bomb attack on March 22 1988.
”The warplanes hovered over the region and dropped balloons, apparently full of chemical weapons. Then missiles followed. A couple of them fell near my place. I saw headless bodies and parts of bodies, like arms and legs.”
Another witness, Sadoon Khider Gader, also gave a gruesome account of how dogs were set free on prisoners killed in detention centres.
”They [the prisoners] were badly treated and those who died were carried by their mates outside” of the detention centre and buried, said Gader, who lost his two sons.
”We saw dogs eating them [the corpses] through the windows.”
Salah Gader Mohammed Ameen broke down in the witness box as he testified, saying his father, mother and two brothers disappeared in the Anfal attacks, only to be told that in 2004 that their bodies were found in mass graves.
”Nothing will compensate the loss of my father and mother when I was 10 years old,” he said wiping his tears.
Since the start of the trial, witnesses have given chilling accounts of how Kurds were bombed, imprisoned and buried in mass graves by Saddam’s forces in the Anfal attacks coinciding with the last years of the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq war.
On Tuesday, Saddam showed obvious annoyance at the long litany of condemnations by the witnesses and attempted to give his side of the story.
”I noticed today [Tuesday] that there were too many insults … when we put a lion in a cage, any coward can bring a stick and hit him,” he said.
Saddam said he had negotiated an end to a Kurdish uprising in 1975, after stopping what he said was Iranian interference in Iraq’s affairs.
”This means that between the Iraqis — Arabs and Kurds — there were no problems,” he said, however, admitting that ”there were some tragedies and in the fight some unpleasant things happened”.
On Wednesday, Saddam was conspicuously quiet. — AFP
