More than three-and-a-half years after Iraqis cheered the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue, the ousted dictator’s own end will probably draw a little closer on Sunday with the verdict in his first trial.
”It won’t be long,” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki promised Iraq last month, displaying a better grasp of the political significance of the drama than the niceties of due process or the independence of the judiciary.
”An execution order on this criminal despot and his criminal aides will be passed soon,” he said. ”His execution will remove the playing card on which those who want to be back in power are betting.”
Maliki might have jumped the gun, but few would indeed bet on anything other than a death sentence when Saddam and his seven co-defendants file back into the cramped courtroom of the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad.
In the first of several probes into the brutal excesses of Saddam’s 24-year reign, the former strongman stands accused of ordering the destruction of the small Shi’ite community of Dujail 60km north of Baghdad.
Saddam survived an assassination attempt by members of Maliki’s Dawa party in Dujail in 1982, and responded with his customary vigour. A kangaroo court was set up, the village’s orchards destroyed and 148 civilians executed.
Twenty-four years and three wars later, Maliki and his supporters have their chance to finish the job and kill Saddam once and for all.
The once untouchable tyrant has been imprisoned at a United States military base and forced to listen to accusers list the crimes carried out by his regime.
And an Iraq once mesmerised by his daily court appearances has turned off its televisions, with shell-shocked citizens more concerned by the daily struggle to survive in a country that has become a sectarian battlefield.
Thinner, bearded and shorn of his trademark military uniform, the 69-year-old still blusters from the dock, but appears to finally have grasped his powerlessness as the new regime’s judicial machinery grinds on.
Ironically, however, his execution may come about just as his support among his former subjects makes a faint revival among a Sunni minority tired of war and chaos and nostalgic for the uncompromising former order.
Last month, the leaders of Sunni tribal groups held a rally in the desert outside the city of Kirkuk, waving pictures of Saddam in his former pomp and demanding the release of their ”legitimate president”.
A Saddam comeback is of course unthinkable in a country still occupied by 150 000 US troops and largely controlled by Shi’ite militias and armed forces bitterly opposed to anyone connected to the former regime.
But Maliki’s government isn’t going to take any chances.
”Article 27, item two of the law says that if a verdict of execution is final and binding, it will be implemented within 30 days,” said the tribunal’s implacable chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Musawi.
First, of course, there would be an appeal. This would begin within 30 days of Sunday’s expected verdict and take ”two weeks or two months”.
Some hope that the execution would then be put on hold until Saddam is judged in a current trial for his role in the alleged genocide committed against Iraq’s Kurdish minority during the 1988 Anfal campaign.
Musawi and Malili are not in this camp.
”The court should not wait for other cases. Judicial procedures shall stop against the dead and shall continue against those still alive,” Musawi said.
”We are faced with a law. If the execution verdict is final and binding, it should be implemented regardless of the wish of anyone.”
What will this mean for Iraq?
Saddam’s defence lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, thinks there will be trouble.
”This decision will set the country ablaze again and plunge the entire region into the unknown,” he warned on Sunday, in an open letter to US President George Bush demanding that the verdict be postponed.
The hearing might yet be delayed by a week or two, but the most likely outcome is that a Kurdish judge, Rauf Rashid Abdel Rahman, will on Sunday bring an end to a trial that began more than a year ago on October 19 2005.
In all likelihood, Saddam will then have only months to live. – Sapa-AFP