It was meant to be straightforward: a Nuremberg-style trial to show the world that dictators could be made to face justice in the land they once terrorised. Almost two years after being hauled from a hole in the ground, Saddam Hussein would finally enter the dock to answer for his crimes before a fully functioning Iraqi court.
The case, the torture and execution of 148 Shia men and boys from Dujail after a failed assassination attempt against the then president in 1982, would not rank as the greatest of Saddam’s crimes, but they were relatively easy to prove. The Bush administration hoped the hearings would expose the nature of Saddam’s crimes, which the Americans had used, in part, to justify their invasion. They also hoped that a guilty verdict, and Saddam’s resulting execution, would take the sting out of the Sunni insurgency.
The United States spent more than $140-million preparing for the trial, fortifying the court and training Iraqi officials. ”We hoped it would set a new standard for justice, not just in Iraq but across the Middle East, showing citizens that their leaders could be held to account,” a senior US legal adviser to the Iraqi tribunal said.
In the dock with Saddam were Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice-president; Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother and a former head of the mukhabarat or Iraqi secret police; Awad Ahmad al-Bander, a former chief judge of Saddam’s revolutionary court; and four Ba’ath party officials from Dujail.
Such was the prosecutors’ confidence that lawyers predicted it would be over in a month.
There was an air of triumphant expectancy as Saddam and the seven co-accused were called into court shortly after midday on October 19 last year, in the former Ba’ath party headquarters, now inside the Green Zone. Saddam was the last to appear. Unlike the others, who wore traditional Arab robes, he wore a dark pinstripe suit and open-necked shirt.
His beard was trimmed and his dyed hair had been cut and combed. But the 68-year-old looked thinner than at his arraignment and the lines in his brow spoke of the strains of solitary confinement. He was, however, calm and self-assured.
Yet from the moment the senior judge on the five-man panel asked him to stand and identify himself, Saddam brought the proceedings to the verge of anarchy, setting the tone for the next nine months.
”Those who fought in God’s cause will be victorious …” he declared, clutching the Qur’an. ”I am at the mercy of God, the most powerful.”
The judge asked him again to identify himself.
”Who are you? What does this court want?” Saddam said. ”I don’t answer this so-called court, with all due respect, and I reserve my constitutional right as the president of the country of Iraq. I don’t acknowledge either the entity that authorises you, nor the aggression, because everything based on falsehood is falsehood.”
The judge then told Saddam to ”relax” and said the court could hear his testimony later. But he still needed his name.
”You know me,” came the response. ”You are an Iraqi and you know that I don’t get tired.”
Despite refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the court, Saddam would later mutter that he was ”not guilty,” his plea echoed by his co-defendants.
”From the moment Saddam Hussein refused to tell the judge his name and recognise the legitimacy of the court, their strategy for the trial became clear,” said the US legal adviser.
That strategy, according to Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam’s chief defence lawyer, was to use the proceedings to stoke the insurgency and to keep the trial going, so that in the end a frustrated US would release Saddam in return for his help in restoring order to the country. ”He’ll be the last resort; they’ll knock on his door,” Dulaimi told the New York Times.
Try as they might, the US and Iraqi legal experts could not insulate the trial they had organised from the violence and instability coursing through Iraq.
Three defence lawyers were killed — possibly by Shia death squads, linked to the interior ministry or to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi army — and another fled abroad.
More than 30 witnesses were too intimidated to come to court, and many gave evidence from behind screens. The sessions were dogged by procedural wrangling and technical faults, and repeatedly disrupted by anti-US tirades, hunger strikes, walkouts and boycotts by Saddam and his defence team, who complained that they were not being given access to vital documents.
Politics were at a maximum and legalities at a minimum. If the new Iraqi authorities hadn’t intended a show trial, then the former leader and his co-defendants were intent on making it one.
Saddam the performer was taking his last chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his dwindling band of loyalists — supported by his allies. Barzan wore pyjamas in court, claiming he was not getting enough medical treatment in prison, and sat with his back to the judges. Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s former international envoy, delivered a courtroom encomium to him in what appeared to be a hospital gown.
The proceedings were criticised by prominent human rights groups and bodies such as Amnesty and the UN, which described them as ”incompatible” with standards of international justice.
Iraq’s new leaders and US officials weighed in from the sidelines, publicly criticising the judge for being too tolerant of the defence’s antics, and urging a speeding up of the whole process.
The brunt of their ire, and of Saddam’s truculence, was borne by the chief judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, who finally resigned in January. Speaking to the Guardian in his family home in Sulaymaniyah, last week, Judge Rizgar recalled the enormous pressures surrounding the trial, although he declined to give the exact reasons why he left his post.
”I treated everything as if it were a normal case,” he said. ”I believe a judge should always be neutral. That neutrality gives me a profound strength to treat proceedings in a normal and professional manner.” As the trial progressed, the sniping increased. The prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said repeatedly that he favoured Saddam’s swift execution. But Judge Rizgar remained unmoved.
”I did my job,” he said. ”According to law it is forbidden to talk in a way that will leave an impact on the judge or the prosecutor. But did we have full implementation of this law?”
Judge Rizgar was subsequently replaced by another Kurdish judge, Rauf Abdel Rahman, whose more assertive approach won praise from some Iraqis but raised further questions about the court’s impartiality. As the case proceeded, the unruliness and defiance from Saddam and his team worsened. Saddam told the judge to ”go to hell”.
The trial’s fairness was a vital concern in a country trying to bring reconciliation between its Sunni Arab minority, which dominated Iraq under Saddam, and the Shia Muslim majority and its Kurdish partners who now control the government.
The trial was beamed live from the courtroom, albeit with a 20-minute delay so that some of Saddam’s outbursts could be censored. And the effect of seeing the once absolute ruler of Iraq in the dock, quibbling with a judge, for a while held Iraq in thrall, though some Sunni Arabs saw the trial as a sign of their humiliation and marginalisation.
Amid the clamour, the harrowing witness accounts of torture and murder in Dujail were all but drowned out. More than 80 Iraqis testified over 40 sessions.
Ahmed Hassan Mohammed described how after the assassination attempt on Saddam’s motorcade in Dujail, women and children were tortured.
”People who were arrested were taken to prison and most of them were killed there. The scene was frightening. Even women with babies were arrested,” Mohammed said. He alleged that the torture equipment included a mincing machine that was sometimes fed with living human bodies.
The prosecution produced a wealth of documents from the previous regime, which they claimed proved Saddam’s guilt. As the trial drew to a close Saddam appeared to acknowledge that he had signed the death warrants for the men in Dujail, but said it was his constitutional right as a president, and that he had been defending Iraq from the Iranian-sponsored militants of the Dawa party who had organised the ambush on his motorcade.
”The responsibility was mine and mine alone,” he told the court.
Backstory
As Saddam Hussein entered the town of Dujail, a mainly Shia farming community 56km north of Baghdad, on July 8 1982, villagers fired on his motorcade in an assassination attempt. The Iraqi military took swift retaliatory action. Helicopters fired on the village and hundreds of residents were rounded up. Many men and boys were executed. Saddam was charged with the deaths of 148 villagers, but many in Dujail believe the death toll was much higher. Saddam later appeared to acknowledge he had signed the death warrants for men in Dujail, but said it was his constitutional right. ”The responsibility was mine and mine alone,” he told his trial. – Guardian Unlimited Â