A witness at Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial in Baghdad described on Monday how he survived the murder of dozens of villagers by Iraqi forces during the 1988 military campaign against the Kurds.
The session resumed after a two-week break with witness Taimor Abdallah Rokhzai telling the court how Kurdish villagers were taken out into the desert and shot by soldiers.
”There was a trench there and we were lined up and a soldier was shooting at us,” said the smartly dressed young Kurd who now lives in Washington DC.
”I saw bullets hitting a woman’s head and her brain coming out. I saw the pregnant woman shot and killed,” added Rokhzai, who was 12 at the time. ”It was horrible.”
Rokhzai watched his mother and sister and dozens of others shot dead as he was hit in the shoulder and fell into a metre-deep trench filled with bodies.
”Then suddenly it stopped and it was quiet. I was waiting to die and my whole body was covered with blood, and the soldiers went away,” he added, describing how he then scrambled out of the pit and fled across a landscape of trenches filled with corpses.
He was eventually helped by a desert tribesman who hid him for several years before he returned to the north of the country, where word spread that a child had survived a massacre.
”When the Iraqi intelligence forces came to know that I was the only witness to have seen that massacre they sent people to kill me,” he said.
The seven defendants are accused of responsibility for the deaths of 182 000 Kurds during the so-called Anfal campaign, when government troops swept through Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988, burning and bombing thousands of villages.
Saddam and his former aides argue that it was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation against Kurdish separatists at a time when the country was at war with neighbouring Iran.
The accused — including Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as ”Chemical Ali” — all face the death penalty if convicted. Saddam and Majid are the only defendants facing a charge of genocide, however.
Most of the defendants’ lawyers have boycotted the trial, but Monday’s session saw Badie Aref, who is defending former military intelligence chief Farhan al-Juburi, make an appearance in court.
Aref said that during the recess, United States officials came to his office and told him that he had the power to convict or acquit his defendant, and specified which defence witnesses he should use in the trial.
”This is forcing us to do something that the occupation wants,” he told the court. ”This is a conspiracy and can’t be done.”
Earlier Judge Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifah specified that defence lawyers should present a list of their witnesses in Monday’s session. Aref submitted 10 names.
Dozens of Kurdish villagers and former guerrillas have already testified, giving horrifying accounts of atrocities allegedly committed by Iraqi forces against men, women and children during the Anfal campaign.
The witnesses described the detention of civilians, the rape of women prisoners and villages being bombed with chemical weapons.
The Dujail verdicts are now with an appellate chamber, whose final word will come within an unspecified time. If it upholds the trial court’s ruling, Iraqi law stipulates that Saddam must be executed within 30 days of that decision.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has already said Saddam may be hanged before the end of this year. — AFP
