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Iraqi Tribunal Details Plan to Prosecute
Saddam Hussein
6.6.2005
By JOHN F. BURNS |
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BAGHDAD, Iraq, -
The Iraqi court set up to hear cases against Saddam
Hussein and his top aides plans to bring the former
dictator to court by late summer or early fall in a
case involving the killing of nearly 160 men from
Dujail, a predominantly Shiite village 40 miles
north of Baghdad where Mr. Hussein survived an
assassination attempt in 1982, a senior Iraqi court
official said.
Under pressure from Iraq's transitional government
to accelerate Mr. Hussein's trial, the Iraqi Special
Tribunal has abandoned the strategy urged by
American lawyers who have guided much of its work
since it was established by the American occupation
authority last year. |
Photo : Saddam, AP
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Their
approach would have delayed Mr. Hussein's trial
until at least 2006, and brought him to court on
multiple counts of genocide and crimes against
humanity, in a trial similar to that of Slobodan
Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who has been
on trial since 2002 at the International War Crimes
Tribunal at the Hague.
The Americans favored trying Mr. Hussein only after
cases against some of his top aides were completed,
allowing prosecutors to build up a pattern of
"command responsibility" that led conclusively to
Mr. Hussein.
This approach, the American lawyers said in
briefings on the tribunal's work in recent months,
would be the most effective way of implicating Mr.
Hussein in mass killings in which there was no clear
documentary proof of Mr. Hussein's involvement, and
of which Mr. Hussein's defense lawyers have said
that Mr. Hussein was unaware at the time.
But Laith Kubba, spokesman for Prime Minister
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who took power at the head of a
Iraq's first-ever Shiite-majority government last
month, said at briefing today that the government
wanted the trial to begin within two months. Mr.
Kubba said there was "no reason to waste time" in
preparing a trial that would hold Mr. Hussein, who
headed a government dominated by Sunni Arabs, to
account in the 500 separate cases of crimes against
humanity that Mr. Kubba said were under
investigation by the tribunal.
Mr. Kubba said the government preferred an approach
that concentrated on 12 "fully documented cases,"
including Dujail, and these were sufficient to
ensure that Mr. Hussein, 68, would receive the death
sentence. The Jaafari government has said it intends
to apply the death sentence - already in Iraq's
existing criminal code, drafted under Mr. Hussein -
with rigor against those responsible for crimes
committed under Mr. Hussein, as well as by the
insurgents who have plagued Iraq since his
overthrow. "The position of the government is to
speed up the trial", Mr. Kubba said.
The court's new strategy, as explained by one of its
top Iraqi officials, will be to include Mr. Hussein
as a defendant in the first of its trial, involving
the assassination attempt at Dujail on July 8, 1982.
The official said Mr. Hussein had already been
called to a formal hearing similar to an
arraignment, called a referral in Iraq, at which he
had been informed that he would be tried in the case
along with at least five other defendants, including
two of his senior aides, a judge who condemned more
than 140 Dujail men to death, and two officials of
the village's Baath Party committee, who had
identified the men arrested.
In a statement of facts prepared by the tribunal in
February, when it held arraignment proceedings in
the Dujail case for Barzan al-Tikriti, Mr. Hussein's
half-brother, Taha Yassin Ramadan, 66, a former
deputy prime minister and vice president, and Awad
Al-Sadoun, 60, the judge in the Revolutionary Court
that conducted the trials of many of the Dujail men,
it said a "small group of villagers" at Dujail had
attacked Mr. Hussein's convoy on July 8, 1982, and
that Mr. Hussein, unharmed, had fled the area by
helicopter. Within hours, the tribunal said, agents
of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and other police
agencies descended on Dujail, arresting hundreds of
people and summarily executing about 15.
Ultimately, the tribunal said, about 1,500 people,
including entire Shiite families, were arrested and
held in remote desert internment camps, and 143 of
them were "brought to show trials and executed." Mr.
Ramadan, the tribunal said, led a committee that
ordered that Dujail, a farming village, have its
livelihood eliminated by destroying its date palm
plantations and fruit groves, as well as the homes
of all those arrested.
But he said the haste could prove costly because the
Iraqi government would have to use the law put in
place by the American occupation authorities. To
proceed without the Iraqis enacting their own law,
he said, "would lack credibility and legitimacy in
the eyes of the Iraqi people and other Arabs."
Tribunal officials have said that Mr. Hussein will
eventually face similar trials for other atrocities,
including the Anfal campaign of the late 1980's in
which dozens of Kurdish villages and towns,
including Halabja, were attacked with chemical
weapons; the suppression of a Shiite rebellion that
followed the 1991 Persian Gulf war, in which 150,000
Shiites were killed; the summary executions of more
than 20 Baath party leaders Mr. Hussein accused of
treason after he seized the presidency in 1979; and
the killings of more than 500 members of the family
of Massoud Barzani, a Kurdish leader, and of several
Shiite religious leaders.
Still undecided, the tribunal official said Sunday,
was whether Mr. Hussein would ultimately face trial
for his role in Iraq's eight-year war with Iran in
the 1980's, in which nearly a million Iraqis and
Iranians died.
The Jaafari government, at its first high-level
meeting with the Iranian government in Baghdad last
month, signed a joint communiqué accepting Mr.
Hussein's responsibility for starting the war, and
for the loss of life involved. Although American
officials wrote a provision for war-crimes
investigations into the statute establishing the
tribunal last year, American officials in Baghdad
have cautioned that widening the cases against Mr.
Hussein to include the Iran-Iraq war would expose
Iraq, already burdened with billions of dollars in
debt, to demands for heavy war reparations from
Iran.
Mr. Hussein will join five defendants in the Dujail
trial, including Barzan al-Tikriti, Mr. Hussein's
half brother, who headed Iraqi's intelligence
service at the time; Taha Yassin Ramadan, 66, a
former deputy prime minister and vice president; and
Awad Al-Sadoun, 60, the chief judge of the court
that sentenced 143 of the Dujail men to death.
A tribunal official said the case against Mr.
Hussein would be bolstered by testimony from Mr.
Tikriti and Mr. Ramadan implicating Mr. Hussein, and
in the destruction that followed, with the razing of
most of the village's houses and uprooting of date
palm groves and fruit orchards that were its main
livelihood. But the official, speaking on a
guarantee of anonymity, said the earliest practical
date for the Dujail trial would most likely be three
months from now, since prosecutors and defense
lawyers needed time to prepare.
There were conflicting reports of the reaction of
Mr. Hussein, who has been kept in American military
custody since his capture in a hole near his
hometown, Tikrit, on Dec. 13, 2003. A London-based
Arab-language newspaper, Asharq Al Awsat, said in
its weekend editions that Raid Juhi, chief
investigating judge of the Iraqi tribunal, had told
the newspaper in an interview that Mr. Hussein had
"suffered a collapse in morale because he
understands the extent of the charges against him."
The Iraqi lawyer named to lead Mr. Hussein's
defense, Khalil al-Duleimi, disagreed. "The last
time I met Saddam was in late April and his spirits
were very high," Mr. Duleimi said, according to an
Associated Press report on Sunday. It was not clear
whether Mr. Duleimei had met Mr. Hussein before or
after he was told that he was to face an early
trial.
Since he was captured, much about Mr. Hussein's
circumstances has been obscure. American officials
have said that he has been held in Camp Cropper, a
special detention center near Baghdad airport.
But a Jordanian lawyer, one of more than 30 foreign
defense lawyers Mr. Hussein's exiled family says it
has hired, said last month that Mr. Hussein had told
Mr. Duleimi that he had spent long periods away from
Camp Cropper. Much of his detention has been spent
at other locations, requiring flights aboard
American aircraft, that Mr. Hussein believed to be
outside Iraq, the Jordanian lawyer, Ziad Najdawi,
said.
Mr. Najdawi said Mr. Hussein had not told Mr.
Duleimi where he had been held between his meetings
with Mr. Duleimi at Camp Cropper, sessions with the
special tribunal's prosecutors, and visits Mr.
Hussein had from representatives of the Swiss-based
International Committee of the Red Cross. Mr.
Hussein, Mr. Najdawi said, behaved in his meetings
with Mr. Duleimi as if he believed their discussions
were being electronically monitored, and, Mr.
Najdawi said, as though Mr. Hussein might have been
told by his American captors not to discuss where he
was being held.
But Mr. Najdawi said that from other indications,
which he did not specify, Mr. Hussein's defense team
believed Mr. Hussein had been held in the Gulf state
of Qatar, the Middle East base for the United States
Central Command, which is responsible for the war in
Iraq, or possibly at the British-controlled island
of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean
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