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"Then the judge appeared, and announced he will
start the trial of Saddam and his assistants. And
everyone responded to the judge's announcement in
their own way. There were people who were shouting,
there were people who were crying. For everyone, it
was something unbelievable."
Almost everyone remembers the oversized banner
headline in that day's edition of Kurdistan Nwea:
"The Day of Justice."
The events related in witness testimony in a Baghdad
courtroom happened here, in the Kurdistan region of
northern Iraq. They happened 18 years ago, but to
many here watching the trial, which resumes today
after a recess called late last month, it is as if
they took place last week.
As many as 100,000 died during the Hussein
government's 1988 campaign dubbed Anfal, or "spoils
of war," which attempted to relocate — and in many
cases, exterminate — Kurds living along the mutinous
borderlands near Turkey.
In the former leader's second trial, Hussein and his
six codefendants, charged variously with war crimes,
crimes against humanity and genocide, are accused of
directing a campaign in which tens of thousands of
men were shot and pushed into mass graves, and women
and children were rounded up and killed, or forced
into camps that were no more than fenced-off areas
of sand. Thousands of civilians were attacked with
poisonous gas and left, blinded, burned and
vomiting, to die. Wells were filled with dirt,
houses demolished, farm animals seized, villages
marked with signposts reading "forbidden zone."
Hussein has refused to enter a plea, but he and his
lawyers appear to be painting the 6 1/2 -month
campaign as a legitimate counterinsurgency operation
against a secessionist region that was allied with
Iraq's enemy, Iran, during the war that lasted
through most of the 1980s.
The trial has special resonance here because almost
no family in the north is without victims.
Posters tacked up on walls all over this city about
30 miles from the Iranian border show a photograph
of Hussein as he looked just after he was captured
by U.S. forces, grizzled and dazed, his hair like a
caveman's. The image is often half scratched-out or
otherwise mutilated. "Now YOU are under the mercy of
Anfal," the posters say.
Dozens, including elderly peasant women and tough
Kurdish peshmerga fighters, have boarded planes to
Baghdad to sit at the witness table, stare Hussein
in the face and provide testimony of what happened.
"When I entered the court, it was somehow horrible,"
said former peshmerga Akarwat Abdullah Tawfik, who
testified about leading 700 civilians and 400 fellow
fighters through the mountains during a deadly
snowstorm to escape their villages, only to face a
gas attack in the village of Shanakhsea, northeast
of Sulaymaniya, on March 22, 1988.
"You see, he was so weak, but he still had a
powerful presence," Tawfik said. "When you see him,
you feel frightened. He was looking at me. I felt
that he was expressing his sorrow that he did not
kill all of us so that nobody would be eyewitness to
his atrocities."
He told his story for 75 minutes, and then for the
next 110 the defendants and their lawyers countered
with questions.
Through it all, the citizens of Sulaymaniya have
cheered the witnesses and booed the defendants. The
Shaab Cafe erupted into a storm of whistles and
hoots each time the presiding judge, Mohammed Orabi
Khalefa, ejected Hussein from the courtroom for
refusing to keep silent. Khalefa has kept a lid on
verbal outbursts since replacing the trial's
original judge, whom Iraqi authorities deemed to be
partial to the defendants.
"People get so much pleasure from seeing that
dictator and his company with such long faces. And
not the previous face of the president, that
handsome president of Iraq. No. Sitting in a cage….
And now you see a young judge warning him, and
making him sit down, and making him shut up," said
Tawfik Ahmed Abdul, chief of vital statistics for
the city Health Department.
Sipping their glasses of sweet tea, the patrons at
Shaab complain that the trial is taking too long.
They recall how trials in the Hussein era often took
half an hour. A few, such as Akarwat Tawfik, even
argue that public execution would be too merciful a
punishment for Hussein.
Because electricity remains an on-again, off-again
affair throughout Iraq, many wait until the more
reliable evening hours, when nearly every station in
Kurdistan rebroadcasts the day's events for four to
five hours a night, to watch.
Aso Rashid Faradj, 42, watches at his father's
bookshop, or at home, preferring the quiet way the
tomes seem to absorb his ricocheting memories as the
stories unfold. He and his older brother were
arrested in 1985, in the prelude to the Anfal
campaign. Faradj spent five years in prison.
Five years after Faradj's release, his brother was
executed. The family received a bill that had to be
paid before his body was released from Abu Ghraib
prison outside Baghdad. It included an invoice for
the clothing he was issued, his coffin and the four
bullets used to end his life.
"I never thought that we would be here, making fun
of Saddam Hussein. But I imagined in the past that
one day Saddam's head would be destroyed, just like
the head of [former Romanian leader Nicolae]
Ceausescu and Hitler and other dictators," Faradj
said.
"Because in the end, the regime was a fascist
regime, an anti-people regime. Saddam did not
recognize a people that constitute one-third of
Iraq, which is the Kurds. And more than all of this,
Saddam didn't love his country and his people."
latimes com
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