Saddam's genocide trial revives Kurd anger 20.8.2006

Proceedings are expected to last until the end of the year, unless they are interrupted by the results of the first case against Saddam over the killing of 148 Shiite villagers from Dujail after an attempt on his life in 1982.

Judges in the Dujail case are due to announce their verdict on October 16. If Saddam is found guilty, he could be given the death penalty.

If so, he would have an automatic right of appeal, but if he loses he could face a noose before the Anfal trial is complete.

The case against Saddam's co-defendants, former senior security officials in his regime, would continue however, as prosecutors seek to make the terrible events of 1988 at matter of legal record and heal some of Iraq's wounds.

"The evidence will essentially consist of the testimony of the complainants, testimony of witnesses, and a documentary phase," a US offical close to the case said on condition of anonymity.

"There are a lot of documents in this case that truly connect the defendants of this case to the actions of the Anfal -- very appalling evidence consisting of mass graves where people where taken out to the desert and executed."

The chief trial judge will be an Iraqi Shiite Arab, Abdallah al-Ameri, according to officials at the tribunal's office in Kurdistan.

Saddam and co-defendants will be defended by 12 lawyers, while a 32-strong legal team will represent Anfal victims.

Six former senior officials will be charged alongside Saddam, most significantly his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, who became notorious as "Chemical Ali" for ordering poison gas attacks.

Prosecutors will seek to prove that in ordering Anfal, named after an Arabic term for "spoils", Saddam was guilty of a genocidal bid to exterminate the Kurdish civilian population.

The defence is expected to argue that Anfal was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation against Kurdish separatist guerrillas who sympathised with the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Iraqi prosecutors and their international advisers, however, feel they have enough evidence to tie Saddam and his inner circle to a policy of setting up "prohibited zones" within which Kurdish civilians were bombed, gassed and shot.

Kamal Othman Khoshaw, the general prosecutor of Kurdistan, said his teams have unearthed what they believe is clinching proof of Saddam's guilt.

"Among the documents is a military one issued by the General Command of the Armed Forces, addressed to the general commander, and breaking the news that the operation with all its eight stages was over," he told AFP.

"The document names all the leaders and party members involved," he said.

Human rights watchdogs, however, are concerned that the Iraqi tribunal does not have enough experienced jurists to conduct a genocide hearing and cannot provide enough security to defence witnesses.

"There is strong evidence of genocide against the former regime," Nehal Bhuta of the New York-based Human Rights Watch told AFP.

"But based on our observations from the Dujail massacre trial, we believe the court is ill-equipped to conduct a trial of such a magnitude against a head of a state," he warned, calling for increased international involvment.

Such concerns will cut little ice with surviving Kurds, however, whose memories have been stirred by a government-led effort to find witnesses and by poster campaigns promoting the trial as a humiliation for Saddam.

Mullah Omar Hassan, 50, was grief-stricken when he remembered his daughter being taken away. "She was pleading, 'Father, don't leave me alone'," he told AFP, adding that all but a handful of his 102 neighbours were killed.

"We waited for the day to see him tried for his crime and that day is coming near," he said.

AFP

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