BAGHDAD, September 12, -- Ousted dictator Saddam
Hussein's trial on genocide entered its fifth
hearing on Tuesday, a day after the former Iraqi
ruler charged that Kurdish testimonies against him
were dividing the country.
Saddam and six co-defendants including his cousin
Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali", were in
the dock again to face charges including genocide
over the brutal 1987-88 Anfal campaign against Kurds
in northern Iraq which prosecutors say left 182,000
people dead.
The trial, which began on August 21, has seen nine
Kurds give chilling accounts of how Saddam's forces
swept through the northern Kurdish villages killing
and gassing people and destroying their homes.
On Monday the former ruler charged that the trial
was dividing Iraq between the Kurds and the Sunni
Arabs.
"The whole beginning (of witness testimonies) is
aimed at creating a split within Iraq between the
Kurds and Arabs," Saddam said in a tirade from the
dock. |
Former dictator Saddam Hussein (R), Ali Hassan Al-Majeed
known as "Chemical Ali" (L)
Photo : AFP |
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"I want to give a message to the Iraqi people that
they should not suffer from this guilt that they
killed Kurds. This is shameful," he said.
Saddam, who is also awaiting a verdict in a trial
over the killing of Shiite villagers after an
attempt on his life in 1982, is charged with
genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity
over the Anfal campaign.
If found guilty, he faces execution by hanging.
Saddam, showing flashes of anger, claimed he had on
several occasions acted on behalf of the Kurdish
minority in Iraq.
"After the Iran-Iraq war ... I made a statement on
TV and radio giving orders that no Iraqi security
force should arrest Kurds, and if anyone has
problems with Kurds, they should complain to Saddam
Hussein."
The former dictator also said it was he who agreed
autonomy for the Kurds in northern Iraq in 1970,
when he was vice president.
"If the Arabs were racist and discriminatory, why
would they accept an autonomy for the Kurds," he
said, vowing however that "Iraqis will not split".
Saddam's outburst Monday came after three witnesses
claimed he and his co-accused ordered the gassing of
Kurds and bombing of their villages to quell an
insurgency that coincided with the last years of the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Katherine Elias Mikhail, once a peshmerga Kurdish
guerrilla, described how she was present when first
her unit and then a year later her village were
gassed by Saddam's air force.
"I saw hundreds of people -- not dozens but hundreds
-- and they were vomiting and teary-eyed," she said
describing a 1987 attack on a peshmerga base.
"People with me collapsed because they had lost
their sight."
In late 1988, the planes struck her village.
"We had been frequently attacked by aircraft, but
this time the sound of the explosions was not as
loud as before and after the explosion there was
white smoke," said the woman who is now a writer in
the United States.
Mikhail, who has long since shed her guerrilla
fatigues for a business suit, said she lost most of
her family to the old regime and her complaint was
against Saddam and Chemical Ali and "the
international companies who supplied the Iraqi
regimes with these weapons".
She was followed on the witness stand by two more
Kurds, including Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a farmer who
described how troops came through his village in
1987, set fire to his village and drove off their
cattle.
"We followed after them and begged them to return
our cattle, and they told us that the Iraqi
government had ordered them to kill us and loot our
livestock," he said, going on to describe his
subsequent imprisonment.
AFP
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