Saddam's Trials

The first thing to make clear is that there isn't one "Saddam trial". There has been one set of court proceedings already, relating to the killing of 148 Shia in Dujail in 1982. The one going on now is for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Kurds in 1988 in what was called Operation Anfal. Among others also on trial are his cousin, "Chemical Ali".

I went to the Anfal trial today. It was a strange experience, being totally mundane on one level and totally unreal on another. It had the participants you'd expect - judges at the top (five of them, of which the chief presiding judge sits in the middle), prosecutors on one side, defence lawyers on the other, a witness box facing into the courtroom with a curtain around it which could be drawn at the witness's request, and defendants in the middle as you can see from TV footage. There were also interpreters and scribers and bailiffs and people responsible for document production. And a few Americans with the little earphone wires that make them look like extras off 24 but much harder. So far, so normal.

Then you start listening to testimony and despite the normality of structure, this isn't exactly a petty theft trial. Rather than "witnesses" as such, the people that testified were "complainants". The first one spoke from behind the curtain and spoke of how the army came with tanks and destroyed the village and arrested busloads of people. They were taken to Tikrit and held there for a day and then taken to a military prison where they stayed for 7 months. People were malnourished and some died of disease, others torture. Some women were tied to the fence and left in the hot sun all day. Some women were beaten with cables. The stories went on and on. People's families were split up when they were arrested and she, like others, never knew about the fate of hers until their ID cards were found in the mass graves in which they had been buried. The court showed pictures of the ID cards that were found. Her brother and sister can have been no more than 10 at the time. I still stand by the comment from my last post about a life being a life but it's those pictures that left a bigger imprint on me than anything else did today. (They actually fucked up by also showing the complainant's ID which obviously doesn't sit well with the fact that she was giving testimony from behind a closed curtain. The court deleted it from the record but everyone in the courtroom was able to see it for the 15 seconds or so it was on screen.)

The other complainants gave similar accounts about how their villages were destroyed, how their families went missing to never be seen again, how long they were in detention for. One referred to the army taking his ID card off him and saying he didn't deserve it as he was Iranian - the "justification" being that the army accused the Kurds of siding with the Iranians. Not that this will make the headlines, but he also said that he had heard (at the time) that leaflets had been dropped from helicopters telling villagers to leave his village because there would be big trouble, but they didn't believe their village would be hit as they were just simple people and besides they had nowhere to go. All they had was the land their families had been farming for generations, and their livestock. They had nowhere to go, or no way of taking their livestock with them.

At the end of each of their testimonies, the prosecutors and the defence lawyers asked further questions, and when that was done the judge asked whether the complainant had any questions for Saddam or the court, and who they held responsible. They asked him, why did this happen to them when they were just poor farmers? Why if they were accused of siding with the Iranians did they not get a trial like he has today? I guess it was just for the record as the defendants weren't invited or extected to respond. As to who they held responsible, Chemical Ali seemed to be equally culpable in their eyes - his name and Saddam's were the only ones that came up consistently. Bizarrely in the case of Chemical Ali, that was the name three of them used (as interpreted) rather than his actual name (Ali Hassan al-Majid). They were also asked by the judge whether they wanted to claim compensation, which was interesting - i.e. that they had to formally request it, or that it was even part of the proceedings. Maybe it makes sense if you think harder about it, i.e. they're complainants, so why shoudn't that be the case? It's just that this isn't Judge Judy so after hearing all this crazy stuff you get reminded of the normality of structure again.

The judge that now presides over the trial (it's actually, like the others, called a Tribunal) was appointed 2 weeks ago after the first judge was removed. He was good at making clear that he wasn't going to stand for any shit. In the past the court has at times looked like a bit of a circus. Today there were no theatrics from Saddam (which was almost disappointing) but he did get told off once. The 2nd defendant had been passed a copy of documents that were produced to the court and passed it to Saddam to look at. The judge stopped proceedings and told Saddam that if he wanted a copy of anything he had to ask him, not speak to the other defendants. As the judge got on with the proceedings Saddam was passing the papers back to the other guy and the judge stopped again and said "Look! We've just talked about this! We will give you a copy" which was amusing as Saddam was just passing them back.

Now for the legal bit. This Tribunal, well the Supreme Court, was set up under last year's constitution. There is no article in the constitution allowing removal of a judge from presiding over a case unless an individual request to withdraw has been made by the judge himself or parties in the case on grounds of prejudice being shown by the judge and/or public prosecution. The court has to act with full independence of all other authorities, including the President, government etc. Now, when the request to remove the last judge was made, it was made by the prosecutor. The problem is that it was made by him because of pressure to do so from the government, after the last judge said that Saddam wasn't a dictator. So, whether that judge was right or wrong, the way he was removed broke the rules in the constitution.

Then there are the major difficulties they'll have in the Dujail (i.e. the first trial) sentencing. That was scheduled (and, officially, still is) to be handed down next Monday. The inside, unofficial, word is that is unlikely as they just don't know what to do. It's pretty likely he'll get a guilty verdict, but the problem is what sentence to give. If they give him death, then the Sunni will go nuts. If they don't, then the Shia will kick off. So it's a no win situation that's been created by the insistence on having the trial here in Iraq - whatever the sentence is, there will be a lot of blood spilled because of it.

Both those reasons would be justification for just transferring the whole thing to an International Criminal Court but it's probably too late for that now. That would be seen as a defeat for the Iraqis and egg on the face of Bush & Co. Clearly saving some embarrassment for the White House is more important than getting it right in the first place. Oh but now the Americans are apparently going to advocate a break up of Iraq on sectarian lines, so that's ok then.