Wide Iraqi support for Saddam's trial

By Dan Murphy
The Christian Science Monitor

WATHIQ KHUZAIE / GETTY IMAGES Ousted President Saddam Hussein is front-page news in Baghdad yesterday as the U.S. signed papers granting Iraq legal authority over Saddam and 11 former senior aides.

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All 10 men in the Baghdad shop — three barbers, those getting a trim and a bunch of friends and neighbors — are united in their pleasure that the case against Saddam is finally getting under way.

"This man is one of history's great war criminals," says Nihad Malika, shaving the head of a 6-year-old boy. "This is a great day for us, though his sentence won't come soon enough."

In a nation facing ethnic and religious division, a bloody insurgency and discontent over the pace of reconstruction, Saddam's fate is one of the few issues Iraqis agree upon.

Some remain loyal to Saddam's regime in the Sunni communities he favored. But most of the country still views his reign with loathing and horror. As such, his trial is likely to bolster the new interim Iraqi government as the most popular public act since the U.S. drove him from power last year.

Yesterday, the U.S. signed papers granting Iraq's government legal authority over Saddam and 11 other senior officials from his regime, though they will physically remain in U.S. custody.

The transfer of legal custody took place in secret. Salem Chalabi, director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, said the defendants were brought one by one into a room at an undisclosed location and informed of the change in their status to criminal suspects. They were told that they will appear in court within 24 hours to hear charges, he said.

According to Chalabi, the 67-year-old Saddam looked haggard and thinner after his U.S. confinement. Saddam said "good morning" as he entered the room, listened to the official explanation, and was told he could respond to the complaints today. He then was hustled away.

"Some of them looked very worried," Chalabi said of the other defendants.

Today, Saddam and his lieutenants are scheduled to be brought before an Iraqi court and, while the cameras roll, are expected to be charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Whether it's the largely Shiite areas in the south that had tens of thousands executed for opposing the regime in the 1990s, the Kurdish north that remembers the use of nerve gas to kill some 5,000 residents of Halabja in 1988 or the many Sunnis who were murdered by the regime, Iraq's court of public opinion is unwavering in its condemnation of his rule.

Here in Sadr City — which Hussein called Saddam City to emphasize his victory over Shiite political opponents who lived there — evidence of the regime's abuses are everywhere. Four of the men at Majid's Barbershop had a brother or cousin executed by the regime, without trial or charges, for belonging to outlawed Shiite political parties.

Concerns about whether a man so deeply reviled can receive a fair trial draw derisive snorts. "The ground, the marshes of this country were witnesses to what he did," says Malika.

Ham Zemadi, a 28-year-old sociology student at Baghdad University, remembers the day in 1999 when Iraqi security officers surrounded a crowd at the Mohsen Mosque protesting the regime's murder of Ayatollah Mohammed Sadek al-Sadr. The security officers fired volley after volley into the crowd, killing about 60 people. "There was blood everywhere," he says. "Those people didn't get a trial."

This poor and almost completely Shiite district of 1 million people in north Baghdad was systematically deprived of basic government services for more than 20 years. Infant mortality is higher here than in the rest of Baghdad, and its pitted roads and pools of raw sewage are a testament to the area's treatment by the regime. Iraq's Shiites, about 60 percent of the population, were a constant source of insurrection against Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime, and he responded with a heavy hand.

"Your pen will run out of ink before you've recorded all the crimes just the people in this shop could tell you about," says Rahim Hussein, whose brother was taken away by the regime in 1982 for belonging to a Shiite political party and never seen again. "Saddam is going to try to claim he wasn't responsible, but he ruled this country completely. All of these murders are on his hands."

Justice, if it comes, won't be swift. Iraq's appointed interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, appealed for "patience" from Iraq's people and said it will probably be some months before trials begin. Saddam, Allawi said, should receive "a just trial, a fair trial. ... We would like to show the world that the Iraqi government means business."

The 12 men's status as prisoners of war and their Geneva Conventions protections ended with the sign-over of legal authority. Iraq is free to deal with them according to its own laws.

The trial will be run by a special tribunal led by Salem Chalabi, a former exile and nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, a once-close American ally who has fallen out of favor with the U.S. The tribunal was set up last December to investigate and prosecute crimes against humanity committed between 1968, when the Baath party seized power, and 2003. Salem Chalabi told CNN that the trials are unlikely to start before 2005.

Iraqi officials say Saddam probably won't be the first of the 12 to go on trial. Among the others charged will be Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, the former internal-security chief known as "Chemical Ali" for leading the campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s that included the Halabja incident and other uses of nerve gas on civilians; and Tariq Aziz, a former deputy prime minister and close associate of Hussein's since the 1950s.

Prime Minister Allawi and the U.S. know how important this trial is to the Iraqi people, and the role it could play in bolstering popular support for his interim rule. The U.S. is helping to pay for a media effort that will ensure that most of the trial is broadcast around the country.

The initial proceedings are taking place under a blanket of secrecy because of fears that insurgents, many of them Saddam supporters, might exact revenge on those taking part.

U.S. and Iraqi officials refused to say where today's hearing would take place or release the name of the presiding judge. No pictures will be allowed of any of the Iraqi participants — except for the defendants — to protect them from attack. Only a few journalists will be allowed to attend.

Issam Ghazawi, a member of Saddam's defense team, said he received threats in a telephone call yesterday from someone who claimed to be a minister of justice who promised that anyone who tried to defend Saddam would be "chopped to pieces."

Information from The Associated Press was added to this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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