Hussein Brands Court Hearing 'Theater'
Former Iraqi Dictator Informed He Would Be Charged With War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19746-2004Jul1_2.html
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 1, 2004; 9:04 AM
BAGHDAD, July 1 -- Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, combative and at times defiant, was led into an Iraqi courtroom Thursday where he was read his rights and informed that he would be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for brutal acts committed during more than three decades of one man rule.
"I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq," the former dictator declared twice when asked to identify himself. He declined to sign formal papers at his arraignment, reportedly because he did not have his lawyers.
"This is all theater. The real criminal is Bush," he said, according to initial pool reports, which may change as official translations become available.
He reportedly smiled when informed that the government would pay for a lawyer if he could not afford one, noting that he had heard he had "millions" stashed away in Geneva.
Pool video, released without any sound, showed Hussein to be animated and alert.
He spoke often and with frequent hand gestures, alternately waving and pointing towards the judge, gazing intently as questions were put to him, resting his hand on his chin and then gesturing towards the judge again, occasionally with both hands, sometimes with a pen in his right hand. From time to time he nodded or shook his head.
He was wearing a suit jacket and light blue shirt but no tie. His hair and beard were trim. His brown eyes, though underlined with bags, were wide open most of the time.
As many as 300,000 Iraqis died on the orders of Hussein and his lieutenants, human rights groups believe. The years of violence included the gassing of Kurdish villages and the slaughter of Shiites in open fields. Countless other Iraqis disappeared one by one, to be executed as enemies no matter the quality of the evidence against them.
At the moment, he faces seven preliminary charges, including invading Kuwait in 1991 and crushing uprisings of Shiite Muslims and Kurds. The judge read off the charges, involving also killing religious figures in 1974, gassing of the Kurds in the 1980s, killing members of political parties and suppressing the uprisings. Eleven of his lieutenants are getting hearings Thursday as well.
Pool reporters said Hussein called the Kuwaitis "dogs" during the hearing, and was admonished by the Iraqi judge that he was standing in a court of law and could not use such language.
"How can you, as an Iraqi, say the 'invasion of Kuwait' when Kuwait is part of Iraq?" he asked the judge.
Hussein was taken off an armored bus in handcuffs and chains, surrounded by guards. He walked in, where his cuffs and chains were removed.
A judge sat him down across the table and asked him to identify himself. He was asked his age and whether or not he understood what was going on.
He asked about the court's jurisdiction, repeating that he was "the president of Iraq." The judge told him that Iraq had been reconstituted and that Hussein no longer held authority.
Today's proceeding was not the beginning of a trial, but rather the equivalent of a preliminary hearing or an arraignment. No actual trial is expected for months, at least, as a massive investigation involving forensic evidence, document review and perhaps thousands of witness interviews lies ahead.
Prominent on everyone's list of crimes is the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, in which tens of thousands of Kurds died and hundreds of villages were destroyed. A chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja killed 5,000 people, one of many places where the Hussein government allegedly used airborne poisons.
Legal experts believe the most likely path to a conviction of Hussein for committing genocide or crimes against humanity is to establish his command responsibility for the institutions of Iraqi government, including the military that tormented the Kurds and the security services that killed thousands of ordinary Iraqis between 1968 and 2003. The well-documented Halabja attack may serve as a case in point.
Documents gathered in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War include an order from Hussein granting supreme powers in Kurdish northern Iraq to his cousin Ali Hassan Majeed, who was also to be arraigned Thursday. A June 1987 order from Majeed instructed Iraqi military commanders to carry out "special bombardments . . . to kill the largest number of persons present," according to Human Rights Watch.
The next year, an audiotape captures Majeed telling colleagues that he will use chemical weapons against the Kurds, whose political aspirations Hussein saw as a threat. Majeed, now a U.S. prisoner in Iraq, soon deployed the gas and became known as "Chemical Ali."
"I will kill them all with chemical weapons," Majeed is quoted as saying in a transcript provided by Human Rights Watch. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? [Expletive] them -- the international community, and those who listen to them. I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for 15 days."
In addition to the Halabja assault, a trial of Hussein would almost certainly address the fearsome force used to quell an insurrection by Shiite Muslims at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 and the subsequent draining of the southern marshes.
Led again by Majeed, who had moved south to take command, Iraqi troops terrorized communities with indiscriminate public shootings and air attacks, witnesses said. They killed an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Shiites, most of them civilians, according to human rights organizations.
Back in control, Hussein and his security forces -- in a country labeled the "Republic of Fear" by Iraqi academic Kanan Makiya -- squeezed the Shiites in innumerable ways through the 1990s. One of the most infamous was the rerouting of the Euphrates River to dry up the southern marshes and disrupt traditions thousands of years old. An estimated 250,000 Marsh Arabs were forced to flee to Iran or move elsewhere inside Iraq.
Also likely to be included in the prosecution of Hussein, according to current thinking in Baghdad, is the 1983 roundup and massacre of as many as 8,000 members of the Barzani clan. Hussein became angered when the Kurdish Barzanis helped Iranian forces seize two slices of Iraq and is believed to have sent his forces to exact revenge.
Hussein's smaller-scale persecution of real and perceived political opponents will be an almost certain target, with prosecutors taking examples from the innumerable individual executions and episodes of violent harassment. Human rights workers identified scores of mass graves last year, suggesting that long-term repression claimed more lives than estimated.
Two prominent cases under discussion are the killings of Shiite ayatollahs Mohammed Bakr Sadr, executed with his sister in 1980, and his cousin Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, assassinated in 1999.
An estimated 290,000 people are missing and believed to be buried in mass graves throughout Iraq. In a country of 22 million, that is more than 1 percent of the population, the equivalent of about 3.5 million people in the United States. The vast majority of these bodies have not been found.
By comparison, forensic experts working in the former Yugoslavia estimated that "ethnic cleansing" left 30,000 dead in mass burial pits. It was there that the specialty of forensic archaeology emerged and proved its worth, as the careful evidence-gathering of experts was later used in trials that succeeded in convicting war criminals. In the Iraq war, the U.S. government did not wait long to recruit a group of forensic archaeologists with expertise in things like human anatomy and geophysics. Most of them are in their twenties and come from universities around the globe or from other projects involving crimes of war. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April, these researchers have identified 80 to 100 mass graves in Iraq. The number depends upon how one counts, since some sites include several mass graves in close proximity.
Some graves contain a few dozen bodies. Others -- like one in Hilla in southern Iraq -- contained 5,000, exhumed to the anguished cries of local residents. Four thousand of those men have been identified so far as Shiite rebels, all of them executed: eyes blindfolded, hands tied behind the back, gunshot wounds to the head.
The beginning Thursday, albeit brief, had enormous symbolic significance. Two years ago, the feared Iraqi leader lived the life of a king, shuttling from one grand palace to another.
Seven months ago, he was pulled from a hole in the ground where he had been hiding from U.S forces, looking weary and disheveled, his wild hair and uncombed beard caked with dirt.
Thursday he was hauled into court, under the legal control of a government composed of long-time enemies.
It was only the first step in what could be at least many months and likely many years of hearings, motions, arguments, evidentiary presentations, deliberations and inevitably appeals all overseen by Iraqi judges, lawyers and investigators under the supervision of the newly empowered interim government of Iraq.
The structure of the court itself did not exist when Hussein was in power. It was created by the U.S. occupation and passed along to the interim government when authority was transferred three days ago.
Now that Hussein and some of his lieutenants are facing the beginning of a protracted legal process, the trial, whenever it actually begins, is seen not only as a chance to bring Hussein to justice but also as an opportunity for Iraqis to confront their past.
It could become the highest-profile war-crimes prosecution since Nuremberg. But officials and specialists familiar with Hussein's record foresee a trial that will focus on a relatively small number of crimes chosen for the strength of the evidence and their power to represent the types of suffering inflicted during 35 years of rule by terror.
The legal apparatus for prosecutions was established in "The Statute of the Iraqi Special Tribunal," drawn up months ago while the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority was laying a statutory groundwork to be passed along to the interim government of Iraq.
Legal experts believe the most likely path to a conviction of Hussein for committing genocide or crimes against humanity is to establish his command responsibility for the institutions of Iraqi government, including the military that tormented the Kurds and the security services that killed thousands of ordinary Iraqis between 1968 and 2003.
Fred Barbash reported from Washington. Staff writer Peter Slevin contributed to this story.