IRAQ: Saddam Hussein refused to plead as he and six former army commanders went on trial in Baghdad yesterday for what prosecutors called a "barbarous" genocidal campaign which killed tens of thousands of Kurds in the 1980s.
Seeking to prove that the campaign amounted to genocide of Iraq's Kurdish minority, prosecutors said that villages had been razed in aerial and artillery bombardments, including poison gas attacks, and villagers had been deported to detention centres, tortured or raped.
"It is difficult to fathom the barbarity of such acts," Munqith al-Faroon, chief prosecutor in the trial, told the court of the seven-month operation in 1988 which was codenamed "Anfal" (Spoils of War) after the title of a chapter of the Koran.
"These crimes touch the conscience of all mankind," chief tribunal prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi told the court.
A large map of Kurdistan, the now autonomous region in northern Iraq, hung in the trial chamber in Baghdad's heavily-fortified government compound. Orange dots indicated villages which had been destroyed and red dots those which had been gassed.
The start of the new trial comes as judges continue to deliberate in a separate case in which Saddam is accused of crimes against humanity for killing 148 Shia men after an attempt on his life in 1982. A verdict is due in October.
The 69-year-old former leader faces the death penalty in both cases, but the scheduling of a dozen other trials could delay any execution for years, raising the possibility that, like former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, he could die in jail.
Saddam, dressed in a smart black suit, was in typically combative mood after leading his fellow accused into the chamber, dismissing the US-sponsored tribunal as a "court of occupation" and refusing to state his name.
"You know my name," he told chief judge Abdullah Ali al- Aloosh. When asked to enter a plea, he replied: "This needs a lot of books." Mr Aloosh entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
One of Saddam's co-defendants is his cousin, Ali Hassan al- Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his alleged fondness for poison-gas attacks on Kurds. Looking frail and walking with a cane, he also refused to enter a plea. The seven defendants, including Saddam's former defence minister, face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Saddam and Majid face the additional charge of genocide.
Iraqi forces are accused of using mustard gas and nerve agents in a seven-month campaign which razed villages and forced thousands into detention camps, devastating the Kurdish north.
- (Reuters)