BAGHDAD: It’s 8 o’clock on Wednesday night and an Iraqi woman named Um Ahmad is on the line, calling into a television talk show to give the nation a piece of her mind about Saddam Hussein’s appearance in court.
“He is still massacring Iraqis,” says the Baghdad resident, alluding to the ex-dictator’s loyalists fighting in the insurgency. “You cannot give him the right to talk like he does.” In the southern city of Basra, Isam Shimir is equally furious about the case. So far, he says, prosecutors have utterly failed to show that the government’s response to a 1982 attempt on Saddam’s life in Dujail — including the killings of 146 residents of that village — was wrong.
“He was subject to an assassination attempt, and the suspects got caught,” says the 30-year-old Sunni Muslim Arab. “What should he have done? Forgiven them?” Iraqis often dismiss Saddam as a figure from their past, arguing that he no longer plays a role in their lives. But the courtroom proceedings this week showed that the former Iraqi president continues to cast a long shadow over the country.
As the trial began each day, streets emptied. Iraqis huddled in shops and living rooms to watch their former strongman face his alleged victims. The proceedings were aired non-stop on local TV stations and pan-Arab satellite channels, breaking only for commercials and prayer time.
Most viewers seemed to sense that they were watching history unfold. “Saddam will be the first leader of the Middle East judged,” said Oman Sheikhly, a 28-year-old Sunni Arab construction contractor who lives in Baghdad. “The other leaders will take notice.”
But if the trial was meant to help Iraqis come to terms with their past or unify them as they head toward the Dec. 15 National Assembly election, it seems to be doing the opposite — sharpening differences in a country already divided along ethnic, sectarian and regional lines.
Those who supported Saddam think he has been getting a bum deal. Those who despise him believe he is being pampered, even as they think he is getting his comeuppance. “This shows the end of the tyrant,” said Ali Hassan Jabr, 27, of Baghdad’s largely Shia neighborhood of Sadr City, who said he lost six of his relatives at the hands of the deposed government’s security apparatus. Many Iraqis wondered why prosecutors decided to first bring the case of Dujail. Saddam and his seven co-defendants are accused of exacting a years-long campaign of mass arrests, torture and executions on the Shia village after the attempt to kill the president, a Sunni.
“Now the trial is concentrating on the crimes against Shias only,” said Humam Shama, 59, a secular Shia economist who runs a Baghdad educational institute. “Why are they starting this trial at this time when there is a difficult sectarian period?”
When Saddam’s image appears on television, the dimly lit lawyers’ association cafeteria in Baghdad turns into a volatile checkerboard of emotions and opinions. The lawyers stop sipping their bottled sodas, Turkish coffees and sweetened teas and look up, some staring in rage, others with glee.
The atmosphere becomes alert and tense. Occasionally, shouting matches erupt in what is normally a bastion of collegiality and decorum.
“The reactions are very profound,” said Sa’ab Mahmoud Abed, a 33-year-old lawyer among those sitting in the smoky room. “Of course we are deeply affected when we see him on television in front of a judge. This man ruled us for 35 years.”
Many Iraqis view the trial strictly through the prism of their own allegiances. It was not the harrowing testimony of witness after witness describing torture, but “the president’s bravery on the stand despite his tough circumstances” that most impressed Yaseen Ayoubi, a 52-year-old former brigadier general in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit.
Hassan Eidan, a 32-year-old owner of a cellphone shop in Baqubah, said it was not just Saddam who was humiliated by sitting in the defendants’ dock — it was “Iraqis and all the Arabs.”
“The goal of the trial is to disparage the previous regime and Saddam,” he said, adding that the most poignant moment of the trial so far has been the sight of the former president writing on his hand because he didn’t have paper.
A few Iraqis, especially those in the upper echelons of power, said they were content with the trial. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times News Service
